The Yankee Kitchen: How to Crack Open a Lobster

Yankee Magazine Lifestyle Editor Amy Traverso shows you how to crack open a lobster. It’s a messy job, but its well worth the work! Enjoy! Hi, I’m Amy Traverso, Lifestyle Editor at Yankee Magazine, and today I’m going to show you how to take the meat out of a lobster. It’s kind of a messy job, but you get some really great eats out of this. So here’s how you start. You take the tail off. So you just rip it off. It’s really easy. And then you want to take the arms and the claws off. So you take those, and you pull them off there. Now this part, some people like to eat, like to sort of get every piece of meat off of this. Some eat the middle. I don’t, so I’m just going to set that aside. Okay. Now we’ve got our tail. The way to get the meat out of the tail is to first take off these little fins. Okay. So now you’ve got your tail. You want to get all that meat out of there, ideally in one piece. So I’m just kind of twisting it around a little to loosen the meat in there. Now that I’ve made a little hole where the little flippers used to be, you can sort of just stick your finger in and push it right out. It came out really clean, and that’s a nice lobster tail. So that you can set aside. Actually, I’m going to put my meat in this bowl. Okay. Now you take off the legs and the claws, and these you really need a tool. The first part I could do with my hands. This is just a matter of kind of breaking the shell so that you can reach in and get out the meat. There’s a little bit. This was a small lobster, so I’m not going to get a lot out of here. There’s a little piece. You’ll get a lot more out of the claws. All right. So now I’ve got the meat out of here. The claws are pretty easy. They tend to be harder, and the meat tends to comes out easily because it’s just kind of a smooth flat shell. You can just pull off the elastic bands or cut them with scissors. So you take off the bottom piece here and you’ll get a nice little tiny piece like that. If it’s a big lobster, you’ll get a big piece. Now you use your cracker again, and just kind of break the shell. I try to be gentle when I’m doing that because I do like to get the meat all in one piece. And that is all you need to do to get all the meat out of a lobster, and now you can do it like a pro.