A guide to cleaning & preparing a lobster for a lobster salad and removing lobster meat for a recipe including how to use a lobster pick.
Whether you have caught or bought a live lobster and cooked it or whether you have bought a pre-cooked lobster, the next stage is to prepare it for eating.
Important: If your lobster is still alive, please follow these instructions to cook it before following the guidance on this page to prepare it for eating:
Once your lobster is cooked, using tools like those below, you can either prepare it so that you end up with half lobsters to serve with salad or you can remove all of the meat to use for a recipe.
Seafood toolsspecially designed to get in to the awkward areas of the lobster make preparing and eating shellfish a lot easier. We have a full range of seafood utensils in ourcook shopincludingseafood forks,crab and lobster crackersandshellfish tools kits.
It is necessary to cut the lobster in half first - this is easier if you turn the lobster on it's back first. Cut down the centre of the lobster applying quite a lot of pressure in order to cut the shell.
You should then remove the bits of the lobster that are not edible, for example the gills, before cleaning the lobster ready to serve. Full instructions on how to clean and prepare a lobster for a salad or platter are detailed in the video.
If you wish to carry on and remove the lobster meat from the shell so that it can be used in a recipe then follow the instructions in this video. These are instructions on how to pick the meat out of a lobster shell and assume that you have viewed the above video above first.
