Maine · Main
Downeast 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
- 2 cooked lobsters (about 700g meat), chilled and cut in bite-size pieces
- 5 tbsp mayonnaise
- 1 celery rib, minced fine
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp chives, snipped
- 4 New England split-top hot dog buns
- 3 tbsp butter, softened
- Salt and white pepper
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg · shellfish · celery
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
- Fold lobster with mayonnaise, celery, lemon, and chives. Season carefully and keep cold.
- Butter both flat sides of each split-top bun.
- Griddle the buns over medium heat until deep gold and crisp on both sides, 2 min a side. 2 min
- Line each bun with a lettuce leaf if you like, then heap the salad in generously.
- Serve immediately with chips and a pickle.
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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