Our friends from out of town visit and we decide to pull out all the stops and make drunken lobster pasta.
Sake Lobster Recipe:
3 Live and hearty lobsters
A huge, cheap bottle of unfiltered sake (reserve 1/3rd cup for sous viding)
1 tablespoon white miso
1 tablespoon of scallions
a dash of sea salt
Pasta:
Use your favorite homemade recipe or store bought tagliatelle.
Lobster Liver Sauce:
All the livers from the head of your lobsters
2 Tablespoons of DaRosario black truffle butter
1 Tablespoon of lobster broth
A pinch of sea salt
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Scallion Olive Oil Coulis:
1/3rd cup of chopped scallions
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
We schlep to Chinatown to buy our lobsters and are rewarded with free scallions from the nice fishmonger. When we get home our three lobsters immediately get a wash in cold water. Then, we immerse them in unfiltered sake in a snug container. Next, we mix a handful of chopped scallions with olive oil with an immersion blender, we set the coulis aside as our finishing sauc
Our friend, supermodel and physicist Danielle, assists to roll out the pasta dough and cut it into shape. It takes finesse to catch the pasta when it comes out of the machine, you have to approach the freshly formed shape like a fainting baby, let it fall evenly into your hands and then rest it gently on a flat floured surface.
My secret hope is that killing a drunk lobster is more humane than killing a sober one (probably not though, sorry lobsters). Either way, after eight hours of soaking, we use a sharp knife to quickly sever the lobster's heads from their tails and that kills them instantly.
We will only sous vide the tail. The head and claws are reserved to be boiled and we'll use the broth to loosen up the liver sauce.
Use a pair of scissors to cut down the belly of the tail until you reach the end flippers. If the tail moves, SCREAM, but relax, it's just muscle memory--- the lobster is dead. Pull the meat out by massaging your thumb along the shell with a lot of pressure to get the meat out. Take your time.
Reserve the lobster livers in a separate bowl and remove the clear intestines. Clean up immediately, or else the clear lobster blood will coagulate and turn into something we've dubbed "sea glue" (which will be super hard to remove).
Lobster tail, scallions, sake, salt, and miso in a bag for sous vide.
We vacuum seal our lobster tails in with sake, miso, sea salt, and scallions. It goes into the sous vide at 59.5°C for 15 minutes.
We use real truffle butter in the liver sauce.
Meat Jacuzzi's temp flux'd b/c we put our bag in.
While the tails go vide, we simultaneously do the following three actions: make the liver sauce, boil the other half of the lobster, and cook our pasta.
All of the livers are put into a small saucepan with two tablespoons of DaRosario's Black Truffle Butter. We whisk the sauce with a spoon until the butter melts and it's uniform. Next, we put in a touch of our lobster stock (more like lobster water) from our boiled lobsters to thin out the sauce a little. Finally, we add salt and pepper. Our fresh pasta is thrown into boiling salted water for two minutes, we stir and strain. We portion the pasta into bowls and immediately spoon the truffled liver sauce on top.
Our sous vided lobster tails are firm but lightly springy to the touch. We give the meat a quick run under the knife and distribute them into the pasta bowls and toss.
Roughly chop the lobster tail after taking it out of the sous vide.
Finally, we drizzle our scallion oil on top and serve! In the picture below the coulis is already mixed in and we garnish lightly with chopped raw scallions.
The result from all of our hard-work is mind-blowing. I had really bad memories of laboriously chewing on overcooked (expensive) lobster and this dish eradicated all of them from my mind. The lobster meat had a very complex sweet flavor and it's texture was as delicate as a grape. We all inhaled our plates and we don't think our guests, Danielle and Sam, minded the wait.
Done and yum.
