Local California Spiny Lobsters!

This is reflecting back on a delivery we got from Haworth Fish back on October 10.

Connor from Haworth Fish called to say that he’d be arriving soon, and a while later pulled into our driveway in his big truck. He thoughtfully asked us how we were planning on preparing the lobster, and asked if we wanted him to show us how to separate the tail from the body and clean it.

Of course, we really wanted to learn! He showed how we could use a towel to - “and this is the kind of gruesome part” he said - twist the tail and body in opposite directions to separate them.

Then he showed a really cool trick. By using one of the antennae, which have a serrated edge with pointy bits pointing in one direction, you can insert the antenna in the “multi-purpose hole” (!), and then when you pull it out, the little pointy bits grab on to the intestinal tract and you can pull it out in one motion.

And here were our four lobsters. We bought them at $20 each, but I saw their price has since risen to $24 and then to $25 each.

Each one weighed about a pound plus some.

Now, the twisting apart task was SO difficult! Not only are the body and tail firmly attached to one another, the lobster is also jumping and resisting. There was one particularly feisty one. You really feel like you are killing a living creature with your bare hands!

In the future, I might give an extra tip on top of our tip to Connor to just pull the four apart for me!

So to prepare the lobster, we tried three different methods. The one on the left is boiled. We boiled a bit too long, so it lost a lot of flavor. The one on the right is broiled. The parchment paper it was on actually caught on fire, and perhaps because of that this had a (rather nice) smoky flavor. But it was a bit tough.

The best preparation method I thought, were the ones that were steamed. They had that nice marine flavor, and the texture was good.

We had our lobster together with white corn from our Yasukochi Farms CSA box. A very late summery meal!

Here’s what the lobster meat looked like, removed from the shell.

So what makes California spiny lobsters different from Maine lobsters, are that these don’t have claws. But, there’s still a lot of meat in the bodies, and the spiny legs have some very tasty meat - the salt water seems to penetrate the legs the most, so they taste especially well seasoned.