Killing a lobster isn’t a pretty enterprise, so instead of boiling it alive, put in the freezer to slow its metabolism, then slice up its underbelly.
Killing a lobster isn’t a pretty enterprise, so instead of boiling it alive, put in the freezer to slow its metabolism, then slice up its underbelly.
I worked my way through college at a beef packing plant. Stopping the metabolism of those hussies was an art. And pretty damned humane if I do say so myself.
Take it from someone who caught them for a summer (for educational purposes), lobsters are basically giant cockroaches. If you can swat a mosquito or step on a roach, you can dispatch a lobster.
Exactly. Giant, ocean-going insects.
If you flip Mr. Lobster over and cleave him from tail to head, for a minute or so you get two independent Lobster halves, but no bioling alive. That is, of course, if you’re fixin’ to grill’im.
I had bugs for lunch.
“I had bugs for lunch.”
Lobsters, shrimp, and crabs are crustaceans, not insects.
We kept them semi-chilled on the line, but really, never gave the boiling business a second thought. Good eats though. Thought that a time or two.
Aren’t these the same folks who took Sarah Palin to task for being nearby to where turkeys were being dispatched?
What’s this slowing of metabolism all about, now? I just take them and cut ’em open, and then rinse the viscera into my garbage disposal. Keep your nasssty metabolism-slowing!
This is actually the best way to cook a lobster: prepare like that, and then drop into a pot of boiling water for the absolute minimum time possible that results in a cooked lobster. 8 minutes, maybe. If you cook them too long, they wind up tasting like river bottom.
Lobsters have received the M’chelle O! exemption from teh aminal rites OUTRAGE!! since she finds them real tasty when she’s in hotel rooms in NooYawkSitty. We can’t deny the Holy Concubine, now can we?
Oh, and after chilling (or not, depends on my mood), I stick a big ol’ knife point-down in the back of their tiny, tasty brains and split the head in two. Then into a steamer so’s not to touch the boiling water. Yum-O.
And the laypersons definition of crustacean – very large bugs.
Well, yes, technically they aren’t “insects”, what they are are Arthropods, which means that they are animals with an exoskeleton and jointed appendages.
There are 4 categories of them:
0) Trilobites (extinct. thus not counted)
1) Chelicerta (Arachnids [spiders, ticks, scorpions], Horseshoe Crabs, etc)
2) Myripoda (Centipedes and Millipedes)
3) Hexapoda (Insects)
4) Crustacea (shrimp, crabs, lobsters, lice, barnacles, etc.)
All the wonderful crawly things.
I like them simply steamed over rockweed, with a little salt and pepper. No butter. And then you just toss the shells back into the ocean. I’ve never understood how Lobsters got to be haute cuisine. The only way to successfully eat them is with your fingers and a good bucket to toss the shells.
Also science persuades. They might as well be bugs. They certainly are showing up at school in matching outfits.
Mmmm! Sea-bugs!
I have no qualms about dropping live Blue Crabs into a pot of boiling water, either.
Also I won’t eat oysters or okra. Which, if plants were bugs, it would be one.
You do have to wonder who the extremely hungry individual was who first looked at the hairy, toxic-looking pods of the Okra plant and said “Fuck it, I’m gonna eat those damn things…”
You do have to wonder who the extremely hungry individual was who first looked at the hairy, toxic-looking pods of the Okra plant and said “Fuck it, I’m gonna eat those damn things…â€Â
I suppose, I would more like to shake the hand of the first person who said “Imma slice these up, roll them in flour and fry they asses.”
Giant cockroaches, with built-in monkey wrenches
OOOOOLLLLLLDDDDD arachnids
From the place I was fossil hunting this summer:
http://www.devoniantimes.org/who/pages/trigonotarbid.html
Red Hill at North Bend, PA.
Oh, Bra-vo. With the price of lobsters falling, lovie and I can dine on them nightly now…
But what’s all this fascination with culinary technique. We like to prepare them in our own special way…
By saying, “Chef, we feel like lobster tonight…”
And, toute-suite, they appear…
[All said, through clenched teeth with the lower jaw axtended, in one’s best Thurston Howell III imitation]
The report from my Maine-dwelling parents is that the prices will again start to go back up as more and more lobstermen pick up their traps for the winter.
Anyone remember the animal rights fallout from the Today Show (?) many years back when a guest chef split a live lobster down the middle and threw it on a skillet (with the legs still moving) with ol’ Katie looking on? Hilarious. Put ’em in boiling sea water. We use a turkey fryer pot.
There was (perhaps still is) a fad in Japan for cutting up a live fish just so, then serving it, still moving, to the customer.
It’s still there, John, and I’ve had it. It’s kinda weird, texture is waaaay different from sushi. My guess is no rigor mortis.
I heard a story of a Chinese practice of eating live monkey brain. Un-cap the cranium and scoop the stuff out. It’s a strange practice to get to on the strength of virility myth or other healthful effects and such but there seems to be a habit of that sort of thing in Asia, very old, very hard to give up or so it seems. Still beating snake heart is another one.
Not just a snake, a cobra.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwj0FYN0Qg
Yoiks! Troubled was intended, my bad.
But bomb more, faster, please!
Oops, screwed up again. Wrong thread.
Live monkey brain? Ew. DEAD monkey brain would be bad enough. (And, one might think, a really-not-good-idea from a disease standpoint.)
I put him live in a pot of cold water. When it boils he is done perfectly. Snip the tip of the claws to drain and he is ready for all manner of treatment
JohnAA, the story came from a neighbor who was a Dep. Sec. of Commerce back in the 70’s/80’s and was served this great complimentary delicacy at an official banquet, long before the links between prions and bovine-spongiform encephalopathy and Kreuzfeld-Jacob had been drawn (or even dreamed up), I think. Though he told it as a gross-out story in the context of a number of other gross-out stories of his gustatory travails across the globe, so there’s that.
I don’t eat no bugs.
I’d be willing to bet that you do eat bugs, whether you know it or not Alec, though I’d also take at face value your meaning to say “I don’t intend to eat bugs, no time, no how.”
Bugs can be very small. They can get ground up into unrecognizable nothings in all manner of starchy powders while adding vanishingly little in the way of flavor and even protein or what-have-you, but trust me on this, they are there.
“Bugs can be very small. They can get ground up into unrecognizable nothings in all manner of starchy powders while adding vanishingly little in the way of flavor and even protein or what-have-you, but trust me on this, they are there.”
I reject your reality and hereby assert my own. I am a man with dignity who suppeth not upon the flesh of the insect.
I do, however, gobble up crustaceans and bivalves howsoever prepared.
Reject all you like Alec. :-)
Just don’t eat any tacos.
According to the FDA(via Wikipedia), wheat flour must have less than 150 insect fragments per 100 grams. Below that, you’re golden.
That’s before it is sold to the end user though, isn’t it SBP? Once it gets into the kitchen where the moths and weevils live those proportions are going to go nowhere but up, if I don’t miss my guess.