From the Cove shop
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
Once your lobster is cooked and cooled, preparing it is simple and rather satisfying. Whether you want elegant halves for a platter or all the meat picked out for a recipe, here is how to split a lobster cleanly, remove the few inedible bits, and get every last piece of that sweet tail and claw meat.
Seafood guide
A simple route through buying, storing, cooking and serving seafood at home without making the page feel busy.
Prepare a Cooked Lobster is here to make seafood feel easier at home: what to buy, how to handle it, and how to cook it with confidence.
Start with seafood that looks and smells fresh, then keep the plan simple. Good fish, shellfish and coastal ingredients do not need a complicated route to the plate.
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
Keep seafood chilled, unpack it when you get home, and cook it while it is at its best. A calm kitchen starts with good storage.
Use gentle heat, short timings and a little patience. Most seafood rewards simple cooking more than heavy sauces or overworked methods.
Serve seafood with clean flavours, enough time to rest, and a little confidence. Lemon, herbs, butter, good bread or a simple salad often do the job beautifully.
Read straight through, or use the seafood notes above to keep buying, cooking and serving simple.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
