All About Lobster

The quality of lobster meat depends to a large extent on where the crustacean is in its molting cycle, during which the old, hard shell is replaced with a soft, new one. Lobsters available during the later summer weeks and into early fall are generally soft-shell lobsters, which have less meaty claws and are more perishable than hard shell lobsters. The shell has nothing to do with the flavor of the meat or how firm the meat is. In our taste tests, we found that the meat in both hard-shell and soft-shell lobsters is comparably flavorful. However, if given a choice, choose hard-shell lobsters for their meatier claws.

Like other shellfish, deceased lobsters are vulnerable to bacterial contamination that can cause food poisoning. The lobster may smell fishy too, but that is not a health concern. The reason the flesh may become mushy if the lobster dies before cooking is because the instant a lobster dies, enzymes within its body begin to break down the flesh and cause it to turn mushy.

We cooked lobsters with and without rubber bands in separate pots of boiling water and then tasted both the lobster meat and the cooking water. While a few tasters claimed they noticed a subtle difference in the cooking water taken from the pot in which we cooked the banded lobsters, no one could detect any flavor difference between the lobster meat samples. The bottom line: we’ll keep our fingers safe and continue to leave the rubber bands in place on the claw when we cook our lobsters.

Roasted lobster can be difficult to prepare because the slow heat of the oven causes proteins in the meat to adhere to the shell. Steaming can leave the lobsters slightly under-seasoned (though we prefer this method in our Lobster Bisque recipe because it allows us to create a flavorful base for our bisque.) Boiling in salt water is the way to go for most lobster recipes.

We have found the best way to ensure that lobster is cooked correctly is to check the temperature of the meat in the tail. Any sort of meat thermometer will work for this task. Squeezing the shell is helpful to know if the lobster has a hard or soft shell, but does not determine doneness. Since lobsters come in many different sizes, cooking all lobster for the same amount of time is generally going to yield under- or over-cooked lobster meat. Temping the lobster is the best way to know if it is properly cooked to an internal temperature of 140 degrees.

Skewers can be useful for pushing the meat out of the lobster knuckles, which is difficult to wiggle out otherwise. Sharp scissors are necessary for cutting through the hard shell of the claws to extract the meat. For the most effective way to get the meat out of the legs, use a rolling pin. Start at the claw end and gently roll until you reach the knuckle. But stop just before the knuckle, if you go any further you risk breaking the shell and getting pieces of shell in the meat.

One lobster can vary in weight from the next, but appear to be the same size, especially if one is a soft shell and the other hard shell. You need to consider how much meat is in one lobster, weighing your lobsters is always a good idea for this reason. If serving whole soft-shell lobster, you may consider buying larger ones or, if the price is good, buying two small ones per person. Markets don’t usually advertise which type of lobster they are selling, but you can certainly ask.

We have found that freezing the lobster for 30 minutes just before plunging it into the simmering water is the best way to ensure the lobster doesn't move around in the pot. There's no way to know the extent to which the lobster suffers during cooking, but most scientists agree that the lobster's primitive nervous system is more like that of an insect than a human. This nervous system prevents it from processing pain the way we do. Still, most cooks find putting live lobsters into a pot unpleasant, and we hoped to find a good solution that would make the little guys more manageable. We tested several methods of desensitizing lobsters, and tasted each supposedly desensitized lobster against one that was summarily tossed into boiling water. We landed upon a simple approach: a 30-minute stay in the freezer, which rendered the lobster motionless before it went into the pot.

You can! But you have to remove the meat from the shell immediately once cooked and cooled (allow about 10 minutes for cooling). Lobster meat extracted from the shells can be stored in an airtight container for up to 24 hours in the refrigerator.

We have found that you can kill a lobster in advance of cooking (by piercing them with a knife through the hard upper shell) as long as you immediately separate the tail and claws from the body. When a dead lobster is left to sit intact, the digestive enzymes found in the body quickly break down proteins in the tail. Lobster meat that is separated from the body immediately, however, remains tender yet firm. The bottom line is that if you want to prep lobster ahead of time for grilling or sautéing, you can—just make sure to separate the tail and claws before storage.

The muscles in lobster, especially the tail muscles, are classified as fast-twitch muscles, meaning they are used only during sudden movement. Fast-twitch muscles contain very little of the red protein pigment myoglobin (the compound that makes beef or pork red), so the tail muscles of lobster contain very little color in their raw state. The reddish color we see in cooked lobster meat is due to carotenoid pigments that in the raw state, are bound together with proteins. But when cooked, the proteins denature and release the carotenoids, allowing them to assume their natural red. This also happens in lobster's shells, turning them from brownish-green in live lobsters to bright red when cooked.

You can—with one caveat: During a red tide, avoid the tomalley. Red tide causes paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), which you can contract from infected shellfish. If a lobster eats infected bivalves, the PSP toxin could accumulate in its tomalley, though not in the meat. So it's fine to eat lobster meat during red tide occurrences, when the sale of clams and mussels is prohibited, but it's a good idea to forgo the tomalley when there's a shellfish ban in place.

You can! But the quality of the meat may be different depending on the season. By late June and into July or August, depending on the location, lobsters start to molt, meaning that the lobsters available during the later summer weeks and into the early fall are generally soft-shell lobsters, which have less meaty claws and are more perishable than hard-shell lobsters. During the molting stage the lobster's muscle fibers grow in length—about 14 percent with each molt—and they increase in width with age. This means that the older, larger lobsters do tend to be tougher when cooked.