Butter Poached Lobster Shooters - Preparing the Shooters

Bryan Davis: Hi, my name is Bryan Davis with Chef Bryan's Kitchen and today we are going to be doing a Butter Poached Lobster. We are just about at a boil and now we are going to go ahead and poach our lobster. You want to use live lobsters; you do not want to use lobsters that are dead. There are some things that you can do when you drop a live lobsters in the pot, kick in, move in around; more humane way to do it, stick him in the freezer, freeze him a little bit, it numbs them, so then you can just drop them straight in. The other thing is drop the head in first, that shocks them so it is a more humane way of dealing with poaching lobsters. So you just drop them in.

When you poaching lobsters basically, what you are looking for is a color change. You can tell the tail is pretty much curled up around that means it is fairly well cooked and it has got a nice little pink color to it. So we are just going to drop them in the cold water. Now they are pretty much to the point where we can handle them with our hands. They are still warm, but they are not hot. So what we want to do, we want to take the claws and we are just going to twist the claws off. Now we are going to take the tail. You want to do this over a bowl because as you will see, we are going to twist the tail off and it is kind of a fairly messy process when the lobster comes out.

So you just want to free these out a little bit. Now what we are going to do is we are going to remove the meat from the claws. When you do this you want a knife that has got a fairly heavy heel end to it; this section right here. What we are going to do is we are going to take our side towel; we are going to hold it and right below where the claw tip is, right in, give it a nice twist to break the shell, just back and forth, remove the tip and the claw comes out. Now we are going to work on our tail and the easiest way to do the tail, just straighten it right out and on the underside just put your knife right through the middle and push down to break the shell. What we are going to do is we are going to open it up and if you just open it up, the lobster meat from the tail just pulls right out. So now we are going to take our lobster and I will just put it in our clarified butter. We are just going to drop these claws into the clarified butter one at a time and now we are going to let those poach for probably about two to three minutes.

The way we can tell that it is nice and firm, once it is out of the shell, the only way you can really tell if it is done, is the firmness. So now it is done, so now what we are going to do is we are just going to remove it from the butter. We are going to put it in a little side dish. But I am going to show you today what we are going to do is we are going to do little lobster shooters. So what we are going to start with is a little bit of lemon. Just take one lemon, cut it in half and I am just going to put a little bit of lemon juice in the bottom of each glass. I am going to take a little bit of kosher salt, just sprinkle the kosher salt in there, swirl it around a little bit.

Then we are going take a bite size piece of our lobster, you do not want large pieces because this is designed to be a shooter. So we are just going to take a little piece of lobster in there, then we are going to take some of our lobster flavored clarified butter and we are just going to pour it right on top. Then for a little bit of green we are take a little bit of chopped parsley, I am just going to take a little bit of parsley here, give a nice little rough chop. One thing I might want to mention is we were working with raw lobster earlier and lobster that was not completely cooked, so be sure before you pull it out and start working with fresh ingredients again, that you change out the cutting board.

So we are just going to take a little bit of the parsley, put it right on top and I am going to take -- and this is all garnished, this is all over and above what you need, the shooter basically itself is the lemon juice, the salt and the butter with the lobster. But for just a little bit of color, I am going to take a little bit of tomato and put a little bit of tomato on top. It is going to give it a little textural difference and a nice little color contrast with the green. So there we have it. We have our lobster shooters.

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