More Lobster Than Lob-ster! More Lobster Than Lob-ster!

 

Jesse Sutton: Ok, so if you tuned into our recent podcast episode on Ziploc-circulator cuisine (AKA ghetto sous-vide), you would have heard a new idea develop.  Nate and I were discussing the possibilities of sous-vide, and we got into the idea of cooking a lobster that had just been steeped until it would come out of the shell in a compound butter, and we stumbled up on an idea.

See, here is the problem with lobster.  Everyone likes it, everyone thinks of it as super-fancy, but it actually kinda sucks.  I mean, it can be good, but the way it's eaten in the US about 90% of the time is a crap dish.  Drop it, whole, into boiling water, and then plop it onto a plate with a cup of melted butter, a lemon wedge, and a cheddar biscuit?  No thanks, I'll just have a burger.

And when you get into fine dining, it doesn't always get better.  Throughout the 90's and 00's, lobster dominated the seafood sections of 'fancy' restaurants, and it was usually served out of the shell.  This isn't a problem, if you're serving it cold.  The way lobster works is to cook it to get it out of the shell.  If you decide, at that point, to dress it with a little mayonnaise made with ginger-infused oil, some mango and cucumber, some very finely minced red chile, and a few leaves of mache, well, then, you're in business.  But American diners want lobster entrees, and Americans won't usually eat cold entrees.  (Unless they are entree salads, but entree salads suck.  It's science.  If you put a chicken breast on a salad, you've created a dog turd.  Good job, Wolfgang Puck.)  And if you want to serve shucked lobster hot, you have to cook it again.  This dries it out, and makes it rubbery.

However, the 90's fine-dining-style of serving lobster out of the shell does have one decided advantage: you're able to get full usage of the shell.  See, lobster meat really doesn't taste like much.  As crustaceans go, the crab, the langoustine, hell, even the shrimp, have a ton more flavor.  But lobster stock is another thing entirely.  Lobster stock is the source of flavor for Americaine sauce, sauce vin blanc, and, if you know what you're doing, she-crab soup.  (Yes, lobster stock, or lobster base, is the secret weapon to making your she-crab soup taste better than a bowl of bechamel, texturized with gritty crab roe and flavored with sherry.)  

There's the rub.  Hot lobster dinner served in the shell wastes the shells, plus you have to spend 20 minutes picking 4 ounces of meat from a rapidly cooling, chitinous carapace, with butter as your only real flavoring agent.  90's hot lobster takes advantage of the shell's potential to create a broth or sauce, but is cooked twice, rendering it dry, rubbery, and lifeless.  

Thomas Keller, in his French Laundry Cookbook (which, if you don't have, is not my problem), largely solved this problem, in stages.  His first published method involved steeping the lobsters in hot water 7 minutes or so, rather than just boiling the hell out of them.  Then, he'd gently warm them in emulsified butter.  But still, the lobster is cooked twice, but less severely, and it was a quantum leap ahead.  If you've ever, ever seen the phrase 'butter-poached lobster' in a cookbook, you have him to thank.  Like all great innovators that live long enough to do so, he built upon this idea in the book Under Pressure, highlighting his adventures in sous-vide cuisine.  The first big change was he dropped his lobster steeping time way down, from 7 minutes to just 2-3 (2 for a 1.25#, 3 for a 2 pounder).  His second was using a thermal circulator to heat the butter bath, rather than a burner, so the lobsters were held at precisely 59.5C/139.1F.  This means that they were only half-cooked the first time, so the butter bath was able to bring them up to exactly the point that lobster is perfectly cooked, and then hold them there for a little while.  You wouldn't want to leave them in the bath forever, but it affords you the luxury of not rushing your pick-up.

And with that, Keller solved the problem.  And the cool thing about sous-vide is that you can use lots of different flavors in the butter to cook your lobster up.  You could do basil butter, or tomato butter, or carraway seed butter, the possibilities are endless.  (I kinda want to try Whirl, which is basically that fake garlic grease that comes with a Papa John's pizza.  Blasphemy, I know, but isn't that the point, sometimes?)  

So we thought the issue was closed.  But then Nate and I were discussing possibilities on the podcast, and we had this idea: what would happen if you cooked a lobster in lobster-shell-infused butter?!  I knew, as long as I was borrowing Nate's circulator, this was going to have to happen.  Think about it!  Sure, you can serve lobster in a sauce that tastes like lobster stock, but it's never really going to flavor the meat itself.  When you put mustard on a hot dog, the hot dog doesn't actually start tasting like mustard.  But this, this, would be a genuine breakthrough.

It's inspired, in a way, by the way we did tomato salads at the Woodlands, back in the day.  You know how raw tomatoes, no matter how ripe they are, never really develop that amazing, concentrated flavor of a good canned tomato?  We solved that problem (well, not me, but I was in the room).  We ran vegetable oil in a blender with tomato paste for like a half hour, then bunged it through a coffee filter.  The resulting rose-colored oil was imbued with just a hint of that canned-tomato flavor.  Not enough to trample the flavor of the fresh heirlooms we were glazing with it, just enough to give the raw tomato a little more backbone.  

The results were entirely successful.  A dish of lobster that tasted like lobster.  No, more lobster than lobster.  Here's how we did it:

The Veg Prep: Blanch 10 seconds, shock, and peel some cherry tomatoes.  Season them with a little salt.  Slice and braise a fennel bulb or two in some water with salt, sugar, and star anise, and drain when tender.

The Lobster: I took live lobsters, put them in a large pan, and poured boiling water over them to cover.  I drained them after 2:45 (they were on the larger side, but not quite two pounds), and shucked them while they were still hot.  In case you are wondering, they are indeed a lot harder to shuck when they are only half cooked!  One of the tails tore as I was cleaning it, and I lost a big nug of meat out of the biggest claw, but if you go slow and are careful, it will be okay.  Using Joyce Chen scissors helps a lot with the claws and knuckles.

The Butter: Take lobster shells and bodies, and bake them at 300F until they are bright red and dry.  Take them outside to your porch or garage (trust me), cover them with a towel you don't care about, and smash them to bits with a hammer.  Fill up a saucepot with them, and add melted salted butter to cover.  Put this on a low flame, and simmer for an hour and a half.  You don't want the butter to brown, so adding a little water to the pan on occasion is a good idea.  It will sink right to the bottom.  Strain when you're done.  The butter should be rosey and perfumed with lobster flavor.

The Cook: Place lobster meat in a single layer inside a Ziploc, using the water displacement method.  Using a thermal circulator, bring water up to 59.5 Celsius.  Add enough lobster butter to the bags that it can cover the meat.  Drop into the circulator, let it return to temp, and set a fifteen minute timer.  

The Dish: Meanwhile, cook off some really nice pappardelle.  When it's almost done, finish it in a pan with a small amount whole butter and a little of the pasta water.  Then, dump the lobster meat into a large bowl.  (Getting it out of the bag in an orderly fashon without making a mess is a challenge.)  Add some of the lobster butter to the pasta, swirl and add a little pasta water if necessary, to emulsify, and check the seasoning.  It should taste nice and lobstery, and be quite buttery.  Add the fennel and tomatoes to the pan, just to warm them.

Plate the pasta, garnish with the vegetables, carve the lobster tails, season them with a hint of salt, and place them on and around the pasta.

Get after it!

-JS

If I have been able to see farther, it's because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.   -I. Newton