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Connecticut Hot Lobster Roll
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- Meat from 2 lobsters (about 700g), in large pieces
- 170g butter
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 4 split-top buns
- 2 tbsp butter, softened, for the buns
- Flaky salt and black pepper
- Chives (optional)
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Melt the 170g butter in a wide pan over low heat with the lemon juice.
- Add the lobster meat and warm it through very gently, 3-4 min: the butter should never sizzle. 4 min
- Meanwhile butter and griddle the buns until gold and crisp on both flat sides.
- Lift the lobster out with a slotted spoon, letting excess butter drain, and pile into the buns.
- Spoon a little warm butter over, season with flaky salt and pepper, and serve at once.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Barrel-aged Chardonnay (Meursault style)
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Butter-dressed shellfish climbs a weight class: oak-and-cream Chardonnay matches it richness for richness.
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