Lars: Hello, my name it’s Lars Petersen, and I’m with Conrad Dekker, a talented Chef, actually working for the Marriot’s in Amsterdam. Today, Conrad and I are going to be talking about the proper ways to cook and prep lobsters.
Conrad: Lobster is not a niche food, in some restaurants here in Amsterdam and it’s always a very prestigious kind of seafood, if not the most famous seafood perhaps in the world. It’s well known for its flavor and it’s the prized seafood. It’s not a good but it’s good for you. It has less total fat and cholesterol than lean beef, poached eggs, even roasted skinless chicken breast. It’s high in iron, zinc, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, vitamin A, B, 12, B, six, B three, and B two. So it’s good and good for you. When we buy lobsters, depending on the time of the year, we may be buying hard shell lobsters or cheddar lobsters, our soft shell or new shell lobsters. The new shell lobster tends to have a lesser meat yield. Some people think the flavor is better, the hard shell has more meat, but it’s certainly harder to get into. And usually you need a nutcracker or sometimes a hammer. The lobsters we’re using today are new shell lobsters. And one of the ways you can tell just by looking at them, you can touch them and the shell has some give to it. If you turn the lobster over, if this were a hard shell lobster, it would be black. There’d be bits of black. It’d be very dark. And the lobster would obviously be very hard. Now, some people prefer one sex lobster over the other. This is a male. And the reason we know is we look at the structure right here and in the male, it’s sort of armour plated with shell material, a hardened, bony. And in the female, the same organ is soft and feathery. And many people prefer female because in this female, when it’s cooked, there is the what’s called the coral by the consumer. It’s actually the ovary and it’s it’s bright red, it’s kind of waxy and consistency. But many people do like to eat that. So they’ll ask for a female lobster.
Lars: Well, let’s talk about the most common ways to cook live lobsters. Three most common ways are boiling, steaming or grilling them, can you teach us?
Conrad: It’s best to take the rubber bands off. It’s just a good idea to take them off if you have the time and are not doing mass quantity. So a knife works well.
So, the first procedure we’re going to talk about is boiling. Now, in order to start this process, you want to get a large stockpot, fill it about three quarters of the way full with either seawater or you could even add salt to tap water. So we’re going to do that. It’s about a tablespoon of salt per quart of water. Okay, get this to a boil. Rolling boil. And then you want to add your lobsters. Bob has already removed the rubber bands from these ones you drop them in. Then you bring it back to kind of a simmer. Now, the timing for this, how does this work? About 18 minutes for a pound to a quarter pound lobster. And then for anything larger, about one and one half pounds, it’s about 20 minutes. If you’re using soft shells, you want to make sure you reduce this time by approximately 3 minutes. So steaming is very similar to boiling. Obviously, you use less water when you start the actual steaming process, you’re going to do use about two inches of water at the bottom of a large stockpot. You can use seawater or once again you can use salted water. Same ratios apply as boiling and when to remove the rubber bands, which has already been done and are going to drop the lobsters in the cook.
Time is also pretty much the same for a pound to a pound and a quarter lobster. You’re going to do about 18 minutes and the cook time for over a pound and a half or about a pound and a half is 20 minutes. And you’re going to reduce this time by 3 minutes if you’re talking or using soft shell lobsters. So if you decide to grill the lobsters, the first thing you want to do is par boil them. So same procedure is boiling, except you’re only going to boil them for about 5 minutes. Once the lobsters come to a rolling boil, you set them for 5 minutes. You want to remove the lobsters and put them in cold water. Okay, so you’re going to remove the lobsters and put them in an ice bath. This stops the cooking process. About 50% ice, 50% cold water. After they’ve cooled down, you’re going to remove them from the ice water. Try to remove as much of the water as possible. So after they’ve been removed from the cold water, they can be either put into a plastic bag for storage in the refrigerator or frozen, or they would go on to the next step, which is grilling.
Speaker 2: And this process involves taking our knife and. In the center. We open it up. And there are a couple of things that we will remove. First is the tamale, which is right here, the sand sack, but it’s actually the stomach. And then we’ll also remove the intestine, which is in the tail. Oops. Sometimes the intestine is hard to see because if it’s if it’s not full. It’s not pigmented. Here it is. There’s the. Intestine. And again, often it’s full and pigmented and it’s a lot easier to see. But this one is relatively empty. But there it is. So we remove the intestine because sometimes that can impart a flavor.
So you want to add some sort of butter or olive oil to the lobster before you grill it. This helps with the sticking and also helps with flavor. So once you’ve done the PA boiling, you’ve done all the prep work by splitting the lobster, you can now put them on the grill. You want to put them on the grill, flesh side down, making sure to kind of spread the lobster’s cavity here as you place it down and also open up the tail a little bit. Make sure the tail is folded out like that, the cavity open. You going to cook them flush side down for 5 to 6 minutes and you’re going to want to make sure also that the lid of the grill is put down during this whole process. Then you’re going to flip them and cook them another 4 to 5 minutes.
You want to do it on relatively low heat because the lobster shell and the meat can burn pretty easily. So one anatomical fact about the lobsters, or they have very distinct claws. There’s one claw that’s the ripping claw, the ripper claw, and it’s got serrated edges on the inside here. And it’s literally for ripping things or tearing things apart. It’s actually smaller than the other claw, which is the crushing claw a lot larger. And it’s used for grasping things and breaking things. And so these can switch. They’re not always on necessarily the left side or the right side. They can switch back and forth.