How to Finish Breaking Down a Whole Lobster

Part of the Video Series How to Cook Lobster, Crab, & Shrimp

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Final steps for prepping a whole lobster for cooking; learn this and more in this free online instructional cooking video about seafood taught by an expert.

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Video Transcript

How to Finish Breaking Down a Whole Lobster
All right we are back to show you how to complete breaking down a whole steamed lobster. As you can see, we've got the claw meat; both claw actually which stayed intact in the bowl here along with some of the meat that came out of the legs that were attached to the claws. So we are down to the head of the tail. All I am going to do is gently separate the tail from the head and most people are familiar with lobster tails anyway. You just want to separate it this way. I don't want to use any of the tools or anything else. I just simply pull that from one side to the other. So to get the meat from the tail now, I am going to use my culinary shears. Now I showed you in the previous video these lobster shears and these have short stubbier blades obviously so they are really good for cracking in the claws and things of that nature without making a mess. These are culinary shears that I use for chickens and all kinds of things as well. It's a little bit longer thinner blade so I am going to go ahead and use these guys and I am just going to make a cut along the top of the tail and split that open and cut along the base and the tail meat will simply just come on out. If you wanted to serve this in a dish as a center piece simply just leave the tail whole this way and we would get a knife and just trim it off and make it look nice. Then we would have a nice presentation to make. What I am going to do is use the shells and the head once we are finished with the whole job and use it for seafood stock and you can throw crab shells in there and shrimp shells as well, whichever you prefer. Lobster tails make a really nice seafood stock as does the insides of the heads and such. So I am going to kind of pull these apart, just separate it just a little and I don't want to get too rough with these because I want to keep the tail looking nice and pretty intact. So I am going to go along the underside, underside of this in the middle and just trim along. Like I said I don't want to get real deep just enough to get that shell cut. This just pops nice and easy like that. We can just run our fingers across the top of this and clean that up nice so there is some nice lobster tail meat. Again, we can use the head and innards that are inside there if you will. We can use those for seafood stock or anything such as that nature. We can rinse this head and clean it off and use it for a garnish or center piece on whatever it is you are trying to make since it has already been cooked. That's the long and short of it. Whole steamed lobster break down, start to finish.

About the Expert

Expert: Louis Ortiz is a professional chef instructor at a culinary institute. He has been working in the culinary industry for 10 years. Read More