Lobster Rolls: Expensive giant sea-bugs in a hot dog bun

I remember being a kid and seeing, in every grocery store it seems, the tanks of live lobsters and crabs for sale. I don’t see them so much anymore. Maybe it’s just the season–lobster season runs from late June to December apparently, and we’re not quite there yet–but the closest I got to a live lobster this month (apart from the seafood place on the north side who wouldn’t sell them to me and a sale at Joong Boo Market that I apparently just missed) was a sign at Mariano’s saying they could be preordered for Memorial Day.

Backing up for a moment, my quest for lobster rolls this month started out OK. It turns out there’s a place just a few blocks from my office that specializes in them, Luke’s Lobster, a chain from New York.

I stopped in one day and ordered a lobster roll, a small bag of chips, and a soft drink. The roll was small, with the typical sliced sides of a New England style hot dog bun that had been very nicely buttered and griddled for some extra flavor and texture. It was filled with buttery lobster meat, served with a pickle, and the whole sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning. The chips were Cape Cod brand salt and vinegar, and the drink was a bottle of a carbonated honey-sweetened green tea from a company in Brunswick, Maine.

It was a good lunch, a really good lunch even. Look at that beautiful lobster meat, with a nice whole clearly visible claw right on top. Luke’s is clearly pretty proud of what they’re doing, and if I was the kind of guy who would eat one sandwich, call it a day and write this post, I could have done worse.

I’m not, though. I’m the kind of guy who keeps eating these sandwiches until I can find something interesting to say about them–or at least until I get sick of them–and as it turns out, there’s another place right near my office selling lobster rolls in a fast food setting, the Brown Bag Seafood Co. location in the Revival Food Hall.

Brown Bag’s lobster roll is served with “truffle parmesan tots” on a sheet of faux newspaper for that hint of authenticity. The sandwich was bigger than Luke’s, though after steaming for a bit in the plastic tub it’s served in, the sides of the roll weren’t as nice and crisp as Luke’s had been. Also, there is some kind of pinkish “lobster sauce” spread inside the roll–not terrible, but I’m not sure where it puts this sandwich on the Connecticut/Maine lobster roll spectrum.

See, I guess there are 2 different kinds of lobster rolls. In Maine, and in many other places, a lobster roll consists of chunks of lobster meat dressed with a bit of mayonnaise and celery, maybe some herbs, in a griddled hot dog bun. In Connecticut, though, they call that a lobster salad roll, and insist that the real deal only needs the meat to be tossed in some melted butter and perhaps seasoned a bit before stuffing into the roll.

Clearly I needed to explore both kinds. However, these 2 lunches, consisting of likely 2 of the least expensive lobster rolls in the city, set me back nearly $60 including tips. There are other lobster rolls in the city, but most if not all of them are higher-end places, including even higher price tags. That’s the thing about lobster–you don’t really find them around here, so when you buy it, you are not only paying for the lobster, you are also paying for its airfare.

Now I’ve dropped ridiculous amounts of money pursuing sandwiches for this site in the past, but frankly I’m just not inspired enough by the lobster roll to keep buying increasingly expensive restaurant versions of them. Which brings us to me seeking out live lobsters to cook, which brings us to my failure to find any, which brings us back to the beginning of this post.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone. I don’t have any live lobsters. I looked at high end groceries and fish markets, I looked at ethnic places, I even stopped by the New England Seafood Company, who had a tank full of live lobsters but told me they weren’t selling them anymore. (They’d have made me a sandwich, and it likely would have been a good one, but by that time I was a man on a mission. I’ll stop by again sometime and give them a shot though, they were definitely nice enough about it)

All I could find was lobster tails. $30 worth of lobster tails is probably enough for a couple of sandwiches, right?

I took a cue from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and used skewers to keep them from curling up when they cooked, but I just steamed them rather than the steam-then-roast method he recommends. It’s really quite a transformation once they’re cooked.

I don’t know though if it’s because I steamed it too hard/too long (8 minutes) or if I just don’t know the right way to get the meat out of a lobster tail, but I didn’t end up with the nice red color on the surface of the meat–those bits seemed to stay stuck to the shell. The meat was fine though, not rubbery the way overcooked shellfish can get, and I ended up with enough for 2 sandwiches.

I had tried to make my own New England style hot dog buns–I even bought a special pan for the purpose–but I didn’t get the nice soft yet firm texture I was looking for in the trials I did. However, I was able to find a commercially-produced split top hot dog bun that was close enough to what I needed. I buttered and griddled the sides of two of them and kept them ready.

For the first roll, I chopped up half the meat while still warm and fresh from the steamer, melted some butter in a pan, then tossed the meat with the butter and some chives before squeezing a little lemon juice over all and scooping the meat into a hot dog bun. I took a bit of the butter left over in the pan and drizzled it over the top before sprinkling a homemade Old Bay analog–paprika, celery salt, mustard powder, and just a touch of white pepper–over the top.

The extra butter was overkill. Delicious overkill, but unnecessary. The tail meat was cooked well, maybe not as lush as the claw meat from the Luke’s roll but all that butter makes up for a lot.

For the second roll, I chilled the remaining tails on ice before removing the meat, chopping it up, mixing it with some finely diced celery, and dressing it with a combination of mayonnaise, lemon juice, tarragon, chives, and a bit more of the homemade Old Bay seasoning. This lobster salad was stuffed into the remaining griddled hot dog bun for a lobster salad roll that exceeded my expectations.

The mild anise-like flavor of tarragon is an excellent accompaniment for the sweet meat of lobster, and the salad worked wonderfully well, with the brightness of the lemon and the crunch of the celery making the slight pungency of the chives almost an afterthought. Stuffed into the warm, buttery griddled roll, it presented complementary flavors and textures and I wish I’d had enough lobster meat to make a half dozen more.

Not enough to actually go out and spend $100 on lobster though. It’s Memorial Day, and instead of preordering those live lobsters from Mariano’s, I’m smoking some brined chicken thighs and giardiniera sausages, home-cured bacon and a big pork butt. I’m making pasta salads and Waldorf salads and jello salads and eating potato chips by the handful. I’m going to do yardwork–well, I’m going to supervise yardwork, that’s what teenage boys are for–and I’ll have a glass of bourbon in my hand, a smile on my face, and my family by my side. I hope that each of you is having as wonderful a holiday weekend as I am, though the law of averages makes that unlikely. Fire up those grills, cook what you have, where you are, and make it delicious.