The Art of Crafting the Perfect Lobster Roll

When it comes to lobster rolls, many people assume that they are a simple dish consisting of lobster meat served on a bun. However, as we will see in this article, crafting the perfect lobster roll requires skill, attention to detail, and a deep understanding of the ingredients involved.

The Process Begins with the Carcass

To start making our lobster rolls, we need to crack open a whole lobster carcass. This may seem intimidating, but it's actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. The first step is to remove the meat from the shell, and then rinse out any remaining bits or debris. Next, we'll set aside the shell for later use.

Cracking Open the Carcass

Once we have removed the majority of the meat, we can crack open the carcass in half. This will reveal a wealth of tender meat that is perfect for our lobster rolls. The legs of the lobster are also an excellent source of meat, and by breaking them off, we can use a rolling pin to push the meat out of the shell.

Adding Celery

One key component of a great lobster roll is celery. Many people overlook this ingredient, but it adds a crucial texture and flavor to the dish. To incorporate our celery into the mix, we'll chop it up into thin strips and set it aside for later use.

The Importance of Chives

Finally, no lobster roll is complete without a sprinkle of fresh chives on top. These add a bright, green color and a burst of freshness that complements the richness of the lobster meat perfectly. By chopping our chives finely and setting them aside with our celery, we can ensure that they're incorporated into the dish in just the right way.

Preparing the Buns

While our lobster meat is being prepared, we need to get our buns ready for action. We'll start by letting our buns rise, which will give us a light and airy texture. Once they've risen, we can brush them with an egg wash, which will help them brown beautifully in the oven.

Baking the Buns

With our buns prepared, it's time to bake them in the oven. We'll set the temperature to 375°F and let them cook for about 15-20 minutes, or until they're golden brown. While our buns are baking, we can focus on preparing our lobster meat.

Making Brown Butter

To add an extra layer of flavor to our lobster rolls, we'll make some brown butter. This is a simple process that involves melting a stick of butter in a pan and letting it cook until it reaches a golden brown color. Once the butter has reached this stage, we can remove it from the heat and pour it into a bowl.

Adding Flavors to Our Lobster

Now that our lobster meat is ready, we can start adding flavors to it. We'll add a few milk solids from our brown butter to give the lobster a nutty flavor, followed by a handful of chopped chives for added freshness. A small amount of cold Japanese Mayo will help bind everything together, while a pinch of flaky salt adds a touch of sophistication.

Assembling the Rolls

With all our ingredients ready, it's time to assemble our lobster rolls. We'll start by placing a generous serving of lobster meat onto each bun, followed by a sprinkle of chopped celery for added texture. A dollop of Japanese Mayo on top will help keep everything in place, while a sprinkle of chives adds a pop of color.

Finishing Touches

Finally, we can add our finishing touches to the rolls. We'll slice them in half and serve them immediately. To take it to the next level, we can toast both sides of the bun for added crunch.

Manny's Lucky Break

Just as we're about to finish our lobster rolls, Manny makes a lucky break by not getting fired from his job. As he takes a bite of one of the rolls, it becomes clear that this is possibly the best lobster roll he's ever had. With its perfect balance of flavors and textures, it's no wonder why.

A Lobster Roll Like No Other

In conclusion, crafting the perfect lobster roll requires skill, attention to detail, and a deep understanding of the ingredients involved. From cracking open the carcass to adding the final touches, every step is crucial in creating a dish that is truly exceptional. Whether you're a seasoned chef or just starting out, this article has provided a comprehensive guide on how to make the ultimate lobster roll.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe're gonna make lobster rolls today but we're gonna start by catching our own lobsters let's go all right we're on route to go get those lobsters I didn't really get to explain this part yet but just by chance my brothers and I for probably the last four Summers have a couple lobster traps during the winter time when all the storms happen we always go on the beaches and find these beat up washed up lobster traps then we fix all them up and toss them back in each summer with all these fish we catches bait or sometimes just cheap pieces of chicken because lobsters seem to really like chicken in fact I'm pretty sure most of them like drums better than Wings just like I do we'll be there in a couple minutes and we'll take you out to sea foreign these are actually ours we're not just pulling up random people's traps right now Pete you want to pull the first one yeah you would pretty much never ever see anybody pull this kind of thing up in a kayak because of how heavy these can be if they have lobster so we have to be really careful not to flip the kayak over so it looks like our first one we didn't get anything except for spider crabs which you technically can't eat but we're not going to be eating those today so once Pete has cleared out the Trap I'm gonna hand him some good old fish and he's gonna toss that right in the Trap and we're gonna hope that next time we actually get a few lobsters in this one sometimes it's definitely hit or miss but fingers crossed for the second trap on to the next one second buoy big fingers crossed that this one delivers Pete let's see it all right and here's the track and so we got five in this trap and now I'm gonna hand them to Nick so he can determine if they're Keepers or not when we grab them we want to grab right behind there's super claws up front attacked at us so what we want to do when we test them is go behind that notch in their eye with this thing here are you laughing don't make me fire you in the ocean and because that Notch doesn't go all the way past this bottom part of their carcass this one right here is a keeper the rest of these little guys like this they get to go back and swim another day how can you not want to eat that Frozen stinky fish last trap we did pretty well on that other one but I think we're gonna get some Big Boys in this one right here so this cute little guy that was in the Trap right here is a stone crab which you can totally totally eat but we think that the sad part about it is that you have to rip off their claws and you really only eat that part of it so we also like to let these little guys go so it looks like we got an absolute beast in this trap right here which is pretty exciting that's a huge claw this car right here is about the size of Pete's hand and if you compare it to a regular little guy like this just look at how enormous that thing is you can eat this thing in one bite and now we're heading back to shore to check out our Hall it's all in all it looks like we got about four sizable lobsters here one of them unfortunately doesn't have a claw but I just want you to look again at the scale of how truly monstrous this huge guy right here I'd say he's almost double the length of any of the other lobsters that we have here and just his claw alone is bigger than the body of this one right here to make sure these things don't kill each other on the ride home Pete's gonna band up all their claws so they can't absolutely destroy each other because we want them all in one piece when we get back to the kitchen and one last little thing to tell if the lobsters are male or female you look at these two little parts right here if they're harder and more rigid like these ones are this is a male Lobster and if they're softer and more feathery like this it's a female lobster it looks here like we got mostly males many what do you give me the camera all right thanks for taking us out Pete it's time to take these back to the kitchen and make some lobster rolls homemade everything of course so we are almost home I got one of my cute little lobbies riding shotgun up here I had to fire many during the ride in this Lobster instead got to sit in the front seat and hold the camera and he actually did a fabulous job but let's go back home and make some lobster rolls we are back and we have these two beauties right here I left the rest of the lobsters for everybody else to enjoy as you can see we got some of the nice Lively ones too it looks like this one right here is a girl and the other one happens to be a girl as well looks like I'm quite the ladies man today while we wait for that water to heat up to steam our lobsters let's make our homemade buns but before I make those buns one little quick thing I've completely stopped asking to like the videos for me instead now I ask that you like them for little baby pesto the cutest hamster in the world and the little guy that secretly controls everything I do in the kitchen he's my little Remy from Ratatouille quickly go down and toss a like on the vid make sure to subscribe and now let's get rolling now it's time to make those nice hot dog buns first we're gonna go in with two and a half cups of lukewarm water is just be very slightly warm to the touch then with one quarter cup granulated sugar and then while whisking about a tablespoon of active dry yeast make sure you're whisking when you pour this in otherwise it gets really clumpy now we'll let this sit for about five minutes to wake up now once our yeast has woken up and it's all foamy oh cut the can we're gonna close this down and as we begin to mix I'll slowly add in about six cups of all-purpose flour soon after this I'm then going to add in one melted stick of butter or a half cup of butter that of course will give us really nice buttery hot dog buns and last but not least we got to give it just a little bit of salt because we don't want totally unseasoned hot dog buns once it's been kneading for a while I'll pull it off my dough hook and now I'll add just a little bit of oil and toss in that dough ball now I'll cover this with a damp kitchen towel to rest for about an hour and a half once this thick boy has had time to rest check out that giant muffin that we've created it's time for an extremely satisfying part of making any bread giving it a whack watch a visit deflates down really quickly it's still going to keep a lot of those air bubbles but we need to make it so that it's actually still workable because now it's time to gather it all up flour that whole board and turn it into hot dog rolls at this point once I've shaped it into a nice big log I'm gonna go ahead and cut some pieces out normally I'd use a bench scraper for this but this knife here will do just fine I want to make these hot dog rolls easy for you so I'm actually simply going to cut them off like this stretch them out just a bit more and shape them into what looks like a hot dog roll and that is it now we'll lay down all of our hot dog rolls then cover them again for about 15 minutes to rise now it's time to get going with our Lobster now comes one of the more sad parts of our video the bummer is I really really love all animals so it's never fun to cook or kill lobsters we're not going to show this part on camera but what basically happens next is in a split second our knife goes straight through here on the lobster instantly killing it cross me and bad things will happen once our gorgeous and beautiful Hancock lobsters are dead I'm gonna go ahead and place them into the water these will Steam for about 15 minutes or so until we're ready to extract that meat once these Beauties have been steaming for quite some time we can take these out and I'll quickly show you how to remove all the meat first things first is this beautiful lady's tail we're gonna peel and twist it off and it actually looks like inside she had some babies now we're going to straighten out the tail come right in the bottom with a fork to get some leverage and then leverage the whole tail right out as you can see right here we have our beautiful lobster tail but we're not done with this just yet if you peel back each of these pieces and then pull them out you can still get some small bits of meat and every last bit counts next we have our claws we're going to twist the whole piece off here and you'll notice there's several sections of the cloth each little piece here has a nice chunk of meat but to start I usually like to hack open the claw and twist then you can gently slide the whole piece of claw right out in one big piece which looks beautiful on our lobster roll you can usually use your hands to get the rest of these pieces out so we'll set these aside as well now we'll open up her head and rinse this part out at this point I cracked the carcass in half where you can find tons of really tender meat right along the insides here but let's not forget about the legs if you break the legs off and then lay them down you can use something round like a rolling pin to push the meat all the way out and as you can see it slides right out the end I'm also a big believer that you need some celery in a lobster roll so once we have some of our meat laid out I'm gonna chop up a bunch of celery into these soup super nice thin strips now chop it up nice and fine and set that aside as well now last but not least just a few freshly chopped chives which will go right on top of that Lobster and then it's time to finish our bread once our bread has risen it's time to give them a nice little egg wash after all we want them to turn out nice and golden brown when out of the oven so I'll paint over all of our buns with this egg wash making sure that I get under every single little crevice now I'll bake these at 375 Fahrenheit for about 15 to 20 minutes while we wait for our hot dog rolls it's time to make some brown butter and that's very simple whole stick of butter into our pan and then we let that move around as we approach that brown butter stage the butter will start to get very frothy and bubbly the second you start to see any golden brown color in the bottom of the pan pull it off the heat then immediately pour it into a room temperature Bowl which will halt the cooking process as you can see on the color here we've hit that perfect beautiful brown butter color and consistency so first we'll go in with that Lobster meat and as you'll see I like to keep it whole just to show that it really did come from a whole big lobster then we're gonna go in with a few of those milk solids from the brown butter which are going to give our Lobster an amazing flavor nutty and delicious then a couple of our chives a small handful of our chopped celery and a nice serving of cold Japanese Mayo I'll top it all off with just a little bit of my favorite flaky salt and now we mix these rolls look absolutely gorgeous I have to say they're extraordinarily hot but this one right here looks perfect the shape the color I want to just eat this whole thing in one bite once our cute little bun has had some time to rest we're gonna make a nice slice right down the middle normally I'd say you can totally toast both sides of the bun as well but it's already got enough golden brown on it that I'm okay just filling it the way it is at this point it's time to fill that roll with our Mayo coated Lobster my goal with any lobster roll is to have it heaping and overflowing with lobster you should also be able to see those enormous hunks when you go to eat it now to finish it off we'll hit it with just a few chives here to give some bright green color and here I present to you my lobster roll this right here has to be one of the most badass lobster rolls I've ever made and I mean I get it growing up in Rhode Island and then being in Boston means I should probably be able to know what I'm doing everyone has a different interpretation of a lobster roll some people don't like this much Mayo some people don't like any Mayo at all some people like it on a cold room temperature sad bun that's at least my opinion I like what we have here the contrast in temperature those amazing textures that we brought out the super golden brown bun there and the brown butter within the lobster meat itself then of course you make it all green and bright with those chives and that amazing creamy Mayo with of course the celery bits for texture enough talking it's time to take a bite well I'm gonna unfire Manny this is so good I can say confidently that that is quite possibly the best slop stroll I've ever experienced and I've had hundreds if not thousands unfortunately I'm allergic to shellfish so I can't eat this whole thing here I can't eat any of it at all in fact so in addition to keeping his job for the next day it's Manny's lucky day because he's not fired and he gets to eat a lot of Lobster thank you all so much for watching don't forget again to hit that like button and if you liked it before I'm gonna go give pesto some Lobster also don't forget to hit that subscribe button because we have some amazing videos coming right up see you next timewe're gonna make lobster rolls today but we're gonna start by catching our own lobsters let's go all right we're on route to go get those lobsters I didn't really get to explain this part yet but just by chance my brothers and I for probably the last four Summers have a couple lobster traps during the winter time when all the storms happen we always go on the beaches and find these beat up washed up lobster traps then we fix all them up and toss them back in each summer with all these fish we catches bait or sometimes just cheap pieces of chicken because lobsters seem to really like chicken in fact I'm pretty sure most of them like drums better than Wings just like I do we'll be there in a couple minutes and we'll take you out to sea foreign these are actually ours we're not just pulling up random people's traps right now Pete you want to pull the first one yeah you would pretty much never ever see anybody pull this kind of thing up in a kayak because of how heavy these can be if they have lobster so we have to be really careful not to flip the kayak over so it looks like our first one we didn't get anything except for spider crabs which you technically can't eat but we're not going to be eating those today so once Pete has cleared out the Trap I'm gonna hand him some good old fish and he's gonna toss that right in the Trap and we're gonna hope that next time we actually get a few lobsters in this one sometimes it's definitely hit or miss but fingers crossed for the second trap on to the next one second buoy big fingers crossed that this one delivers Pete let's see it all right and here's the track and so we got five in this trap and now I'm gonna hand them to Nick so he can determine if they're Keepers or not when we grab them we want to grab right behind there's super claws up front attacked at us so what we want to do when we test them is go behind that notch in their eye with this thing here are you laughing don't make me fire you in the ocean and because that Notch doesn't go all the way past this bottom part of their carcass this one right here is a keeper the rest of these little guys like this they get to go back and swim another day how can you not want to eat that Frozen stinky fish last trap we did pretty well on that other one but I think we're gonna get some Big Boys in this one right here so this cute little guy that was in the Trap right here is a stone crab which you can totally totally eat but we think that the sad part about it is that you have to rip off their claws and you really only eat that part of it so we also like to let these little guys go so it looks like we got an absolute beast in this trap right here which is pretty exciting that's a huge claw this car right here is about the size of Pete's hand and if you compare it to a regular little guy like this just look at how enormous that thing is you can eat this thing in one bite and now we're heading back to shore to check out our Hall it's all in all it looks like we got about four sizable lobsters here one of them unfortunately doesn't have a claw but I just want you to look again at the scale of how truly monstrous this huge guy right here I'd say he's almost double the length of any of the other lobsters that we have here and just his claw alone is bigger than the body of this one right here to make sure these things don't kill each other on the ride home Pete's gonna band up all their claws so they can't absolutely destroy each other because we want them all in one piece when we get back to the kitchen and one last little thing to tell if the lobsters are male or female you look at these two little parts right here if they're harder and more rigid like these ones are this is a male Lobster and if they're softer and more feathery like this it's a female lobster it looks here like we got mostly males many what do you give me the camera all right thanks for taking us out Pete it's time to take these back to the kitchen and make some lobster rolls homemade everything of course so we are almost home I got one of my cute little lobbies riding shotgun up here I had to fire many during the ride in this Lobster instead got to sit in the front seat and hold the camera and he actually did a fabulous job but let's go back home and make some lobster rolls we are back and we have these two beauties right here I left the rest of the lobsters for everybody else to enjoy as you can see we got some of the nice Lively ones too it looks like this one right here is a girl and the other one happens to be a girl as well looks like I'm quite the ladies man today while we wait for that water to heat up to steam our lobsters let's make our homemade buns but before I make those buns one little quick thing I've completely stopped asking to like the videos for me instead now I ask that you like them for little baby pesto the cutest hamster in the world and the little guy that secretly controls everything I do in the kitchen he's my little Remy from Ratatouille quickly go down and toss a like on the vid make sure to subscribe and now let's get rolling now it's time to make those nice hot dog buns first we're gonna go in with two and a half cups of lukewarm water is just be very slightly warm to the touch then with one quarter cup granulated sugar and then while whisking about a tablespoon of active dry yeast make sure you're whisking when you pour this in otherwise it gets really clumpy now we'll let this sit for about five minutes to wake up now once our yeast has woken up and it's all foamy oh cut the can we're gonna close this down and as we begin to mix I'll slowly add in about six cups of all-purpose flour soon after this I'm then going to add in one melted stick of butter or a half cup of butter that of course will give us really nice buttery hot dog buns and last but not least we got to give it just a little bit of salt because we don't want totally unseasoned hot dog buns once it's been kneading for a while I'll pull it off my dough hook and now I'll add just a little bit of oil and toss in that dough ball now I'll cover this with a damp kitchen towel to rest for about an hour and a half once this thick boy has had time to rest check out that giant muffin that we've created it's time for an extremely satisfying part of making any bread giving it a whack watch a visit deflates down really quickly it's still going to keep a lot of those air bubbles but we need to make it so that it's actually still workable because now it's time to gather it all up flour that whole board and turn it into hot dog rolls at this point once I've shaped it into a nice big log I'm gonna go ahead and cut some pieces out normally I'd use a bench scraper for this but this knife here will do just fine I want to make these hot dog rolls easy for you so I'm actually simply going to cut them off like this stretch them out just a bit more and shape them into what looks like a hot dog roll and that is it now we'll lay down all of our hot dog rolls then cover them again for about 15 minutes to rise now it's time to get going with our Lobster now comes one of the more sad parts of our video the bummer is I really really love all animals so it's never fun to cook or kill lobsters we're not going to show this part on camera but what basically happens next is in a split second our knife goes straight through here on the lobster instantly killing it cross me and bad things will happen once our gorgeous and beautiful Hancock lobsters are dead I'm gonna go ahead and place them into the water these will Steam for about 15 minutes or so until we're ready to extract that meat once these Beauties have been steaming for quite some time we can take these out and I'll quickly show you how to remove all the meat first things first is this beautiful lady's tail we're gonna peel and twist it off and it actually looks like inside she had some babies now we're going to straighten out the tail come right in the bottom with a fork to get some leverage and then leverage the whole tail right out as you can see right here we have our beautiful lobster tail but we're not done with this just yet if you peel back each of these pieces and then pull them out you can still get some small bits of meat and every last bit counts next we have our claws we're going to twist the whole piece off here and you'll notice there's several sections of the cloth each little piece here has a nice chunk of meat but to start I usually like to hack open the claw and twist then you can gently slide the whole piece of claw right out in one big piece which looks beautiful on our lobster roll you can usually use your hands to get the rest of these pieces out so we'll set these aside as well now we'll open up her head and rinse this part out at this point I cracked the carcass in half where you can find tons of really tender meat right along the insides here but let's not forget about the legs if you break the legs off and then lay them down you can use something round like a rolling pin to push the meat all the way out and as you can see it slides right out the end I'm also a big believer that you need some celery in a lobster roll so once we have some of our meat laid out I'm gonna chop up a bunch of celery into these soup super nice thin strips now chop it up nice and fine and set that aside as well now last but not least just a few freshly chopped chives which will go right on top of that Lobster and then it's time to finish our bread once our bread has risen it's time to give them a nice little egg wash after all we want them to turn out nice and golden brown when out of the oven so I'll paint over all of our buns with this egg wash making sure that I get under every single little crevice now I'll bake these at 375 Fahrenheit for about 15 to 20 minutes while we wait for our hot dog rolls it's time to make some brown butter and that's very simple whole stick of butter into our pan and then we let that move around as we approach that brown butter stage the butter will start to get very frothy and bubbly the second you start to see any golden brown color in the bottom of the pan pull it off the heat then immediately pour it into a room temperature Bowl which will halt the cooking process as you can see on the color here we've hit that perfect beautiful brown butter color and consistency so first we'll go in with that Lobster meat and as you'll see I like to keep it whole just to show that it really did come from a whole big lobster then we're gonna go in with a few of those milk solids from the brown butter which are going to give our Lobster an amazing flavor nutty and delicious then a couple of our chives a small handful of our chopped celery and a nice serving of cold Japanese Mayo I'll top it all off with just a little bit of my favorite flaky salt and now we mix these rolls look absolutely gorgeous I have to say they're extraordinarily hot but this one right here looks perfect the shape the color I want to just eat this whole thing in one bite once our cute little bun has had some time to rest we're gonna make a nice slice right down the middle normally I'd say you can totally toast both sides of the bun as well but it's already got enough golden brown on it that I'm okay just filling it the way it is at this point it's time to fill that roll with our Mayo coated Lobster my goal with any lobster roll is to have it heaping and overflowing with lobster you should also be able to see those enormous hunks when you go to eat it now to finish it off we'll hit it with just a few chives here to give some bright green color and here I present to you my lobster roll this right here has to be one of the most badass lobster rolls I've ever made and I mean I get it growing up in Rhode Island and then being in Boston means I should probably be able to know what I'm doing everyone has a different interpretation of a lobster roll some people don't like this much Mayo some people don't like any Mayo at all some people like it on a cold room temperature sad bun that's at least my opinion I like what we have here the contrast in temperature those amazing textures that we brought out the super golden brown bun there and the brown butter within the lobster meat itself then of course you make it all green and bright with those chives and that amazing creamy Mayo with of course the celery bits for texture enough talking it's time to take a bite well I'm gonna unfire Manny this is so good I can say confidently that that is quite possibly the best slop stroll I've ever experienced and I've had hundreds if not thousands unfortunately I'm allergic to shellfish so I can't eat this whole thing here I can't eat any of it at all in fact so in addition to keeping his job for the next day it's Manny's lucky day because he's not fired and he gets to eat a lot of Lobster thank you all so much for watching don't forget again to hit that like button and if you liked it before I'm gonna go give pesto some Lobster also don't forget to hit that subscribe button because we have some amazing videos coming right up see you next time\n"