In New England, lobster is a popular and must-have dish. It is very difficult to not find a restaurant that does not serve lobster. At Technique, the student-run restaurant at Le Cordon Bleu in Cambridge, Mass, where I did my externship was no exception. Our lobster Johnny cake had survived a round of menu changes until finally the entire school entity decided to standardize the menu. The school had also added a lobster and endive salad (Le Cordon Bleu, 2010). We went through quite a bit of lobster, as you can imagine – and as the intern, I had the honor of cooking and cleaning (removing the meat from the shells) it all. Cooking all of that lobster has definitely taught me how to cook and clean in a quick and efficient manner.
I was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. In fact my mother’s family has been in New England since 1630. I was no stranger to this spiny sea creature that was one considered “poverty food” by the colonists (Gulf of Maine Research Insitute, 2000). I had prepared it many times for my parents and various relatives over the years. I thought I knew how to do it! You just boil some water and boil away! This apparently is not the case, at least not in a fine dining establishment.
My kind, and infinitely patient Chef, Chef Ferrar had to remind me that lobster is actually very delicate, and I shouldn’t boil it quite so long and the lobster meat would retain more of its sweetness and be far more tender than what I had been used to. Of course she was right, the meat looked much better and a lot of the fat had not coagulated. It was also a lot easier to get the meat out of the shell (which is time consuming just doing one, but image two dozen before service).
So for many weeks, I cooked my little lobsters gently, and they looked pretty. However, I was still taking a long time getting the meat out of the shell. I mean there isn’t really a lot of ways to remove lobster meat, right? Again, I was proven wrong. With all of the lobsters I did on a regular basis, every now and then Technique has wine tasting dinners. So I had to prepare lobster for 50 guests…in one day. It looked a little hopeless, but the nice things about the chefs at Le Cordon Bleu is that the last thing they want you to do is fail, so the chef who ran the wine tasting, Chef Bradley, took me aside and showed me various ways of getting the meat out of the shell quickly.
Chef Bradley is about a foot taller than me. He was showing me how to smash open the lobster claw with the back of my chef’s knife- which was easy for him being much bigger and much stronger than me, but really all I was doing was spraying lobster juice all over the kitchen. I did find that for me, the best way was to use the lobster crackers we had hanging around. It was a quicker and much less messy ordeal. That done, I moved onto the possibly the best part of the lobster…the tail.
My method had been using my chef’s knife to cut the tail in half, and retrieve the meat that way. It was pretty good, but not that efficient. Again, Chef Bradley had a solution to my problem. He taught me that if you rip off the little flippers at the end of the tail, you can push the meat out of the top (where it had been ripped off from the head). This method had shaved about 5 minutes off the tail meat removal process. A job that used to take me 10 minutes per lobster was reduced to about three!
I really came to enjoy cooking lobsters. After a short while, it became my duty to train all of the other externs and students how to cook, clean, and process the lobster meat for service. People came to me with questions about lobster, and I would gladly answer them. I was proud to learn it, and glad that my chefs took the time to make sure I knew how to do the job not only correctly, but quickly and effortlessly.
References:
Le Cordon Bleu (2010) Technique Restaurant. Retrieved from:
Gulf of Maine Research Institute Lobstering History. (August 9, 2000) Retrieved from:
