The Food Lab's Guide to Sous Vide Lobster

Lobster was the first meat that I ever cooked sous vide, and it's still one of my favorites. If buttery, tender, sweet poached flavor is what you're after, there's no better way to cook it. Sous vide lobster is better than the best steamed or boiled lobster you've ever tasted. How much better? If I were in a mood for writing in hyperbolic tropes I'd tell you that it's times better. But if I'm being honest, it's a lot better than boiled lobster, significantly better than steamed lobster, and a plain old better than roasted lobster. It's also heck of a lot more foolproof than any of those methods and also affords the opportunity to infuse that lobster meat with extra flavor. Think: lobster with the butter built right into it. Doesn't that sound swell? If you look over sous vide lobster literature, there is vast disagreement in temperature and timing. In Under Pressure, Thomas Keller suggests an oddly specific temperature of 139°F / 59°C. Meanwhile, Modernist Cuisine suggests as low as 115° / 46°C. That's a big difference! I decided to cook lobster at 5°F intervals between 115 and 150°F to see how things shook out. But first, some basic prep.

How to Prepare a Lobster for Sous Vide: Shuck and Go

Lobster, whether it's spiny rock lobster tails or live Maine lobster, needs to be removed from the shell before it can be cooked sous vide. Those shells just have too many sharp projections to be worth risking. A few little holes in the bag and you risk gumming up your circulator with coagulated lobster protein or butter. It's a risk I prefer not to take. With live lobsters, I start by killing them in what is supposedly the most humane way possible: Treat it like a zombie from The Walking Dead and plunge a knife straight into its head. This quickly destroys what flicker of consciousness the lobster might have had. After that, separating it into claws, tail, and carapace is a simple matter of twisting and pulling. By the way, despite the fact that hard shell lobsters tend to get more praise than soft, we at Serious Eats unanimously prefer the sweeter flavor of soft shell. It's also far easier to shuck. Lobster meat is extremely soft and delicate when raw. It's nearly impossible to remove the shell from a raw lobster without mangling it. It's essential you par-boil the lobster before attempting to remove the shell. In order to prevent the tail from curling, I like to lay it flat on the cutting board and insert two wooden skewers, starting from the body end and exiting through the joints near the tail end, keeping them as close to the shell as possible to minimize internal damage. Next I bring a large pot of water to a boil (you can also use a steamer) and plunge in the lobster for just one to one and a half minutes before transferring it to an ice bath. Once chilled, it's easy to remove the meat from the tail, claws, and knuckles. To remove tail meat, start by first squeezing the sides in firmly until you hear a sharp crack along the top side of the tail. This should break or crease most of the cartilaginous material under the tail. Next, pull apart the edge of the shell. It should separate quite easily (if not, use kitchen shears to carefully snip through the cartilage, then try pulling it apart again). Once cracked open, the shell meat should easily pop out. Claws are a bit trickier. With a soft shell (new shell) lobster, you can usually get through them with kitchen shears. I start by breaking off the small claw (carefully, so as not to remove the meat inside with it!), the cutting the bottom of the claw open with a pair of kitchen shears. The goal is to cut just enough that you can extract the meat by jerking the claw downwards (think of the motion you'd use to get the last bit of shampoo out of the bottle). With knuckles, the trickiest part is getting those small cavities open without falling victim to the spiny exoskeleton. Gloves or a good cotton kitchen towel for gripping help. Use kitchen shears to snip open the sides of the knuckles, then either a chopstick or the back end of a wooden skewer to gently poke, prod, or fish the tender bit of meat out.

Bagging and Cooking

Because lobster tails and claws need to be cooked at separate temperatures (more on that below), it's important to bag them separately. For red meat, I don't recommend adding fat to the bag, as I find it can actually dilute flavor: the meat doesn't really absorb it, while fat-soluble compounds end up dissolving in the fat and eventually get dumped away. With lobster, on the other hand, it's a different story. Lobster meat has a much looser structure. We also serve lobster straight out of the sous vide bag with no intervening searing or finishing step. The butter that the lobster poaches in in the sous vide bag clings to the lobster and it stays there until you eat it. Fat in the bag also allows you to add aromatics such as parsley or tarragon which add their flavor to the fat that subsequently works its way into and around the lobster meat. Try doing that with your boiled or steamed lobster! I seal up the bags using the water displacement method (no need for a vacuum sealer here), then dunk them into their water bath. But what's the best temperature and timing for that bath? Glad you asked!

Timing and Temperature

In my tests, I found that 115°F was almost off-putting in how soft it was (though I know that some folks like it). It was completely translucent and slippery internally, like half-cured lobster ceviche. It's a texture that works fine when served cold and sliced thinly with, say, some soy sauce or yuzu juice, but it's not what I think of when I want to eat hot, buttery lobster. The minimum temperature I'd recommend cooking to is 120°F (49°C). What was especially interesting was that claw meat had to be cooked to a completely different temperature than any other part of the lobster. Even at 140°F, lobster claw meat is almost jelly-like in how soft it is. Only at around 150°F (66°C) does it firm up to pleasant levels. This makes sense: Just like the white and dark meat in chicken, the claws and tails of a lobster are used for very different things--the claws for steady poking, prodding, and moving, and the tail only for sudden, quick bursts of movement. For tails, wether Maine or rock, I recommend the following temperatures:

120°F / 49°C: Soft and Translucent

At the lowest end of the scale, the lobster is just barely set. It remains lightly translucent in the center with a slick texture like sashimi from a particularly butter fish. Think hamachi or toro. This lobster can be served with drawn butter, but I find that it's best enjoyed chilled in a simple, mayo-free salad.

130°F / 54°C: Tender and Succulent

This is my favorite temperature for cooking lobster hot. It's fully firm and meaty, but it's much more tender than lobster cooked via more traditional methods due to the evenness of the cooking from edge to center. This lobster is succulent and delicious whether you serve it hot with drawn butter or cold in a roll.


140°F / 60°C: Close to Traditional

At 140°F, your lobster becomes as firm as if it were cooked via traditional methods, though it still has the flavor advantages offered by sous-vide. This might be a good temperature if you're serving a died in the wool New Englander who insists on lobster the old fashioned way. It might well convince them that sous-vide is something special here. As for timing, it takes about 20 minutes for the tail from a 1 1/2 pound lobster to cook through, though anywhere up to an hour or even a little longer won't hurt it much. Cook it too long and it'll begin to suffer, turning mushy.

What About Those Claws?

As I mentioned, lobster claws need to be cooked at a higher temperature--150°F--to come out firm. If you've only got one sous vide device, this can be a problem. Initially I was using a rather fiddly method. I started the water bath at 150°F, cooked the claws, then dropped the controller to 130°F, added cold water to rapidly reduce the temperature, then added the bag with the tails to cook. (There's no need to remove the claw bag when you add the tails, the claws hold just fine at 130°F.) Once the tails cooked for half an hour, I was ready to serve. Like I said, fiddly. This was the method I used until I had an important revelation: just as chicken thighs are more forgiving than chicken breast, lobster claws are far more forgiving than lobster tails. The solution is less elegant but faster: during that initial boiling or steaming phase, just leave the claws in until they're fully cooked. This'll take about 5 minutes. You can then shuck the claws and add them directly to the same bag with the tails in order to absorb some buttery flavor. They won't be quite as tender as if they were cooked fully sous vide, but like I said, claws are forgiving. Once everything has gotten warm and happy for half an hour, take the lobster out of the bag, discard the spent tarragon, then serve the meat with copious amounts of warm clarified butter and a squeeze of lemon. “Thank the maker! This butter bath is going to feel soooo good!,” the lobster seems to say. And it's right. Get my full recipe for sous vide lobster on the Anova recipes site and in the Anova App for iOS and Android.

Sous Vide Lobster Recipe