New Blog, New Year, New Lobster Pot

To ring in the first day (and first dinner!) of 2011, I boiled four beautiful Maine lobsters to celebrate the New Year with our best friends, Lorinda and Tracy. Having just celebrated Christmas with a fantastic lobster dinner at my cousins' home in Longview, I was excited to try my hand at boiling live crustaceans.


Of course, getting to use my new 12-quart Le Creuset stockpot (great Christmas gift!) for the first time made this dinner even more exciting for me. 


The "recipe" for lobsters like these is about as easy as it gets - you just remove the lobster from the bag and place it into the boiling water. I took a lot of notes from Julia Child in this awesome youtube clip from her French Chef series. Our lobsters weighed in at  approx. 1.75 pounds each, so the cooking time was 15 minutes (more or less by weight, see said Julia video). One thing I chose, in particular, was to use my favorite Mediterranean sea salt - Alessi. Something about it produces a perfect sea salt taste that's better than your typical kosher salt. Also, after reading some studies by the University of Maine (and I think they'd know!), I learned that you want the salinity of your boiling water to resemble true salt water in the sea. Seawater is approximately 3% salt, so you want to calculate that ratio as to your pot. For example, filling my 12-quart pot with roughly 10 quarts of water for boiling, I needed to add .3 quarts (10 x .03) of salt, which converts to 1.2 cups of salt. See Google. 


Another note from the lobster professionals at the University of Maine: it's okay to leave the rubber bands on the lobsters' claws when you boil them. Julia Child left them on, too. Everything indicates that the rubber bands have no harmful effects in the water or meat, and, more importantly, they don't make any effect on taste. I agree, so mine went in fully handcuffed. When the timer rings, pull the lobsters out with tongs and an oven mitt and rinse with cold water - the shells are hot as hell! 


Drawn butter is even easier - just put a stick of butter in a small sauce pot or pan, melt it down, let it fully boil (but not too hot as to turn it brown) for one minute, and then turn the fire off. Let is sit and cool, and then pour the curdled product through cheesecloth into a new dish. That's it. 


Serve with something cheesy and something green. Don't spend a lot of time there, because the lobsters are sure to steal the show! Thanks to Alex Waltrip and Ginny Foster for inspiring me to try this, and letting me watch from a distance for my first time. 

Here's the curdled, boiled butter being strained into a fresh cup - voila, drawn (clarified) butter for dipping lobster.