Martha Stewart Educated TikTok On The Easiest Way To Eat Lobster Tail
How many places does cookbook author, media mogul, and Domestic Goddess Martha Stewart call home? It's hard to keep track of, exactly, but Snoop Dog's BFF invites readers to have a look at all her not-so-humble homes (past and present) on her website and seems to spend the most time at her sprawling estate and farm in Bedford, New York, which she reimagined and redecorated to better suit her needs after hunkering down there during the pandemic (per Martha Stewart). That said, Stewart has called Skylands, her woodsy, off-the-beaten-path summer retreat on Mount Desert Island in Maine, "my favorite place” (per Architectural Digest). When it gets hot in New York or she just needs a break, the chef heads to her historic happy place, originally built in 1925 for automobile executive Edsel Ford.
What does a sophisticate like Stewart do while in Maine? If her blog is any indication, the lifestyle legend likes to relax, play board games, garden, cook, scope out antiques, entertain friends and family, and eat plenty of seafood. One recap of a visit to Skylands shows a feast of a lobster lunch, with the main ingredient credited to Parson's Lobster and Seafood Shop in Bar Harbor (per The Martha Blog).
Use your fork to grab all of the lobster tail meat
When people think of Maine, they think of lobster. Lobster from Maine is said to be the sweetest on the planet, and Maine is the king of lobster production in the U.S. (per Maine.gov). Whether at home(s) or on her cherished vacation getaway, Stewart enjoys the tough-shelled crustacean. She once Tweeted a photo of the wood-fired lobster cooking station at the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound near Bar Harbor. And on Instagram, she took some heat for being out of touch with the realities of everyday people when she shared a photo of a table set for a lobster dinner with family.
More recently, Stewart shared a hack for getting every last bit out of a lobster tail. The TikTok video, titled "My Lobster Trick,” shows the cookbook author seated at a table cluttered with plates, wearing a lobster bib. Wielding a lobster tail, she picks up a fork and instructs viewers to turn it upside down and insert it as far down as possible beneath the lobster shell. "Then just pull, and the whole tail will loosen and come right out,” Stewart says. Make sure you have plenty of drawn butter for dipping.
The lob-stah TikTok also showed up on Stewart's top TikToks of 2022. And it's not the first time she's shared this fork-in-the-tail tip.
Stewart says struggling with the tail is unnecessary
Lobsters are strange-looking creatures from the sea. They're trapped using pots and nets, they are noted for having beady eyes, and they don antennae, large claws, and an armor-like body. They're brown with hints of green when harvested and turn bright red when dropped in boiling water (per Maine.gov). Some people are intimidated by lobster and by eating lobster, according to Maine-based retailer Lobster Anywhere. That's one of the reasons lobster tails are popular — that and because the tails tend to be extra meaty. Fun fact: Lobsters work their tails as they scoot around in the water. As a result, the tail meat tends to be more fibrous than the tender meat of the claws.
Martha Stewart's website has recipes for lobster every which way: Lobster bisque, lobster rolls, lobster salad, and even lobster shepherd's pie. And in a vintage clip from "The Martha Stewart Show,” the host drafts her guest to share in the experience of deconstructing a whole, cooked lobster, starting with the claw tips and moving on down the body. When it's time to get cracking and think about eating the lobster, Stewart demonstrates how to slide a fork under the shell of the tail and effortlessly extract the meat. "A lot of people struggle with the tail,” she says, "and there's no reason to struggle at all."