The full guide
Read straight through, or use the seafood notes above to keep buying, cooking and serving simple.
How to Prepare a Cooked Lobster
A guide to cleaning & preparing a lobster for a lobster salad and removing lobster meat for a recipe including how to use a lobster pick.
Whether you have caught or bought a live lobster and cooked it or whether you have bought a pre-cooked lobster, the next stage is to prepare it for eating.
Important: If your lobster is still alive, please follow these instructions to cook it before following the guidance on this page to prepare it for eating:
How to Cook a Live Lobster
Once your lobster is cooked, using tools like those below, you can either prepare it so that you end up with half lobsters to serve with salad or you can remove all of the meat to use for a recipe.
Seafood Tools
Seafood tools specially designed to get in to the awkward areas of the lobster make preparing and eating shellfish a lot easier. We have a full range of seafood utensils in our cook shop including seafood forks, crab and lobster crackers and shellfish tools kits.
How to prepare a lobster for a salad or platter
It is necessary to cut the lobster in half first - this is easier if you turn the lobster on its back first. Cut down the centre of the lobster applying quite a lot of pressure in order to cut the shell.
You should then remove the bits of the lobster that are not edible, for example the gills, before cleaning the lobster ready to serve. Full instructions on how to clean and prepare a lobster for a salad or platter are detailed in the video.
How to remove the meat from a lobster for a recipe
If you wish to carry on and remove the lobster meat from the shell so that it can be used in a recipe then follow the instructions in this video. These are instructions on how to pick the meat out of a lobster shell and assume that you have viewed the above video first.
Kitchen kit for this guide
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
Common questions
- How do you split a cooked lobster in half?
- Turn the lobster on its back, then cut down the centre with firm pressure to cut through the shell, opening it into two neat halves.
- Which parts of a lobster do you remove?
- Take out the gills and the small stomach sac near the head, and the dark intestinal tract running along the tail. Keep all the tail and claw meat.
- How do you get the meat out of the claws?
- Crack the claws with a cracker, then use a lobster pick to draw the meat out in one piece.
- Should I prepare lobster for a salad or a recipe?
- For a platter or salad, leave it in tidy halves. For a recipe, pick all the tail, claw and leg meat out into a bowl ready to use.
- What tools help with a cooked lobster?
- A sharp knife, a lobster or crab cracker and a lobster pick make it easy — all available in our cook shop.
