Home > Recipes > Main Courses > Newfoundland Steamed Lobster With Clarified Spy Glass Butter

Steaming is a great way to cook but not overcook a lobster's delicate meat. In order to properly steam a lobster, you need a sturdy and close to airtight steamer. The best steamer setup is a steamer insert inside a Lobster Pot with a fitted heavy lid. This setup will work well on a stove top, but if you feeding more than eight people, it would be a good idea to cook the lobsters in a large stockpot on a propane "crab boil" burner outside.  If that's not possible, just be sure not to crowd your pan too much and to keep the water in the bottom of the pan at a serious rolling boil. It's better to cook the lobsters in several small batches and cook them correctly.

 

This ingredient list is a basic suggestion for what will only lightly flavor the lobster meat. If I chose the ingredients in order of importance, it would be: salt, herbs, onion, peppercorn, garlic, bay leaf, lemon, celery. One real necessity, however is salt. Some hard core lobster broiler and steamers only cook them using seawater. Another tactic is to use fresh seaweed mixed in with the seawater to add even more flavor. The premise of this is that boiling or steaming a lobster  in water with a low salinity than the lobster will leach tasty salt from the lobster through osmosis, thus the need for highly salted Drawn Spy Glass Butter. I think a good amount of salt is 1 tablespoon salt per 1 quart of water. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that much salt will significantly lower the boiling point of the water, because it takes a whole ounce of salt per quart of water to raise the boiling point just one degree.

 

Butter is an emulsion of milk solids, milk fat and water. When butter is heated, this emulsion breaks and the parts seperate. When the temperature reaches 212F, or the boiling point of the water, the water begins to evaporate. The foam that rises to the top is comprised of the protein solids and salts. The foam is skimmed off and what is left is the milk fat. If the foam were left on, it would start to brown and would eventually burn after becomming brown butter, and then black butter. Clarified butter is ofen used for sauteing because it does not sizzle and pop like whole butter, nor does it burn at a higher temperature. Many chefs also use clarified butter in hollandaise sauce and its derivatives, beasue the resulting sauce is more stable and holds its emulsification through a longer range of temperatures.