Title: How To Cook Lobster Tails: A Guide For People Who Don't Have Butlers To Do All The Work
Headings: How To Cook Lobster Tails: A Guide For People Who Don't Have Butlers To Do All The Work
How To Cook Lobster Tails: A Guide For People Who Don't Have Butlers To Do All The Work
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Content: The primary selling point of the lobster—and one hell of a selling point it must be, since it sells so many lobsters at such high prices—is that its meat comes in larger, more easily extracted hunks than can be found in, for example, Chesapeake blue crabs, which, factually, are the most delicious things the world has produced or will ever produce, but which are approximately as onerous to consume as a large box full of live ferrets. G/O Media may get a commission
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The Foodspin archives: Chicken thighs | Popeye's biscuits | Salad | Candy corn Oreos | Chili | Red Bull Total Zero | French toast | Sriracha | Halloween candy | Emergency food | Nachos | Meatloaf | Thanksgiving side dishes | MacGyver Thanksgiving | Eating strategies | Leftovers | Mac and cheese | Weird Santa candies | Pot roast | Bean dip | Shrimp linguine | Go-Gurt | Chicken soup
And of these assorted enormous hunks of lobster meat, none is larger or more pleasant to eat than the tail, which is why it is far and away the most popular portion of the lobster, and why a split, frozen, and packaged lobster tail can sometimes be more expensive than multiple whole, living lobsters. The problem is that, although the tail is tastier than the lobster's claws or any of the frightening viscera to be found inside its thorax, getting it right in your own kitchen is still a dodgy proposition. There's a vanishingly small window between the states of disgustingly raw and absolutely indistinguishable from a bicycle tire, except for its coloration through which the lobster tail must pass in order to taste pleasant enough to not make you feel awful about how much money you spent on it. Advertisement
Inexplicably, the standard method for cooking lobster tails is to steam them, which yields a boring, flabby, bland result that tastes like nothing so much as nothing. Grilling tails has become a common preparation for people who don't like seafood but do like the idea of eating something as symbolic of extravagance as lobster; grilled lobster is wonderful if you enjoy chicken, but enjoy chicken even more when you've traded your child's college education for it. These are the most popular methods for cooking lobster not because they yield the best results, but because they are simple and involve no technique more complicated than putting the lobster tail in a hot place, setting a timer, and then not being abducted by aliens in the interval before it beeps; this way, when the lobster turns out disappointing, you can easily shift the blame to your clock, and bash it to atoms with a sledgehammer.