When you’re shelling out for lobster, expert hands help - Sydney Morning Herald
Do you know your eastern rock from your southern and western? Could you kill one at home, in a pot of boiling water? And why do some taste magnificent and others bland and awful? A search for answers about a Christmas classic.
Eastern rock lobsters – 180 tonnes are fished yearly. When China imposed trade sanctions on imports of live Australian lobsters in late 2020, the southern and western fisheries were brought to their knees. Credit:Jennifer Soo
I'm driving through inner-Sydney streets with a body in the boot of my car and I have a plan to murder it when I get home. It is squirming in its dark captivity and I'm squirming, too. I'm starting to doubt I have the courage to carry out my plan. I suspect the Sydney Fish Market sales assistant who pulled the live southern rock lobster out of a tank for me had doubts as well. She gave me a look. "Lady, you're biting off more than you can chew," it seemed to say. "You're not the woman for this job." Or perhaps: "Can I show you some nice fillets of flake instead?"
I asked her if I could touch the lobster. I was following instructions: to gauge the meat content, I'd been told I should squeeze the lobster's carapace (the body shell from eyes to start of tail) above the legs. It should be rigid. The assistant held out the lobster and its antennae twitched and legs cycled and tail flapped, and I put my hand on either side of its carapace and squeezed for a fraction of a second before jerking my hand back as if I'd just accidentally brushed up against a huntsman spider. Quivering inside, I asked her to turn the lobster over so I could see its underside. I'd been instructed to ensure that the exposed area between where the carapace shell ends and the tail shell starts was plump and glistening.
"Yes," I said, "I'll take it." This was a departure from the instructions: I should have asked for one or more other lobsters to be fished from the tanks as points of comparison. Was my lobster's carapace sufficiently rigid and its belly sufficiently plump and glistening? Were there better lobsters there? I had no idea, but I didn't have it in me to ask to see more. I wanted to run. I wanted to be somewhere else, perhaps at a table in a smart restaurant where a chef might whip up a lobster dish in the kitchen, and I'd be sipping champagne and not thinking about all the murderous goings-on behind the scenes.
My lobster is flopping around now on the scales. The numbers flash up: its 990 grams will cost me $108.89. Recalculating based on the edible portion of the creature – it will yield in the order of 330 grams of tail flesh – my purchase is $326.67 per kilogram.
Really, not much more than one protein portion for one meal (setting aside the potential for a second dish, based on lobster stock, and it would be a crime of the highest order not to make lobster stock if you buy a lobster). With $326.67, I could buy 25 kilograms of beef mince or chicken thighs. I could buy 102 kilograms of lentils. I could feed an Australian family of four for a fortnight. I could feed an Uttar Pradesh village for a year.
Driving home, I have three passengers: an iced, live lobster in a cold bag which I need to murder, my guilty, great big fat privilege, and a gutful of city-girl fear. I have never even caught a fish, never even had to pull a hook from a flapping fish's mouth. I'm out of my depth.
In 2021, when the news was full of stories about COVID-19 and the China trade sanctions on Australian lobster and people were chattering about cheap prices, I saw a row of cooked pinky-orange western rock lobsters sitting perkily on ice at the fish markets, priced at $35 each, and thought, "Bargain!"
Victorious, I carried my pre-cooked catch aloft into a family dinner. The taste: watery and mushy; in fact, even as a bit player in an old-fashioned seafood cocktail with a lively Marie Rose sauce, it was barely edible. The aftertaste: crushing disappointment and buyer's regret.
It was clear I needed to approach the purchase of a lobster with more rigour. And I still wanted an answer to the question: if the Chinese in China aren't eating our lobster, is it an affordable (and worthy) companion to an Australian Christmas table's salads and prawns and bonbons?
Sydney Fish Market guide, Alex Stollznow, can calm an agitated lobster by stroking its body from back to front.Credit:Jennifer Soo
Sydney Fish Market tour guide and seafood polymath Alex Stollznow is quick to disabuse me of the notion that cheap Australian lobster has ever been or will ever be a thing. "For the third year running this Christmas, there will be more lobsters sold and consumed in Australia because of the export ban," he tells me, "but still expect to pay a premium price for what is a premium product."
A few days before my lobster purchase, I meet Stollznow alongside a bank of tanks at the market to receive instructions. He hooks out exhibit A, an eastern rock lobster – NSW DPI lobster No. 4216281, according to its tag.
The beast is protesting, wrenched as it has been from a cosy entanglement with a cluster of comrades in a far corner of the tank – much in the way they might hang together under a reef rock shelf. "He's all arced up," Stollznow says, pointing out the spikes on the olive-brown creature's tail which, were they to close around your finger, could see you in hospital.
He doesn't remember where he learnt to hypnotise lobsters – his best guess is that a fisher taught him.
He doesn't remember where he learnt to hypnotise lobsters – his best guess is that a fisher taught him. Agitated lobsters can produce carapace vibrations which send acoustic signals through water, potentially attracting sharks. Someone diving for lobster might prefer they didn't and so, Stollznow speculates, developed a way to calm their catch.
With his right hand, Stollznow holds No. 4216281 firmly around its body and sits it on the edge of the tank. With his left hand, he strokes the creature from back to front, over its eyes. "Look," he says. Its antennae are starting to droop. Its legs have slackened. "It's in a state of catatonia. Does that look anything other than satisfied to you?"
Now he shows me why No. 4216281 will make a fine supper. "Not many crustaceans show the fullness of their meat like lobsters do," he says, squeezing its hard shell. "If there's any flexibility, there will be a better lobster in the tank." He tips it over to look at the exposed area between tail and carapace. "See how full and shiny that is; that is lovely and full."
In order to grow, all crustaceans moult, shedding their exoskeletons before gradually forming new ones. At this stage, they are "squishy" and vulnerable to predators. They hide under rock ledges and, rather than venturing forth in search of nutrition, they draw it from their own musculature. As a lobster rebuilds its shell, it can lose up to half the meat in its body.
A lobster that has not fully regained condition after the process might also have mushy flesh. It will not make a fine supper.
Stollznow drops No. 4216281 back into the tank and it drifts down through the aquamarine to the bottom. It seems confused, poor love. My guide sets off towards another outlet to introduce me to exhibit B, a southern rock lobster.
Stollznow demonstrates his method for calming lobsters, stroking them from front to back.Credit:Jennifer Soo
There are four main species in Australia – the less common tropical rock lobster (from northern Australia), the eastern (from the south-eastern coastline), the southern (predominantly from southern Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia) and the western (Western Australia). The southern and western varieties, prized in China for their red-orange-purple spectrum of shell colours when alive, previously made up the bulk of exports – a $1.6 billion live-export industry which made a lot of fisher folk very rich.
"A homonym for 'red' in Mandarin is 'prosperity' or 'good fortune'," Stollznow says, although he is of the view that the southern and eastern varieties are of equal quality. (The red-orange premium is also a factor domestically for Chinese-Australians: "The week during Lunar New Year at the fish market, any seafood that's red essentially doubles or triples in price." )
When China imposed trade sanctions on imports of live Australian lobsters in late 2020 in response to then prime minister Scott Morrison's call for an investigation into the source of the pandemic, the southern and western fisheries were brought to their knees. According to Wayne Dredge, managing director of Piscari Industries, a commercial fishing company based in Lakes Entrance in eastern Victoria, the volume of southerns being exported dropped significantly, although some are going to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
But the ban has not resulted in a lobster glut; many fishers restructured or pivoted to other catches. "The market conditions are just so bad," says Dredge, who has diverted two of his vessels to the southern shark fishery – gummy shark for fish and chips – and another to Tasmania for king crab.
Before the ban, consumers were paying about $130 a kilogram for live southern rock lobsters at Christmas. This year, it's likely to be $100 a kilogram. Eastern rock lobsters will be similarly priced.
The story of western rock lobsters is somewhat different. They are sourced in the largest lobster fishery in Australia with an annual quota of up to 7000 tonnes (compared with about 3000 tonnes for southern and 180 tonnes for eastern).
Before the ban, 95 per cent of the western rock lobster harvest was exported live to China. For Australian consumers on the east coast, it has long been almost impossible to buy a live western.
Almost all are pre-cooked and frozen which, I now know, was likely the reason the one I bought in 2021 was so atrocious – lobsters don't freeze well. (In a pricing anomaly, western rock lobsters are also sold per creature rather than per kilogram, generally between $32 and $38 for a 350-gram lobster, making them roughly equivalent in price to their eastern and southern cousins.)
At a tank in another market shop, Stollznow hauls out a southern rock lobster and strokes it to submission. He reassures me that lobsters' brief accommodation in the tanks, which hold seawater and have filtration systems, is comfortable. "If he died overnight, the rest of them are likely to as well; if the shop makes one mistake it's, like, $1000. They have a vested interest in making sure they're happy."
Stollznow takes me on a guided tour of the southern's anatomy: he points out how, in comparison to the eastern, it is stockier, with heavier legs and a smoother shell. And, unlike the dung-coloured eastern lobster, when live, the southern has a rich red-orange shell.
What a handsome beast it is, with its textured carapace, spiked dinosaur-ish tail and delicately marked swimmerets shaped like a posh lady's fan (swimmerets are pairs of swimming limbs attached to the abdomen).
Later, I discover the work of Swiss-born natural history illustrator John James Wild, who, in the late 19th century was a contributor to the Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria, or, Figures and Descriptions of the Living Species of All Classes of the Victorian Indigenous Animals. Wild's lithograph of the southern rock lobster, Jasus edwardsii, and its constituent parts is gorgeous.
Unlike its eastern counterpart, the southern rock lobster has a bright red shell when live.Credit:PIR SA
My southern rock lobster jiggles a bit as I lift the cold bag holding it in a tomb of ice from the boot of my car and carry it into my kitchen. It's easy for carnivores to delude themselves about what exactly it is they're eating when the killing is done out of sight, when the protein comes into view presented on a plastic tray or restaurant plate. "Lobsters talk to each other, you know," a friend said when I told her I was working on this article.
I'm thinking about lobsters talking to each other as I prepare the ice bath that will knock mine out. The freezing slurry will anaesthetise my lobster so it no longer feels stimuli. In a large, wide stainless-steel bowl, I mix a litre of tap water, 50 grams of table salt and a couple of trays of crushed ice cubes to create a chunky, icy mix (the consistency of "wet cement" is considered ideal). "The addition of salt lowers the freezing point of water by at least one degree, and every degree matters," Stollznow had told me.
I'm thinking about lobsters talking to each other as I prepare the ice bath that will knock mine out.
Gingerly, I open the cold bag. I expect flashing claws and fighting spirit but my lobster offers no resistance as I lift it into the slurry. Stollznow's instructions: "Leave it in there for at least 10 minutes – it's not cruel, it puts it to sleep – and relative to how every other lobster meets its maker, it's incredibly gentle; normally, they get gnashed to death in a shark or a crab's teeth."
For maybe a minute the lobster moves sluggishly in the ice, antennae and legs making small waving movements as if to say goodbye. I tip a few more ice cubes in, just in case, and it bucks, a last protest. I am killing an animal on my kitchen bench and am not at all at ease with myself.
But if I can move past the issue of killing an animal to eat, I should be reasonably comfortable with my decision. Australian lobster fisheries are tightly controlled and sustainable. "When you're buying local product, hand on heart, they're all managed fisheries, there are quota allocations for each," says Erik Poole, innovation and technical manager at the Sydney Fish Market.
And, adds Stollznow, the eastern rock lobster is "one of the few individually managed species on earth". Every lobster caught in NSW waters must be tagged; the tag records a range of data including the fisher's details and where the creature was caught, and the system is designed to prevent a black-market trade.
"We have an obligation to eat as many different things as possible – when you over-depend on a small number of creatures you get monocultures."
Stollznow, a man who likes to spend his weekends on a kayak on the Hawkesbury River north-west of Sydney, fishing and then cooking his catch over a fire, has a straightforward view on eating lobster. "If their numbers are healthy and we're not causing them undue harm in harvesting them, we should do so. We have an obligation to eat as many different things as possible – when you over-depend on a small number of creatures you get monocultures."
Wayne Dredge explains that while Victoria doesn't have a tagging system, it does have strict reporting. "We're accountable for every kilogram of lobster we catch, all the way down to the last 100 grams." The issue, Dredge says, is not sustainability but climate change. "The reproductive capacity of the stock is decreasing due to changing conditions." Lobsters like to live and breed in cold water.
I am half-expecting to find my southern rock lobster menacing and on the move when I return to my kitchen after 20 minutes. But it's at rest now in the ice bath, ready for its final journey.
Lobster should be cooked as soon as possible after it has been killed, in heavily salted boiling water.Credit:Getty Images
Stollznow has impressed upon me the importance of four steps for the cooking process. First: I should cook it as soon as possible after it has left the tank. Second, I must use the biggest stock pot I have, fill it with water, bring it to a wild boil, then add a wild amount of salt and bring it back to the boil (in my 14-litre pot, I use 10 litres of water and 500 grams of salt – a large volume is needed to penetrate the shell; ideally the water should taste of the sea and, indeed, some people cook lobster in sea water).
"We tend to go a bit on the higher side [of salting] when we're cooking shellfish," Stollznow says, "especially if you're cooking something for a short period of time, you need to get some sort of seasoning that's going to help penetrate it."
Third, after the lobster goes in, I must slam the lid on the pot and bring it back to the boil as fast as possible. And fourth, I must have another fresh ice bath ready to plunge the lobster into when it's cooked – if it's not cooled quickly, it'll continue cooking.
At the third step, things go awry. I drop the lobster into the pot – it gives no sign it feels a thing – and it quickly becomes clear how inadequate my stove is: the pot is too big for the electric plates, the heat too small and the best I can manage is a sputtering simmer. Stollznow has told me to watch for the shell to change colour. "You'll see the shells start to mottle … eventually that will become uniform across the shell."
And there are, he says, only seconds between excellent and overcooked. To be safe, I've also done a cooking-time calculation based on my lobster's weight (eight to 10 minutes a kilogram) and, for those long, slow, simmering minutes, I self-flagellate; this is a high-stakes game and I'm about to fail at it. I killed the poor creature for nothing. I should have bought a kilo of prawns.
I could have chosen other ways to eat my lobster. YouTube offers a smorgasbord of gruesome videos showing chefs separating the tails from live lobsters for sashimi. (Stollznow says lobster makes excellent sashimi but will first anaesthetise the animal in an ice slurry before cracking the tail with a knife to extract the flesh.)
At Gimlet in Melbourne, head chef Colin Mainds roasts southern rock lobster in a wood oven to create one of the country's most elite crustacean dishes – half a lobster on saffron rice with a bisque sauce. It costs $170. About 40 people order the dish every day. There is a "trail of reasoning" to justify the price, says Mainds, including the cost of fishing licences and the fact that a select group of fishers deliver the live lobsters, packed in seaweed, to the restaurant every day of the week. "We'll literally get them 10 hours out of water." At home, he likes to barbecue lobster and is partial to a traditional seafood cocktail.
Melbourne restaurant Gimlet's half southern rock lobster, roasted in a wood oven and served on saffron rice with a bisque sauce. About 40 people order the $170 dish each day.
Mainds, who grew up on the west coast of Scotland putting pots down to catch lobster, remembers the best lobster dish of his life – at Andrew Fairlie restaurant in Gleneagles where he worked as a young chef. The signature dish was Scottish lobster smoked over whisky-barrel chips with warm lime and herb butter. "The trick was not to smoke the meat but to smoke the shell."
My lobster has gone now from pot to second ice bath to fridge where it spends a few hours. Later, filled with trepidation, I pull it out, convinced it will be ruined, resigned to a poached egg for dinner. I twist and remove the head gently, remembering Stollznow's counsel that "the longest, tenderest, wobbliest bits of meat" are in the carapace and should remain attached to the tail meat. I lay the tail on a board, back side down, and, with my sharpest knife, slice it in half.
And here is something remarkable: my shonky stove did not ruin the lobster; the flesh is firm to the bite and tastes sweetly of the sea. I dip it in home-made mayonnaise and eat it with my fingers. The creature did not die for nothing. I think I might have the courage to murder a mud crab next.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.
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