Grilled Lobster Tails!!!

Some of you may be intimidated by Lobster. Some of you love the stuff but rarely eat it due to the cost. The cost leads to that intimidation. Do these questions pop up when considering Lobster:

What if I overcook it?
What if I under cook it?
How do I know when it's done?
What if I screw it all up and that money spent on that expensive seafood will be wasted?

I've asked myself those same questions. I've had those same fears. How does one eliminate those fears? Practice. But this is such and expensive food item to practice on, right? Wrong. This is the best time to get that practice. Due to the economy being in the crapper nobody is buying such luxuries like lobster. The lobster vendors have slashed prices. What better time to practice on lobster than right now? Those two tails above were $20. Not apiece. Total. They were $20/pound and each of those is 8 ounces. Show me a good steak that you can get for $10? I saw a place in St. Louis that has 2 pound live lobsters for $14/lobster. That's not per pound.

The time is now to conquer your fear of this delicious crustacean. The time is now to get your practice in. The time is now to realize that a lobster tail is just a really big shrimp. If you can grill a shrimp you can grill a lobster tail....

Dad ponied up the lobster tails. These were $20/pound as I mentioned above, but the next day Dad went back for a couple more and they were marked down to $13/pound. $6.50 for an 8 ounce tail? Are you kidding me?!?!?! Oh, how I wish I had the freezer space!?!

And while lobster tails are just large shrimp in terms of cooking they do require a bit different preparation. The main problem being splitting the tail open. Some suggest to split the bottom, much softer section of the tail. Some split the top. I went with the latter. A pair of kitchen shears made quick work of those shells but this can be done with a sharp knife too. Simply start with the sheers (or knife) and split the shell all the way to the tail:

Then slice the meat in half along the split shell. Try not to cut through the bottom shell:

Now for the cool part. I put my thumbs into the newly created slit that runs the length of the tail and pulled it apart. The bottom shell holds the two pieces together and now the meat is butterflied for maximum surface area:

The lobster tails will be braised with drawn/clarified garlic butter which is so simple to make:

2 stick salted butter
1 heaping tablespoon of garlic
1 spoon

Bring the two sticks of butter to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. After the foam dissipates on top you will notice some white clumps floating to the top. Spoon them off the top while trying to leave as much of the remaining butter. A sieve could also be used for this. Right before the butter is to be brushed onto the lobster tail (and a few shrimp in this case) put the garlic in. The longer garlic cooks the less flavor it has so do not boil the garlic the whole time.

Two sticks of butter seems like a lot but what will not be slathered onto the seafood while cooking will used as a dipping sauce during the meal.

Now that the lobster tails and garlic butter are ready for the grill, Dad and I cracked open a great wine that was on sale at the local grocer. Normally about $23 this bottle was on sale for $13:


Cooking Method:

I set up two zone cooking here almost out of habit but it is not really necessary. Just get the grill to a medium high heat. Not quite steak flame searing temps, but still a hot fire. There is no need to indirect these. Just keep them over the heat the whole time. The 2nd zone could be useful to keep the tails warm if there was something else that was not quite done and needs a little more time.

Brush the lobster meat with a healthy dose of the butter and place meat side down over the heat. Be careful of flame ups from the butter dripping into the fire. I had to readjust the location a few times due to flame ups as you can see below with the flames licking the tail on the right:

Here are the tails moved a bit to avoid the flare ups. I put the butter pot right on the grill to keep it warm (lower right):

The tails need to be over the heat for only about 3-4 minutes. Here are the tails with the shrimp added to the grill. I flipped the tails immediately after placing the shrimps on the fire (I will talk about the shrimp in another post):

Once the tails are flipped the shell will disperse the heat quite a bit but they still only need 5-6 minutes on the heat shell side down or a total of about 10 minutes cook time. This will vary depending on temp and size of the tail. What to look for is the consistency of a cooked shrimp - white, firm flesh, but not rubbery. Once the tails are flipped give them another slathering of garlic butter.

Here is Dad's tail plated. Notice the flesh is a little browned from being over the heat but not charred. That is nearly perfect:

And here are a couple of shots of my tail. Mine charred just a bit on the right side but it was still fantastic:


Now is the time to get over the fear and anxiety of grilling lobster. When prices go back up you will be a seasoned vet with these and not worry at all about grilling them...


Click here for the rest of the process

2008 New Year's Eve Feast - Lobsters, Prawns, and Escargot, OH MY!!

I realize I am the GrillinFool and this is a grilling website, but for NYE we did not grill anything. I did not pay for the lobsters and the man that did wanted them boiled. As I was eating my lobster for free, I obliged the man with the credit card. As someone who is cursed with an insatiable passion for seafood and stuck smack dab in the middle of the country I can't stress enough how much I enjoyed this meal. And yes, I was very worried I would screw up the cooking of the lobsters in my first attempt at this. It is so easy to do. I worried for nothing. Click the link below and see what I am talking about...


My menu planned on being lobsters, crab stuffed prawns, sauteed swiss chard, roasted red potatoes, cheesy potato biscuits, and clarified butter. As you can see in the pic above there is no greenery on the plate. The swiss chard at my grocery store was downright rotten. They had very little left and what was left was pretty much not edible. The good news is though that they did have escargot ready for the oven with a butter/garlic/herb mixture already added to the shells. The crab stuff prawns were also premade at the grocery store. Remember I was going for low maintenance for this meal.

This was the first time I have ever made lobsters myself. And I ran into a little problem. My largest pot is a 12 quart pot. That is not big enough for these beauties:


I want to expound a bit about the lobsters we had. Being in St. Louis, lobster is not on the menu very often except for very special occasions as it is normally extremely expensive. Well, we found TheLobsterGuy.com and these lobsters turned out to be pretty reasonable and more than that they were phenomenal. The lobsters were billed as being 1.5 pounds and they were every bit of that if not more. We ordered them on December 28th for December 31st delivery. They came with instructions on how to care for the lobsters up until cook time as well as a hand written note thanking us for our order. I don't pimp a lot of products here but this outfit deserves the props. Highly recommended. Now back to the meal itself.

Knowing that I didn't have the hardware to handle these bad boys I went to a local wholesale restaurant supply store and picked up this 60 quart monster (my 20 pound beagle in the background for perspective):

This problem was a little bigger than the lack of greenery for the meal. While this pot would easily accommodate the four lobsters my stove could not accommodate the 15 gallon pot:


Missed it by about an inch and a half. While I was not happy about the situation, my eight month old was ecstatic:

He played in that pot for a couple of hours. He really enjoyed himself in it. I almost don't want to take the pot back, but I just can't justify keeping it considering the price. Since he likes the pot better than the horse we got him for Christmas (in the background of the first pic) I suggested to Mrs. GrillinFool that we take back the horse and keep the pot. She didn't like that idea!?!

So, what to do about boiling these lobsters? We talked about firing up my grill outside and putting the big pot on that but I think it would've been hard to keep the temp up considering it was about 35 degrees and windy outside. So we pulled out my 12 quart pot and got a couple smaller pots which did the job:

The big pot took on two lobsters and the other two took a lobster each.

For the sides I cut up enough red potatoes to cover a baking sheet. I put them in a bowl, slathered them with garlic, olive oil, black pepper and a few pinches of coarse salt and put them in the oven for 45 minutes on 400:

The right third of the potatoes I added some fresh rosemary:


Here is a shot of the other two sides ready for that 400 degree oven. The prawns went in for 15 and the escargot for 10:

With 12 minutes remaining on the biscuits, the prawns in the oven, the escargot about ready to go I dropped these into the pot. ***Warning: picture of Dead Lobsters Walking:


Despite the lobster being very similar to the cock roach in terms of their species, I had a hard time with the notion of boiling something alive. So I split their heads in two to put them out of their misery about 10 seconds before dropping them in the pots.

For the two smaller pots all I added was a large pinch of salt to each. For the larger pot I added two large pinches and a bag of crab boil for my FiL and I. I did not sample one of the lobsters cooked in the pot without the crab boil so I have no idea if it made a big difference. I will say this that everyone said theirs was delicious so it would seem that I couldn't go wrong either way.

The smaller pots came back to a boil pretty quickly so I pulled those lobsters first. The larger pot having two lobsters dragging the temp down required a little more time. Here we have all four lobsters on the cutting board waiting to be plated. The ones on the right were just removed from the water:


Here are the prawns out of the oven:


And the escargot. One fell over and leaked all the butter and herbs out:


Of course we did it up right for NYE so the wife broke out the Lennox and the Waterford. Or as my FiL calls them, "the fancy eatin' plates." The wife likes to break out the fancy stuff for events like this. As long as I'm not doing the dishes, as none of this stuff can go in the dishwasher, I'm OK with that:

And yes, those are actually nut crackers that we use for lobster (and crab legs). We just don't eat it lobster or crab enough, considering we live smack in the middle of the country to, to justify the proper gear here. The nut crackers and a good fork work just fine:


And the wine pairing is one of my faves - Pierano Estates Chardonnay - which is a rich buttery chard that played off the vast sums of butter that we consumed that night beautifully:


And of course the final plating before we luxuriated in some luscious lobster meat:



The obligatory, what would I do differently the next time:

1. I would measure the space between my stove top and the hood over my stove and get a pot that would fit in that space.
   
2. I would probably add the potatoes a little earlier so that I could broil them for about 5 minutes and get a nice crunch to them. I didn't want the lobster to cool and become rubbery so I had no time for that.

Other than that I doubt I would do anything differently...Oh, and we are definitely doing lobsters again next year and the TheLobsterGuy.com will get our business again...

Click here for the rest of the process