Lobster Tastiness- This is not a Review

I've been coming back to Massachusetts every Sunday or Monday all summer, or every summer for that matter. Yes, I am a Masshole, but not really. I was born in Portland, Maine while my parents lived in South Freeport. I am a Mainer.  I can't make a living in the design profession in Maine, so I live outside Boston. I am not proud of it.

Anyhoozle, I have learned a lot from my study of lobsters over the last 30 years coming back and forth from Maine and hauling my own: lobsters have colons.  When lobsters defecate it is a signal for everyone.  If you own a New England seafood shack and have tank with slow turnover, it is bad.

Here's the deal: if a lobster relieves himself (herself, and they don't pee) in a tank that isn't on a pier exchanging water into a little Maine cove, then they are deucing in the tank. This is bad for for the tank and maybe your health. Solution: stop feeding them and let them starve.  Imagine being a cannibal and eating a starving human or buying the scrawny chicken to roast for a Sunday "suppah". This is not good for flavor. I am sure my torso is chock full of flavor after eating lobster risotto the night before, as opposed to eating me after I dropped 20 post-Andean plane crash. Fat Nat is better tasting and more nutritious.

See my review of Belle Isle Seafood

What I have found over the years is when the tail end of a lobster's alimentary canal is packed and green it means they were just yanked from a place where they were feeding and happy. This means tasty lobster. If you peel back that tail skin and find black intermittent waste solids, the lobster won't be that sweet.  If it is clean like a jumbo prawn in a Thai restaurant then the meat will have no flavor at all.

I don't eat the tube full of green stuff, but my ancestors from the Maritimes do.  They're weird and have one vowel sound, so I don't give them much cred as gourmands anyway. They regulary eat dinner at Tim Horton's. Find places that consistently sell lobsters with their colons packed with green mud and you will have a very tasty lobster.  I recommend Day's in Freeport, The Bedrock Lobster Pound in York - a new fave.  These are places that turnaround lobsters quickly and don't "tank" them where they starve. Muscongus Lobster Co-op is another place.

This is the scientific truth about lobster storage: Lobsters in Tanks- University of Maine Report.  Make sure to read the disease part, they clearly recommend unloading diseased lobsters to humans for immediate consumption- I'm not kidding.