Cooking Lobster

If you take lobster out of its shell before fully cooking it, you have more control over its taste and texture. Steep the lobster just enough so that it will pull cleanly away from the shell, leaving the interior raw, so you can treat it like raw fish.

At the French Laundry, we butter-poach the lobster, which loads the flavor of butter into the meat and cooks it so slowly and gently that the flesh remains exquisitely tender—so tender some people think it’s not completely cooked. When you cook lobster violently, the meat seizes up and becomes tough, and you can’t get any flavor into it. Gentle heating is the key. Butter-poached lobster is extraordinarily versatile. You can combine it with many different garnishes: beets and leeks, peas and carrots, figs, foie gras.