LOBSTER HAND ROLLS
The Zero F*cks Cookbook: Best Food Least Effort By Yumi Stynes (Hardie Grant Publishing)
Cooking time: n/a
Prep time: 10 minutes
When I was a kid, my dad was involved in rock lobster fishing down
in a South Australian town called Robe. He would bring home lobsters
and my mum would experiment with different ways to prepare
and serve them, but no matter what she tried, no matter what was
fashionable or what was going on in fancy restaurants, this was always
the method she would return to and that us kids requested. It is really
easy but, more importantly, it gives the limelight to the star ingredient.
1 × 2 kg freshly cooked rock lobster (see cook’s note below),
cut in half lengthways
6–8 best-quality nori seaweed sheets, each cut into 8 pieces
550 g (3 cups) hot absorption-method cooked rice
Japanese soy sauce, to serve
Wasabi, to serve
Salad greens, flowers and leaves, to decorate
TIPS
1. If you are lucky enough to have a fresh, live lobster to hand,
then kill it humanely and boil it whole for 10 minutes for every kilo
of weight. Otherwise, buy a cooked one from your fishmonger and
eat it the day you buy it.
2. Don’t be afraid to outsource your rice cooking if you’re on
holidays or just can’t be bothered. All good Asian takeaway joints
will sell you good, hot rice cheap.
Serves
six to
eight
Have an enormous serving platter ready and decorate it with salad
greens, flowers, leaves from the garden … whatever excites you.
Wash the guts out of the lobster, then pull out the flesh as neatly as
possible and slice it on a clean chopping board.
Return the flesh to the two half-shells of the lobster in as close to the
original position as you can and lay them out on the serving platter.
Divide the nori pieces among small serving plates and the rice among
small serving bowls. Fill a few small dipping bowls with soy sauce.
Place the lobster platter in the middle of the table for everyone to
help themselves. To eat, pick up a piece of seaweed, top it with rice (a
generous tablespoon), add a piece of the lobster dipped briefly into the
soy sauce (don’t drown it!) and finish with a dab of wasabi, then close
the bundle and pop it into your mouth. Repeat.
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