Summer Crush
Red’s Eats, Wiscasset, Maine
If I ever get fired from KRD, I plan to buy a truck and drive around selling lobster rolls. My motivation is purely gustatory. You just can’t get a good one around here. Summers past I’d cook up every excuse I could think of for a trip to Maine to buy a market-price roll at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset. (Hard to believe the cash I willingly shelled out for this bottom-feeder on a bun.*) But the last few summers it’s been hard to get away. So I challenged my son to rival Red’s. He did.
*Maine lore from the 1600’s has it that inmates at the Maine State Prison rose up in rebellion over yet another lobster dinner, prompting a law to surface on the books forbidding prisons from serving Homarus Americanus to inmates more than once a week as the State considered this cruel and unusual punishment.
Ingredients…so basic, but opt for a good mayonaise
Steam the lobsters (ugh, I have to leave the room for this). Allow to cool and then de-shell and chop the meat
Chop the celery… we like a lot of celery
Add the juice of 1/2 a lemon. (Notice the technique…keeps the seeds out of the salad)
Go easy on the mayonnaise, you don’t want it to overpower the lobster. Add salt and pepper.
Definitely grill the buns! We used brioche rolls…you can stuff more into these than the traditional hot dog rolls.
Add a little lettuce to each and then “plate” the lobster rolls… (that’s restaurant speak for “put the lobster salad on the rolls and put the rolls on a plate”)
Plated lobster roll
This quiet scene lasted only a moment. Enter famished family of four. WOW! Red’s got nothing on this roll.
