Lobster Corn Chowder

So this recipe was kinda the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Every one of my friends who knows I have been working on this project has been like, “LOL pleeeeease let me be there for you having to kill a lobster in your kitchen.” We were joined for this one by my friend Cam, who was committed enough to say he’d drop everything the moment I texted him that lobster was happening.

Obviously, the main Item Quest here was the lobster. We searched in vain, all over Columbia as well as suburban Indianapolis when we were visiting there, for a place to buy “3 1-½ lb lobsters, cracked and split” but I guess that’s something you can only buy in the fairytale land of The Hamptons. Having someone else kill, crack, and split the lobster for this would seriously remove like 99% of the work. To have someone that would be willing to do it - even for money - is something you can only get if you’re rich enough to live in that New England fairytale land. The one place we can usually count on to get us uncommon seafood products is our beloved local butcher, Ole Timey Meats. We called them to special order it, and they had it in for us a couple of days later. A 90 degree Saturday in June? PERFECT. Let’s make soup!

Even the butcher said he wasn’t fond of the process of killing lobster, and had only done so himself once or twice. I texted my culinary queen, Merra, to let her know that I was about to be living the real life version of this YouTube video we were obsessed with in high school. She told me about her own crustacean experience, driving home live crab in the back of her car, and we experienced similar clacking noises from the box in the back on the five minute drive from the butcher back to our house.

After consulting a website devoted to lobster from Maine regarding how long to boil this thing, we got our salted water to a rolling boil and then:

This literally looks like me after a 30 minute run without sunscreen on.

I didn’t mean to be such a wimp, but I honestly would have dropped it if I had had to pick it up with my bare hands. Thank goodness for my fearless sous chef. Once we drained it and ran cold water over it, I got out my big bowl for the shell and my cutting board and set to work on the cracking/splitting/shelling process, with Dan reading me instructions from the internet. I was also doing this wearing the black rubber gloves Dan uses for when he is working on cars.

Getting all the meat out of it wasn’t all that terrible, especially not compared to the process of gutting salmon, which I have been doing since I was a kid in Alaska. We were repeatedly Googling pictures of the insides of lobster though, to find out if various bits were edible and how to tell which parts were the gills and such. Eventually I ended up with my bowl of lobster meat, and another large bowl of lobster shells and juice. (Why can’t you buy lobster juice if you can buy clam juice?)

Onto the stock-making process! Ina swears that making your own lobster stock is *essential*. I peeled the corn (I know it is called shucking, as I learned that on my first day of college in Indiana when a born-and-raised Midwesterner laughed at me, but it really seems more like peeling), and what I found underneath was the vegetable representation of a member of an ‘80s hair band:

And then once I got all of the corn off of there, I set it aside and made the stock. The stock required an ingredient called “cream sherry”, which I had never heard of. We looked for it at the grocery store, but were informed that its alcohol content is too high to be sold in the store with the rest of the beer and wine - we had to go to a liquor store. We went to the one closest to the Trader Joe’s here in Columbia, and having been there once before, I gave Dan a head’s up that it is an...interesting experience. He thought I was just being extra, but it lived up to all that I promised it would be: a super old Korean lady with all of her hair in curlers dug out a bottle of cream sherry from someplace in the store we never would have looked. When she rang us up, she just started at Dan for a full minute and said, “Wow...so handsome.” And then we left.

When the stock was done, we strained it to get all the chunks of lobster shell out and then added it to the rest of the vegetables that were cooking in butter and bacon fat in the Dutch oven. Once everything was heated, we added the lobster meat chunks and dug in.

Despite his Connecticut upbringing, Dan wasn’t the biggest fan of this. I think in general he just doesn’t love lobster (I knowwww) but I’m wondering if there’s any difference in taste between lobster caught in Charleston vs lobster caught further north. As a general rule, since moving south I have noticed that cold water/water quality improves lots of things - coffee, beer, bread texture, fish, etc. Between the two of us and and our respective hometowns, we have both experienced the best of all of those things. I may have to try this again with Maine lobster and see if it tastes any different. Ina insists that the cream sherry gives the chowder a necessary “edge” but I think if I were making chowder again, I would maybe do without the addition of it at the end. The sweet wine flavor was strange to me with the dairy-heavy soup and briny lobster taste.

Ultimately, the best thing about this soup was the process of making it and learning that, aside from boiling a creature alive (nbd, right?), it’s actually pretty easy. The worst part was eating leftovers of it before playing in a hockey game. Usually our northern foods mix well with our northern people activities. Not this time. This is strictly a night-in, pajamas-on kind of food. Not that Ina would know - I doubt she lounges in pajamas at home, and I know FOR SURE she has never played hockey. That would be a sight to behold.