How We Make Lobster Salad At Home In Maine

How We Make Lobster Salad

            In Maine, during High Summer, we eat a lot of lobster rolls and lobster salad that we make at home ourselves.  The high summer season is perfect for cool clean fresh lobster meat, cool crisp fresh salad and just a light touch of dressing.  We use no commercial mayo, no sugar and we make our dressings ourselves.  This post shows how we make our lobster salad.  Serves four.

            The classic Maine lobster salad rule we follow:

Lobster salad is lobster meat with salad.

It is not salad with lobster meat.

            We stopped at Day’s on the way home from Portland and purchased a pound of lobster meat.  Just north of Yarmouth on Route 1 paralleling the 295 highway, Day’s has superior “hand picked” fresh lobster meat always in stock.  They sell it at a separate counter away from the cook and served-to-eat counter so one may get in and out in under three minutes including no standing in line with “tourists”.  This last counts for a lot with year round residents during the summer season “people from away” “state invasion”.  Tourists rarely buy lobster meat so buying a full pound container ($33.00 today) pretty much declares your “local”.

Once home, we select a celery HEART, five carrots and half a red pepper.  I prefer a big leafy heart but today settle for a “sort of one”.  We hand peel and hand grate the carrots, thin slice the celery and red pepper.

Then we pick, shell and add some fresh garden peas.  We put all of these in a medium bowl.

We also have some cold blanched broccoli and asparagus available for garnish.  We keep these fresh made and on hand in the refrigerator during High Summer.

Next we prepare the lobster meat.

We arrange and review the meat on the cutting board. That's the arm meat at the upper left.  Claws upper right.  Six tails at the bottom.

We slice the meat on the board being sure to make varied sizes of meat chunks; small, large, stringy and cubed.  They don’t all have to be cut completely through.  Eaters delight in finding a couple of big chunky tail pieces “still hanging together”.

Add the meat to the bowl and toss.

Garnish and don’t do too good a job of that.  Remember - this is Maine.  Serve….

…with a dressing on the side.  Here we combine the juice of one lemon, twice as much apple cider vinegar, the same amount of best olive oil, a very little salt and “some” black pepper.  Stir with the ladle and add to taste.