Lobsters & Crayfish

Lobsters & Crayfish

In the state of Maine "Lobster" can mean only one thing (though the rest of the world may disagree). In the early days of the Republic, though, these overgrown crawfish were considered food for the poor, shunned at fine tables. After storms the rough folk would go down to the shore and carry off stranded lobsters weighing 10 or 20 pounds - for the taking, so it couldn't be very good.

Then railroads were built and refrigerated freight cars were built. Live lobster could be sent to Chicago and other inland cities where it was exotic, expensive, and in great demand. Prices soared, and the good people of Maine began to realize their error.

Shellfish

General & History -
Buying, Cleaning and Cooking Lobsters -
Varieties -
Health & Nutrition -
Links -

General & History

The category "Lobster" includes several crustacean families that are not necessarily closely related. True lobsters have large claws. Crayfish are closely related to true lobsters. Spiny lobsters, which have no claws but very strong jaws, are related only as members of the order Decapoda, which makes them as closely related as crabs. Spiny lobsters are warm water creatures while true lobsters reach their maximum development in the cold waters of the North Atlantic off the coast of New England (U.S.) and Canada.

Buying, Cleaning & Cooking

Killing Lobsters

If you've bought your lobster live you have to kill it before you can eat it. Dying is never a pleasant experience, not for us or for lobsters, so you want to kill it as cleanly and quickly as possible. The question of whether "lobsters don't feel pain like we do" is still unresolved with conflicting experimental data, but we should presume they do. There are several methods used.

The traditional method is by dumping the lobster face first into a big pot of boiling water. Some consider this cruel and say the lobsters scream. Looking at it logically, the lobster's brain is right behind the eyes, so there may or may not be a moment of pain, but the brain should be cooked in less than a second and the pain forgotten. The "scream" is actually air exiting from under the shell due to the temperature change. The body may still twitch but there's no lobster in there anymore.
Set a knife lengthwise over the front of the head and hit it down with a soft faced mallet splitting the front of the head and the brain. This should produce an almost instant loss of consciousness but the body may still react for a minute or more.
Some feel the lobster should be sedated by stashing in the freezer for twenty minutes to an hour or more before dropping in the boiling water. This may or may not be effective.
Others feel the lobster should be sedated by soaking in a salt solution before dropping in the boiling water. Having observed crabs react to water of the wrong salinity I'm not going to recommend this without more evidence, it may be very painful to the lobster.

Varieties

American Lobster - [Maine Lobster, Northern Lobster, Homarus americanus]
These true lobsters are found as far south as North Carolina but achieve their maximum numbers and development from Maine (U.S>) to Labrador, Canada. They can grow as large as 44 pounds and over 3 feet long but the average market size is between 1.5 and 2 pounds. Lobsters are brown to greenish but about 1 in a million is bright blue and about one in 30 million is yellow. A very few are albinos, which don't turn red when cooked as the others do. Prep & Cooking Details.

Spiny Lobsters - [langouste, Rock Lobster, family Palinuridae, genus Palinurus (Mediterranean), Panulirus (Americas, Australia & China)]
Unlike true lobsters, spiny lobsters have no claws but very strong jaws and a lot of protective spines. Found worldwide in both hemispheres they prefer warmer waters and are generally nocturnal. The Australians, who as usual get everything upside down and backwards, call them Crayfish. Spiny lobsters have been around since the Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago.

Western Spiny Lobster - [Crayfish (Australia), Panulirus cygnus]
Native to the West Coast of Australia, this lobster accounts for the most valuable fishery in Australia with somewhere around 10,000 tons landed per year. The fishery is certified as sustainable. Prep & Cooking Details.

California Spiny Lobster - [Bugs (California), Panulirus interruptus]
Found from Monterey Bay, California to the tip of Baja California this lobster has no claws but jaws strong enough to crush clams. They can grow to 3 feet long and the official weight record is 16 pounds but specimens to 26 pounds have been reported unofficially. The fishery is quite efficient so few make it beyond 2 pounds today, but it is also a highly regulated fishery and considered sustainable.Prep & Cooking Details. Photo U.S. Government NOAA public domain.

Caribbean Spiny Lobster - [Florida Spiny Lobster, Panulirus argus]
This lobster is found in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. They can grow up to 16 pounds. Most are caught in the Florida keys, but other areas of the Caribbean also harvest them, particularly the Bahamas. Prep & Cooking Details. Photo by Douglas Whitaker distributed under Creative Commons License 2.5.

Mediterranean Spiny Lobster - [Palinurus elephas]
Found from Monterey Bay, California to the tip of Baja California this lobster has no claws but jaws strong enough to crush clams. They can grow to 3 feet long and the official weight record is 16 pounds, but specimens to 26 pounds have been reported unofficially. The fishery is quite efficient so few make it beyond 2 pounds today. Prep & Cooking Details. Photo by Michael Wolf distributed under Creative Commons License 2.5.

Crayfish

Crayfish are freshwater lobsters, generally much smaller than ocean lobsters. The photo specimens (pre-cooked and frozen) were farm raised in China, the larger being 3-1/2 inches long from nose tip to tail tip and weighing 0.7 ounces. The whole tray of 19 of them weighed 11.1 ounces for 0.58 ounces each and the whole 19 yielded 1.7 ounces of tail meat (15%). Nothing else edible was found on these critters. Considering the tray cost US $2.25, that's $21

Langostino

[Squat Lobster, Cervimunida johni and Pleuroncodes monodon of family Galatheidae]