Make Joe Beef’s Lobster Spaghetti Recipe Without Killing a Lobster

We adapted Joe Beef’s famous lobster spaghetti to use tails instead of whole lobster

During a recent trip to Montreal, I was thrilled to nab a reservation at Joe Beef. The charming Lyonnais bistro-meets-Quebec-tavern has enjoyed multiple awards, the praise of famous chef patrons, and (after it having its share of #MeToo-era controversy, reported on in 2019) still booked-solid reservations.

After much negotiation and several reads of the handwritten chalkboard menu on the wall, my husband ordered the entree nearly everyone orders at Joe Beef: the lobster spaghetti. We had other dishes that were lovely, of course, but it was that mound of perfectly cooked spaghetti, tangled with hunks of sweet-briny lobster and salty bacon, and garnished with a crimson whole lobster tail that we remember. In fact, that lobster Thermidor carbonara mashup is one of the rare meals that my husband won’t shut up about.

Since that visit two years ago, I’ve been promising to make him that lobster spaghetti for every birthday, New Year’s, and anniversary, but every time I flip open Joe Beef’s first cookbook to make it, I renege on my promise. That’s because the recipe starts by instructing you to boil a live lobster, noting that “if you don’t want to look at the lobster as it boils, you are probably someone who likes to have sex with the light off.” While I don’t find those two things to be mutually exclusive, I am here to tell you that going to a seafood market across town and watching while clerk pulls a live sea bug out of a crowded tank, listening to the creature scrabble around in a Styrofoam cooler all the way home, and then plunging the it into boiling water and listening while it clanks around in the pot isn’t sexy in the least... unless of course you get turned on by existential dread. I, for one, do not.

I’m not alone: Switzerland, Norway, and New Zealand have all banned this method of cooking lobsters. There are some ways to make it easier for the creature, though. Some experts recommend briefly freezing lobsters for 15 minutes, which purportedly torporizes them so they don’t mind being boiled alive quite as much. If you eat a lot of lobster and have money growing on trees, you can also invest in a crustacean stun gun for around $1,000. Or you can plunge a knife into the center of the beast as my very scary advanced seafood teacher did in culinary school. I’m pretty sure he demonstrated this method just to see his students jump back in horror from the cutting board.

My problem isn’t so much how the deed is done, it’s that I don’t really love doing the deed. I’m normally detached from the killing of the animals I eat for good reason: I’m a big fat hypocrite with a sensitive stomach. (Don’t write in, I just told you that I appreciate the paradox.) But I was determined to make good on my promise to make Joe Beef’s lobster spaghetti for my husband this past Valentine’s Day, so I developed a workaround that wouldn’t require me to take a clonazepam just to fix dinner.

I went to the closest grocery store where lobster tails (from already dispatched lobsters) were on sale for $7 a piece. A 4-ounce tail will yield about 2 to 2½ ounces of raw meat, so three to four tails was enough to make a luxe meal. I priced a live lobster from the seafood market across town at $85, so the tail route saved me quite a bit.

In the Joe Beef cookbook, the lobster is boiled and then separated into meaty parts (claws, tail) and the thorax with its attendant innards, which are called tomalley. You then hack (in the authors’ words) the thorax into pieces and simmer it in a pot with water and cream to make a shell-infused sauce. Since I didn’t have the thorax, I resorted to a lesson I learned at a long-ago restaurant job where we served “lobster” bisque. There was actually no lobster in the soup; we just made a stock with saved up shrimp shells, added cream to it, and voila — something that tastes a lot like lobster.

Thus I used shrimp shells in lieu of lobster thorax to make a concentrated shellfish-y stock for my version of Joe Beef’s sauce. I know that not everyone saves shrimp shells in their freezer like some sort of crustacean graveyard weirdo, so I tested the recipe again with a handful of shell-on shrimp and got great results. The leftover cooked shrimp meat, by the way, makes a fine salad or po’ boy the next day.

That just left cooking the lobster tail, which presented a problem. I could simmer the tails in the stock I was making with the shrimp shells, but it’s far too easy to overcook the delicate meat to rubber while you’re waiting for the shells to give up much flavor. To remedy this, I pulled the raw meat from the shells using this brilliant method I found online. Later, I cooked the chopped tail meat in the finished sauce.

In the Joe Beef recipe, the shells are simply boiled, but I thought that that would leave flavor on the table. Sauteing the shells with some shallot and a bit of garlic develops a lot more. After doing this, I deglazed the pan with brandy (you can also use white wine) and then boiled everything in a few cups of water and strained it after a 10-minute simmer. This method gave me an aromatic seafood stock that tasted of pure shellfish, which is a great place to start any seafood sauce.

I finished the sauce by combining the seafood stock with cream and simmered it until it was reduced to about 1½ cups. The Joe Beef recipe recommends reducing to 1 cup of sauce, but in earlier tests, I found that to be a bit too thick to evenly coat the pasta. As a little sauce insurance policy, I now reserve ½ cup of the pasta cooking water and use it to loosen the sauce if needed — hot pasta has a tendency to slurp up sauce and the last thing you want here is dry-looking pasta.

Speaking of the spaghetti, the book instructs you to “make the size of a quarter with your thumb and index finger” to measure each portion of dried pasta. That imprecise word play will get you about 5 ounces of pasta per person, or 10 ounces for this recipe. But given the thick, rich sauce and the lobster and bacon involved, the recipe as written realistically feeds three. Since leftovers do not heat well (the lobster becomes rubbery and the sauce tends to curdle), I scaled down to 8 ounces of spaghetti to serve two people.

The Joe Beef recipe recommends garnishing the dish with parsley. I ignored this directive and substituted fresh minced tarragon since I had to buy a whole packet of it in order to use one single sprig for the sauce. For me, the green anise flavor of tarragon is closely linked to lobster, so using it as a garnish instead of ho-hum parsley was a no-brainer.

The resulting dish is one I’ve made several times for special occasions — it’s fairly simple and incredibly delicious, and with this iteration of the recipe, I won’t be sitting at the table with a thousand-yard stare on my face, trying to get the sound of a slowly dying lobster’s claws rattling around in the boiling pot out of my head. In other words, it’s much more romantic.

Joe Beef Lobster Tail Spaghetti Recipe

Adapted from The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts

Serves 2

Ingredients:

3 to 4 small raw, shell-on lobster tails (4 to 6 ounces each)
2 tablespoons butter
1 shallot, thinly sliced (about ½ cup)
3 cups shrimp shells (from 12 ounces shrimp) or 6 ounces shell-on shrimp
1 large garlic clove, roughly chopped
¼ cup brandy or dry white wine
1 (2-inch) sprig tarragon, plus 2 tablespoons minced tarragon leaves, divided
2 cups heavy cream
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
3 slices thick-cut bacon, cooked and roughly chopped
8 ounces dry spaghetti

Instructions:

Step 1: Remove the meat from the lobster shells: Hold a lobster tail with the soft side up and the tail end away from you. Using sharp kitchen scissors, cut along each side of the tail where the softer belly side meets the hard shell and little legs. Pull up the translucent strip of softer belly shell that you just cut away from the hard shell and snip it free where it meets the end of the tail. Use your hands to pull the hard shell away from the tail meat as if you were opening a book; you may need to use scissors to free the meat from the end of the tail. The tail meat should come out in one piece. Snip the tail meat into 2-inch chunks and place in a bowl and set aside in the refrigerator. Reserve the shells. Repeat with remaining lobster tails.

Step 2: Start a shellfish stock. Melt the butter in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add the lobster and shrimp shells (or shrimp) and shallots, and cook, turning occasionally until the shells are red, and the shallots begin to brown, 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, 1 minute. Carefully add the brandy or white wine, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook, scraping up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan, until the liquid has evaporated, 1 minute.

Step 3: Finish the stock. Add 2 cups of water to the pan, cover, and simmer over medium-low heat for 10 minutes. Strain the liquid through a fine mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing on the solids to extract all the liquid stuck in the shells. Discard solids (remove shrimp meat, if using, and reserve for another use). Return stock to saute pan.

Step 4: Add the cream and tarragon sprig to the pan and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat. Cook uncovered, stirring occasionally and scraping the sides of the pan to get all the orangish shellfish flavor back into the sauce, until it’s reduced to about 1½ cups, 15 to 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and remove the pan from the heat.

Step 5: Cook the pasta and finish the sauce. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add a few tablespoons of salt and the spaghetti to the pot and boil until al dente. Meanwhile, add the chopped tail meat to the cream sauce and cook over medium-low heat until the meat is just cooked through (it will be opaque white in the center), about 5 minutes. Add the spaghetti and bacon to the pan and toss with tongs to coat, adding reserved pasta cooking water as needed to loosen the sauce. The sauce will thicken upon standing.

Step 6: Divide the pasta among two pasta bowls. Sprinkle with the minced tarragon and serve immediately.

Dina Ávila is a photographer living in Portland, Oregon.