Lobster
All you foodies out there have probably drooled as
often as I have over all those mouth-watering descriptions of Thomas
Keller’s butter-poached lobster. Articles on it have peppered food
magazines, internet sites and newspapers over the past year: I’d hazard
that it’s one of the most lauded and highly publicized recipes in recent
memory. This signature dish at Keller’s French Laundry restaurant in
California holds almost mythical stature as the most tender, most luscious, most
succulent, most sensuous lobster known to man. It was a decisive factor in
helping French Laundry land “Best Restaurant in the World” according
to Restaurant
Magazine, where it was selected by an
international panel of more than 300 hard-to-please restaurateurs, chefs and
critics. Needless to say, I’ve been dying to try
it.
Sadly, pigs will fly through an icy
hell before I score a reservation at the French Laundry. Even if I could get
in, I’d have to promise my first-born to cover the tab, and this is not
something I’m likely to do -- not even for lobster. I decided to make it
at home instead.
To start, I picked out
two small but feisty looking lobsters at the fish market. They flexed all ten
legs and two antennae at me and flicked their tails a couple of times. I
don’t think they were particularly pleased about going home with me, but
(just to set the record straight) lobsters can’t be pleased about
anything. They’re also incapable of feeling pain, due to the fact that
they lack a brain.
People often feel
bad about cooking lobsters alive, but it’s very important since digestive
enzymes begin to destroy the lobster’s flesh as soon as it dies. If
you’re squeamish about the process, the best tip I’ve heard is to
put lobsters on ice for a half hour before cooking them. This dulls their
automatic response to heat. “Hypnotizing,” slow heating, and
steaming all increase the lobster’s activity during cooking. Personally,
I’m not disturbed. The way I think about it, lobsters have been around
for close to 200 million years, and they’ll outlive us by a long shot. We
might as well enjoy them while we’re around.
Thomas Keller believes that when you
cook lobster in rapidly boiling water, the meat seizes up and becomes tough,
preventing you from getting any flavor into it. Borrowing his alternative
technique, I flash boiled the lobsters in acidulated water (just a splash of
white vinegar in the pot) just long enough to make it easy to remove the meat
from the shells without actually cooking it. I then slid it gently into beurre
monté where it poached happily for eight minutes until it was cooked
through. Beurre monté is a simple sauce made by whisking water into
melted butter. It makes a great poaching medium thanks to the relatively low
heat conductivity and heat capacity of the fat compared to water. This allows
it to cook foods more gradually, helping them retain their delicate textures.
In this case, it also infuses the lobster with butter, creating the most
marvelously luxuriant flavor and texture in an already delectable
meat.
We ate it over linguine, so that we
could indulge in as much of the beurre monté as possible. Every bite was
a
splurge.
Posted: Fri - January 28, 2005 at 06:11 PM