Page 36 - foodservice - June 2018

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PRODUCE
EASTERN ROCK LOBSTERS: SPINY, DELICATE AND SPLENDID
WITH WINTER WELL AND TRULY HERE, JOHN SUSMAN ARGUES FOR A MENU UPDATE WITH A LITTLE BIT OF CULINARY LUXURY.
John Susman is the director of the seafood industry agencey Fishtales. For more views, insights and understanding of the seafood industry visit thefishtale.com.au.
Consider this: the night before convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad in Utah in
2010, he ordered his final meal. He wanted lobster tail, steak, apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Mass murderer Allen Lee Davis ordered a lobster tail, a kilo of deep fried prawns, fried potatoes, fried clams, garlic bread and root beer.
It turns out that lobster is one of the most common last meal requests amongst death row prisoners – which is strange when you consider that in the early days of the American colonies, jailers were forced to limit the amount of lobster they would feed prisoners. The prisoners, it seemed, thought the constant lobster dinners constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment. The
story is probably apocryphal, but we do know that early settlers in New England considered lobster to be trash food.
When convicts first came to New South Wales, they quickly learned that the local Aboriginals depended heavily on lobster as a source of protein. After storms, lobster would wash up on shore by the hundreds, and, if
you were quick, you could pick them up, cook them, and eat them before they had the chance to spoil. The first few years for the settlers
were notoriously difficult, and the abundance of lobster probably became the crustacean’s undoing. Lobster would have been eaten almost constantly, and the smell of thousands of dead lobsters on a beach would have understandably put them off the food entirely.
So as time went on, lobster was identified as a subsistence food, something only to be eaten out of desperation. The people who still ate it were poor or lower class or it was otherwise used as livestock feed and fertiliser.
It was the Rum Rebellion and the building of New South Wales as a free state that elevated lobster to the luxury status it has today.
And isn’t lobster the true mark of culinary luxury!
South Australians consider the Spencer Gulf king prawn to be well, the king of prawns. Western Australians will regale you with the story about the time the late Paul Bocuse claimed the West Australian marron to be one of the five great culinary tastes of the world. And Victorians will defend the values of the yabby insisting that René Redzepi of Noma fame championed it above all other shellfish on his visit down under. Northern Territorians will rant relentlessly about the eating qualities of their Gulf mud crabs, whilst Queenslanders and Tasmanians will bicker eagerly over who has the superior scallop.
While all these shenanigans about whose crustacean reigns supreme go on, the humble New South Welshmen sit quietly by, knowing that one of the truly great crustaceans of the world is endemic to some 1,000 km of New South Wales coastline.
The eastern rock lobster (colloquially known in NSW as ‘The Local’) is the smallest of the commercial lobster fisheries in Australia but is the largest spiny rock lobster in the world, capable of growing to an amazing 15 kilograms.
Caught in baited traps, to a tightly controlled quota, they hide in holes and crevices around rocky areas and reefs, preferring vegetative cover such as weed or kelp, coming out after dark to forage for mussels, oysters, shrimp and scallops in particular. This luxurious diet is reflected in their silky flesh, which is characterised by having a delicate sweetness with a clean,