Thursday, December 20, 2007
By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
Unfortunately, their new crustacean friends are on the menu for dinner tonight -- or Monday night's Feast of the Seven Fishes.
[Photo by Staff Photographer Chris Pedota]
Lobsters are among the few creatures that home cooks bring home still alive. But with eyes, a semblance of opposable thumbs in the form of claws and a relatively large body size, lobsters are a little too easy to anthropomorphize.
"It's only human nature," said Richard Vellante, executive chef at Legal Sea Foods, which has a restaurant in Paramus. While professional chefs have long since overcome their queasiness in the name of freshness and culinary excellence, those of us used to packaged meat may have some lingering discomfort.
"Things have faces, things move. ... A lot of people don't realize that even when the lobster has died, it will move," he said.
Even knowing this, many of us still feel a twinge of guilt when we hear or see movement inside the boiling pot. The big lobster debate: Do they feel pain? And if they can, some ask, do they experience it on the same level as vertebrates?
Animal rights organizations such as PETA say the answer is yes. "Lobsters feel a great deal of pain when caught or cooked alive," said PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt. "According to Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist at the National Zoo, lobsters have sophisticated nervous systems that allow them to sense actions that will cause them harm."
But studies vary. Some scientists say lobsters have many fewer neurons than humans and other vertebrates and are much less sensitive to pain. Others say that a lobster's neurons are spread throughout its body, so that it feels pain even if it loses its brain. Still others say that the decentralized neural system diminishes the lobster's experience of pain.
"I put customers at ease by saying we're pretty sure they don't feel anything," said Marcel Bisson, owner of Marcel's Live Maine Lobsters in Dumont. Bisson estimates that 70 percent of his customers buy the lobsters from him live, although his cooked lobster dishes also sell well.
Whatever the case, professionals have suggestions to cut down on trauma in the kitchen. Most of these tricks involve putting the lobster "in a trance," as Vellante put it.
A native New Englander, Vellante grew up with lobsters and other seafood. His secret for easing lobsters into a gentle slumber is to rub the shell between each lobster's eyes. "In about 20 seconds, it will begin to relax," he said. At that point, if you can place it head-first in boiling water, "that will terminate the lobster most quickly," Vellante said.
Putting lobsters in the freezer for about 15 minutes is another method, he added.
"What I do is turn it on its back and gently caress the antennas," said Arthur Tolve, who teaches culinary arts at Bergen Community College. "The lobster stops moving immediately and is very calm.
"Lobster also don't like loud noises," added Tolve, who has been cooking professionally for 49 years. "But it feels your voice vibrations in the air, and that will calm it down. Then I take a boning knife and put it between where the two large claws start and ... and that short-circuits everything and the lobster is dead."
The conventional wisdom, even in the professional kitchen, has changed over the years, said Tolve. When he was in training as a young cook, instructors simply turned a lobster on its back, ignored its wriggling and chopped it in half horizontally before cutting the tail in half. Sometimes they even started by cutting off the sensitive antennae, which would make the lobsters foam at the mouth.
"I always said that's not for me," said Tolve. Over the years, he came up with his own methods of treating lobsters in the kitchen. "It only takes three or four seconds to do the right thing."
One of Tolve's students, 21-year-old David Pilger of Lodi, remembers the class where he cooked lobsters for the first time. Tolve brought in the lobsters in a crate with ice and wet newspapers. He taught them the difference between male and female lobsters, between the bigger and smaller claws.
"He put the knife around the center of the lobster and pushed down," said Pilger. "You could tell once he pushed down that the lobster just relaxed -- all the fins, the claws, everything stopped."
Pilger watched closely as Tolve taught him and other students how to prepare the lobster. "I didn't turn away," he said. "I wanted to make sure I could do it correctly when I had to do it. ... A few people did scream and turned away, but others just watched. I'm guessing they had done it before, and they knew what would happen."
"It sounds so brutal, doesn't it?" said Vellante when asked about the knifing method. This is the most humane way to kill a lobster when you are planning to bake it, he added. "You just do it quickly."
It may be useful to think of the act as a hunter does. "Hunters look at things differently from the way that people from PETA look at things," said Vellante. "They look at it as beauty, and also how to utilize it for eating."
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
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