Tasting an oyster a few weeks ago, my friend Greg went into a state of rapture. He lifted, slurped, chewed and swallowed before slapping his hand on the table, declaring, not without a bit of theater, “That, my friends, was as if King Neptune him-self rose from the deep and gave me a big, fat kiss on the lips!”
I thought of him later when, sitting at a wooden picnic table in New Hampshire, friends brought lobster plucked from Maine’s Casco Bay that morning. We steamed it in a lobster pot and served it in a great pile in the middle of the table. Then, accompanied by nothing but bowls of melted butter, we began our attack.
I popped the tail off, pushed the flesh out, noted the slight hint of translucence, and sank my teeth in, and one bite was all I needed. The flesh was just firm, the butter ran down my chin and Neptune re-emerged for his kiss. Despite a lifetime appreciation for Homard americanus, this was without question the best lobster I’d ever eaten. So good, in fact, I had two and vowed to head up to Maine to speak with a chef and a lobsterman to get their takes on achieving this level of perfection.
Chef Sam Hayward has been on my radar for years. His restaurant, Portland’s Fore Street Grill, is generally considered Maine’s best, and rightfully so; most everything he serves is wood-oven roasted, pan seared or raw, preparations that give little leeway to poor product.
“Lobster,” said Hayward, “was one of the first foods I associated with Maine, and that increased the lure of coming here from upstate New York in 1977.” (He still defers to the natives, but borrows their parlance, saying, “I’m from away.”)
His favorite recent preparation involved partially cooking the lobster to loosen the meat from the shell, then when an order came in, dipping the meat in a butter emulsion, and roasting it over the wood oven’s coals for a heartbeat. “We’re always trying to keep the meat as lubricious as we can,” he said, “kind of like John Boehner.”
“Problem was, we couldn’t pull it off. Turn your back on it in that oven,” he explained, lamenting their 800- to 900-degree Fahrenheit heater in a restaurant that serves close to 300 people on a busy night, “and it’s gone.”
This week, they were dipping the meat in a bouillon laden with lobster stock (much of the flavor in lobsters comes from their membranes, fluids and the shell of the animal), creating a finished product that hits the holiest of holies for chefs, a concentration of the thing itself.
The next morning, I headed up the coast to meet lobsterman Ben Taisey in South Freeport. Taisey, 25, began crewing with his cousin when he was eight, got his commercial license when he was 18, and completed a refit of his 1974 wood and fiberglass lobster boat with his father and a woodworker friend in 2009. The perfect lobster I’d tasted in New Hampshire came from him.
On this day in Casco Bay, he was hauling and resetting about 400 of his 800 traps, which he keeps strung together in sets of 10 between chartreuse and white buoys.
One by one, he hauled the traps to the surface with a winch mounted below a steering wheel, emptied them of their crustaceans and re-baited them with a savory mix of a redfish carcass and two whole porgies.
“Everyday, you go home and stink something fierce,” said sternman Justin Corliss, whose hands-free smoking style would leave French crooner Serge Gainsbourg slack-jawed with appreciation.
With each lobster he pulled from the cage, Taisey measured the length from the back of the eye socket to the space where the shell meets the tail (technically, the lobster’s abdomen) with an “I”-shaped brass gauge. Anything shorter than 3¼ inches (about 1¼ pounds) or more than 5 inches (3-4 pounds) was unceremoniously flipped back into the drink.
With the classic rock strains of 102.9 WBLM (One. Hundred. Thousand. Watts. Of. Power!) in the background, Taisey also checked the tail for eggs, aka ‘berries.’ All berried females were returned to the water after making sure the tail has been notched, identifying her as a productive female and forever keeping her out of the live well.
Any keepers were placed in a small wooden box until the men reach the end of the line, after which Corliss used a tool that resembles a pair of pliers to put a “Lobsters from Maine — U.S.A. Wild” rubber band around their front claws (his smoking method is handy here), before dropping them into a PVC tube that leads to the live well.
Watching them haul is a short study in work ethic. Hands find the tools they need to work without needing to look. Hands and feet become the tools themselves. They could do their work in the dark and most of their communication can be done without a word.
“The old timers don’t like newcomers much but you keep your head down and try to be fair. People will keep shorts [undersized lobsters] or scrape the eggs off to sell them, but you’re really kind of screwing yourself,” said Taisey. He recognizes and respects the law and the need for sustainability without turning it into a credo or talking point.
“We’re basically raising them for seven or eight years until we can keep ’em,” he said, gesturing toward the other lobster boats and the thousands of buoys out here near Upper Green and Little French islands. “As long as everybody does it, they’ll sustain themselves. It’s like farming, just out on the ocean.”
Back on dry land, I speak with Kate Burns at Portland’s Gulf of Maine Research Institute, or GMRI, to get her take on what’s working.
“It’s hugely competitive in Maine — we land a lot of lobsters and the lobstermen’s livelihoods can become precarious when prices dip,” she said.
Along with the size limits and tail notching which Burns calls critical for building stock, one of Maine’s biggest lobster successes has been the 1995 creation of managed zones that give fishermen a degree of self-regulating autonomy, allowing them to better react to everything from bait availability to supply chain concerns. It also makes them the masters of their own fate.
Burns gave the example of an experiment conducted between 2009 and 2010, when Monhegan Island lobstermen agreed to cut back on the amount of traps they used to see if they would still catch the same amount of lobster. Not only were they able to pull in a nearly-identical haul, but they also cut labor, bait and fuel costs.
Now, the GMRI wants to work on the supply chain.
“There’s a 20 percent mortality between the boat and your plate,” Burns said, a quiet reminder that nobody buys a dead lobster, “but if you could eliminate that mortality, lobstermen could work 20 percent less.”
Back at Fore Street Grill, a friend and I sat down for dinner and, simply by ordering six Maine oysters on the half shell, we summoned King Neptune from the deep, though he was here for bigger game.
The lobster arrived, fresh from its dip in the court bouillon, flanked by corn pudding and chanterelles. There was also a side of garlic mashed potatoes, which seemed to follow a near one-to-one spud-to-butter ratio — a quiet masterpiece forced to play second fiddle to the lobster.
My friend took her first bite.
“Is this a game changer?” I asked.
“What was the game?” she responded, distracted.
A moment went by and she came back, realizing what I meant.
“Yes. It’s a game changer.”
A few more seconds went by and she took another bite.
“It’s a whole new game.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
I thought of him later when, sitting at a wooden picnic table in New Hampshire, friends brought lobster plucked from Maine’s Casco Bay that morning. We steamed it in a lobster pot and served it in a great pile in the middle of the table. Then, accompanied by nothing but bowls of melted butter, we began our attack.
I popped the tail off, pushed the flesh out, noted the slight hint of translucence, and sank my teeth in, and one bite was all I needed. The flesh was just firm, the butter ran down my chin and Neptune re-emerged for his kiss. Despite a lifetime appreciation for Homard americanus, this was without question the best lobster I’d ever eaten. So good, in fact, I had two and vowed to head up to Maine to speak with a chef and a lobsterman to get their takes on achieving this level of perfection.
Chef Sam Hayward has been on my radar for years. His restaurant, Portland’s Fore Street Grill, is generally considered Maine’s best, and rightfully so; most everything he serves is wood-oven roasted, pan seared or raw, preparations that give little leeway to poor product.
“Lobster,” said Hayward, “was one of the first foods I associated with Maine, and that increased the lure of coming here from upstate New York in 1977.” (He still defers to the natives, but borrows their parlance, saying, “I’m from away.”)
His favorite recent preparation involved partially cooking the lobster to loosen the meat from the shell, then when an order came in, dipping the meat in a butter emulsion, and roasting it over the wood oven’s coals for a heartbeat. “We’re always trying to keep the meat as lubricious as we can,” he said, “kind of like John Boehner.”
“Problem was, we couldn’t pull it off. Turn your back on it in that oven,” he explained, lamenting their 800- to 900-degree Fahrenheit heater in a restaurant that serves close to 300 people on a busy night, “and it’s gone.”
This week, they were dipping the meat in a bouillon laden with lobster stock (much of the flavor in lobsters comes from their membranes, fluids and the shell of the animal), creating a finished product that hits the holiest of holies for chefs, a concentration of the thing itself.
The next morning, I headed up the coast to meet lobsterman Ben Taisey in South Freeport. Taisey, 25, began crewing with his cousin when he was eight, got his commercial license when he was 18, and completed a refit of his 1974 wood and fiberglass lobster boat with his father and a woodworker friend in 2009. The perfect lobster I’d tasted in New Hampshire came from him.
On this day in Casco Bay, he was hauling and resetting about 400 of his 800 traps, which he keeps strung together in sets of 10 between chartreuse and white buoys.
One by one, he hauled the traps to the surface with a winch mounted below a steering wheel, emptied them of their crustaceans and re-baited them with a savory mix of a redfish carcass and two whole porgies.
“Everyday, you go home and stink something fierce,” said sternman Justin Corliss, whose hands-free smoking style would leave French crooner Serge Gainsbourg slack-jawed with appreciation.
With each lobster he pulled from the cage, Taisey measured the length from the back of the eye socket to the space where the shell meets the tail (technically, the lobster’s abdomen) with an “I”-shaped brass gauge. Anything shorter than 3¼ inches (about 1¼ pounds) or more than 5 inches (3-4 pounds) was unceremoniously flipped back into the drink.
With the classic rock strains of 102.9 WBLM (One. Hundred. Thousand. Watts. Of. Power!) in the background, Taisey also checked the tail for eggs, aka ‘berries.’ All berried females were returned to the water after making sure the tail has been notched, identifying her as a productive female and forever keeping her out of the live well.
Any keepers were placed in a small wooden box until the men reach the end of the line, after which Corliss used a tool that resembles a pair of pliers to put a “Lobsters from Maine — U.S.A. Wild” rubber band around their front claws (his smoking method is handy here), before dropping them into a PVC tube that leads to the live well.
Watching them haul is a short study in work ethic. Hands find the tools they need to work without needing to look. Hands and feet become the tools themselves. They could do their work in the dark and most of their communication can be done without a word.
“The old timers don’t like newcomers much but you keep your head down and try to be fair. People will keep shorts [undersized lobsters] or scrape the eggs off to sell them, but you’re really kind of screwing yourself,” said Taisey. He recognizes and respects the law and the need for sustainability without turning it into a credo or talking point.
“We’re basically raising them for seven or eight years until we can keep ’em,” he said, gesturing toward the other lobster boats and the thousands of buoys out here near Upper Green and Little French islands. “As long as everybody does it, they’ll sustain themselves. It’s like farming, just out on the ocean.”
Back on dry land, I speak with Kate Burns at Portland’s Gulf of Maine Research Institute, or GMRI, to get her take on what’s working.
“It’s hugely competitive in Maine — we land a lot of lobsters and the lobstermen’s livelihoods can become precarious when prices dip,” she said.
Along with the size limits and tail notching which Burns calls critical for building stock, one of Maine’s biggest lobster successes has been the 1995 creation of managed zones that give fishermen a degree of self-regulating autonomy, allowing them to better react to everything from bait availability to supply chain concerns. It also makes them the masters of their own fate.
Burns gave the example of an experiment conducted between 2009 and 2010, when Monhegan Island lobstermen agreed to cut back on the amount of traps they used to see if they would still catch the same amount of lobster. Not only were they able to pull in a nearly-identical haul, but they also cut labor, bait and fuel costs.
Now, the GMRI wants to work on the supply chain.
“There’s a 20 percent mortality between the boat and your plate,” Burns said, a quiet reminder that nobody buys a dead lobster, “but if you could eliminate that mortality, lobstermen could work 20 percent less.”
Back at Fore Street Grill, a friend and I sat down for dinner and, simply by ordering six Maine oysters on the half shell, we summoned King Neptune from the deep, though he was here for bigger game.
The lobster arrived, fresh from its dip in the court bouillon, flanked by corn pudding and chanterelles. There was also a side of garlic mashed potatoes, which seemed to follow a near one-to-one spud-to-butter ratio — a quiet masterpiece forced to play second fiddle to the lobster.
My friend took her first bite.
“Is this a game changer?” I asked.
“What was the game?” she responded, distracted.
A moment went by and she came back, realizing what I meant.
“Yes. It’s a game changer.”
A few more seconds went by and she took another bite.
“It’s a whole new game.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
