How To: Cooking Live Lobster

I'm going to show you how to cook live lobster. Now, these lobsters are a European native lobster and you can tell because they're very blue in color - quite long bodies. These believe or not have been in the freezer and they're supposed to be a bit dormant but they're waking up in the heat of the kitchen here now.

So, in the UK they're available from May through to about October time, it depends, they like warm waters. In the winter months, they'll hide in a crevice or something, go into semi-hibernation and they'll only come out in the spring when the waters warm up a little bit. Now, we're going to have to kill these lobsters very quickly.

So, what I'm going to do is just drive a knife through the head and they're going to get plunged straight into boiling water and they're going to take about 12 minutes to cook. So, those that are squeamish, look away. Right, straight into the water there, they do carry on moving, but it's just the nervous system carrying on.

Right, here's our second lobster, straight through the head, one sharp stab like that, straight into the boiling liquor. These two lobsters are about 450-500 grams each, so they're going to take 12 minutes in the boiling liquor. Then, once they're cooked, we're going to take them out of the liquor and just let them cool down on their own.

Right, our lobsters have had their 12 minutes cooking here now, so we're just going to remove those. Now, you can eat these just as they are with a lovely potato salad, beautiful on a summer's day. Or if you're feeling a little bit more adventurous, have a look at my recipe - how to cook lobster thermidor.

And that is how to cook lobster. .