Day 9: The Lobster Is Alive

Today's lesson was: Shellfish Fabrication. As a summary up front we learned how to fabricate fish, squid, shrimp, muscles, clams and lobster. It was pretty cool learning the different techniques and I am now able to break into any shelled fish. After fabricating and cleaning everything we made a shellfish soup. We did so by combing the fish stock from yesterday, a shellfish stock we made today, veggies, wine, water, herbs, crushed tomatoes and all of the shellfish that we cleaned. When it was complete it was so delicious, flavorful and filled with a ton of expensive and fancy fish.

Meet Fred

Now to the fun part. 4 hours before the soup was ready, we were taught how to fabricate the lobster.  The chef began the demonstration on how to kill a lobster. Now for some reason in my mind I was thinking 'of course we will not be individually fabricating a lobster'. As that thought came to my mind chef told us all to go grab a lobster. A live, fresh, moving lobster.  I walked over to the fridge and grabbed a lobster, who I will refer to as Fred. Fred rests on my pan with his claws rubber banned together. Chef instructed us to kill our lobster, since cutting his head off is less torturous than sticking Fred in boiling water, OH. Meanwhile Fred is looking at me in the face and flailing his skinny legs around and I am supposed to kill him. I finally build up the courage and do as I am told. I will spare you all of the details but first thing the head comes off. I am freaking out but happy the worst is over. Fake out, the tail and the legs are still flailing around. They continue to release adrenaline for a few minutes after their death causing them to move around. This makes it a bit tricky to remove his tail since it is still moving.   I flinched as the tail flapped at me while I was trying to remove it.  Finally I have a fabricated lobster who from the naked eye looks alive. I am certain this will be the most traumatizing experience of culinary school but knowing that I could tackle this task was pretty rewarding.

Meet Fred's Friends