Hi, I’m Chef Todd Gray. Today, I’m showing you how to prepare seared lobster tails with Thai chili coleslaw. Let’s get started.
Let’s first prepare our coleslaw by placing some of our shredded cabbage into a small mixing bowl, fresh lime juice. Take a fresh lime. Cut in half. Squeeze some of that juice into the cabbage, some fresh cilantro. Usually the leaves whole or tear them actually they are called plushest, tear some of the cilantro, plushest off of the stem. Finally, a good Thai chili peanut sauce, I don’t want to put too much, just enough to dress the coleslaw. Let’s mix this.
Now, I’m going to add some seasoning, just put a little bit of our sea salt, a little of our fresh cracked pepper and let’s mix that well. Let’s say we have about a cup and a half of our coleslaw. So, now our coleslaw is ready. Place on the side so we can start to split our lobster tails.
Here I have some wonderful lobster tails I’ve gone from Harry’s theater, beautiful, Maine lobster tails, about one and a half pound of lobsters. When we’re buying lobsters we always want to inspect them being sure that they have a good, clean aroma, a smell of the sea, nice and moist, good dark shell with no damaged spots.
Let’s go ahead and start by splitting our lobster tails being sure we have a good, sharp knife. Be sure that the lobster tail is firm on our cutting board. It was not moving around and carefully holding the back of the lobster tail and put the knife on the top of the shell, make an incision and get straight down from all the way to the shell, turning our tail around and finishing cutting to the back side of the tail.
When we open our lobster tail, you can keep them intact. Now, that we’ve completed the splitting process, let’s place them onto a plate and take them all to the range and begin the cooking process. So now, let’s begin to sear our lobster tails. We’ve got a nice even heated pan on about high medium high heat. We’ve got a touch of some olive oil to the pan. We need to season our lobster tails with a touch of our sea salt, our fresh cracked black pepper.
Let’s place this on another pan, shell side up. What I like about cooking lobsters this way is that we’re able to actually roast the lobster in the shell with other couple of things. We get a good sear on the lobster meat but yet the shell protects the meat from overcooking and ensures us that the meat is nice and moist.
Now, we don’t need to cook this for more than about a minute or so as you can see our shell is starting to turn that bright red that we associate with properly cooked lobster. We are going to continue to cook it on the back side, cook it on the shell side just to get the heat from the other side of the lobster, very nice. You see how our meat is nice and cooked on the edges.
You don’t see any opaqueness which indicates that the meat is too under cooked. One thing we don’t want to overcook our seafood because as it sits in the shell, as we plate our coleslaw, the lobsters continue to cook so I kind of want to turn our heat off and let the lobster finish in the pan.
Now, it’s time for our final plate up. Let’s take some of our butter lettuce, taking some of the interior leaves and almost have a cup shape to them. We’ll place this on our dish, fanning out a couple of pieces here and then take some of our Thai peanut coleslaw so that up in the center of the cup, giving our lobster a nice base stand-on. We’ll take this lobster meat puffs right out of the shell nicely, one tail.
Let’s bring the other half off of the shell, just lay them on the top pouring in opposite directions and then finally, taking some of our peanut sauce just to finish drizzling over the top and around for nice presentation and there you have it, seared lobster tails with a Thai chili coleslaw, beautiful, great winner dish. Enjoy.
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