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Lobster
Tails
Generally
regarded as the most elegant of fine dining occasions, lobster tails have
been dazzling menus for hundreds of years.
- There are rare blue, yellow, red, and white
lobsters. Except for the white ones, they all turn red when cooked.
- Lobsters grow by molting (shedding their skin
for you city folk), increasing in weight by 25% each time. They molt
about 25 times in the first 5 years of life. An older lobster only molts
every four or five years. No one has yet found a way to determine the
exact age of a lobster because it sheds its shell so often.
- Lobsters "smell" their food by using four small
antennae on the front of their heads and tiny sensing hairs that cover
their bodies.
- The teeth of a lobster are in its stomach.
The stomach is located a very short distance from the mouth, and the
food is actually chewed in the stomach between three grinding surfaces
that look like molar teeth, called the "gastric mill."
- Lobster blood is usually a gray or slightly
blue color, but it can sometimes be orange, green, or light pink.
- A lobster egg is the size of the head of a
pin. A 1-pound female lobster usually has between 8,000 to 12,000 eggs
that are attached to the underside of her tail. She carries the eggs
for about a year until they are released as larvae (about the size of
a mosquito). Only about 0.01 percent of those eggs will live past 6
weeks.
- It takes between 4 and 7 years for a lobster
to grow to "legal" size, 1 pound.
- A lobster that has lost a claw in a fight is
called a "cull" (sometimes called a sissy by his friends).
- Lobster will catch fish, other crustaceans,
and mollusks for their food.
- A lobster's age is approximately its weight
multiplied by 4, plus 3 years.
- They are very high in the amino acids which
are the building blocks of proteins and contain the amino acid lysine
which is believed to help prevent and control cold-sores
- Hard shell lobsters are the industry standard
for quality and value. It has more meat and better texture. Squeeze
the sides of the lobster's body; the soft shell will yield to pressure,
while the hard shell will be firm, brittle and tightly packed.
- The size of the lobster–small or large–does
not determine the quality.
- Lobsters can survive out of water by using
their gills to extract oxygen from both air and water. A thin film of
water coating the gills is necessary and this is why it is imporant
to keep the lobster cool and damp
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