Seared Lobster Tails with Thai Chili Coleslaw

Todd Gray: Hi, I am Chef Todd Gray and today, I am showing you to how to prepare a Seared Lobster Tails with the Thai Chili Coleslaw, let's get started. At first, prepare our coleslaw, I am placing some of our shredded cabbage into a small mixing bowl. Fresh lime juice, take a fresh lime, cut it in half, squeeze some of that juice into the cabbage. Fresh cilantro, just leave the leaves whole, we will tear them. Actually, they are called pluches. Tear some of the cilantro pluches off of the stem and finally, a good Thai chili peanut sauce. I don't want to put too much, just enough to dress the coleslaw. Let's mix this.

Now, I am going to need to add some seasoning; spread over a little bit of our sea salt, a little of our fresh cracked pepper and let's mix that well. Let's say, we have about a cup-and-a-half of our coleslaw. So now our coleslaw is ready. Place down the side and we are going to start to split our lobster tails. Here, I have the wonderful lobster tails, I have gone from Harris Teeter beautiful main lobster tails, about one-and-a-half pound lobsters. When we are buying lobster, we always want to inspect them being sure that they have a good clean aroma, smell of the sea, nice and moist. Good dark shell with no damaged spots. So let's go ahead and start by splitting our lobster tails, being sure we have a good sharp knife. Be sure that the lobster tail is firm on our cutting board, so just not moving around and carefully holding the back of the lobster tail and putting the knife into the top of the shell, making an incision and go straight down, going all the way through the shell, turning our tail around and finishing cutting through the backside of the tail. When we open our lobster tail, we have been keeping them intact, Now that we have completed the splitting process, let's place them on to a plate and take the moment to arrange and begin the cooking process. So now let's begin to sear our lobster tails. I have got a nice even heated pan and about a medium high heat. I had a of touch little oil to the pan. You need to season our lobster tails with a touch of our sea salt, our fresh cracked black pepper. Let's place these into the pan, shell side up. What I like about cooking lobsters this way is that the way we would actually roast the lobster in the shell, there is a couple of things; we get a good sear on their lobster meet but yet, the shell protects the meat from overcooking and it ensures that the meat is nice and moist.

Now we don't need to cook this for a more than about a minute or so. You are going to see our shells are starting to turn that bright red that we associate with a properly cooked lobster. There we go, we are going to go tune into cook it on the back side, cook it on the shell side just to get the heat from the other side of the lobster, very nice. See how our meat is nice and cooked on the edges, we don't see any opaqueness, it's too undercooked. One thing we don't want to overcook our sea food because as it sits in the shell and as we plate our coleslaw, the lobsters continue to cook. So we kind of want to turn our heat off and let the lobster finish in the pan. Now it's time for our final plate up. Just take some of our butter lettuce, taking some of the interior leaves and almost have a cup shape to them. We will place this on our dish, fanning out a couple of pieces here and then take some of our Thai peanut slaw. Adjust that up in the center of the cup, getting our lobster nice base stand on. Take this lobster meat, it pops right out of the shell nicely. One tail spraying the other half off of the shell and lay them on the top, going in opposite directions. And then finally taking some of our peanut sauce just to finish sizzling over the top and around for a nice presentation. And there you have it, Seared Lobster Tails with the Thai Chili Slaw, beautiful great winter dish. Enjoy!