The Kitchen · nine recipes worth the bean

The Kitchen · № 03

Homard à la vanille

The dish that made vanilla savoury. Roasted lobster, vanilla beurre blanc, 1981.

Serves
2
Prep
20 min
Cook
15 min
After
Senderens, 1981

Where this comes from

In 1981, at L'Archestrate in Paris, Alain Senderens roasted lobster and sauced it with a vanilla beurre blanc. Homard rôti au beurre blanc vanillé became his signature dish and, more than that, it settled an argument: vanilla is a seasoning, not a sugar.

Its influence runs directly through Alain Passard, Michel Guérard, David Bouley and Wolfgang Puck, each of whom built a vanilla dish of their own afterwards. What follows is our homage. The idea is his. The words and the measurements are ours.

After Alain Senderens, Homard rôti au beurre blanc vanillé, L'Archestrate, Paris, 1981

Ingredients

  • 2 live lobsters, about 600 g each; or 4 cooked tails
  • 1 quantity vanilla beurre blanc (№ 04)
  • 30 g butter, for roasting
  • 200 g spinach, washed
  • 1 tbsp neutral oil
  • Salt and black pepper
  • Lemon

Method

  1. If the lobsters are live, put them in the freezer for 20 minutes to sedate them, then dispatch them with a knife through the cross on the head. Plunge into heavily salted boiling water: 3 minutes for a 600 g lobster. You are not cooking it through, only setting the flesh so it leaves the shell. It goes into a hot pan afterwards.

  2. Lift them out and cool briefly. Twist off the claws and crack them. Split the tails lengthwise, or shell them whole. Remove the intestinal tract.

  3. Make the beurre blanc (№ 04) and hold it somewhere barely warm. It will not wait long, so make it last of all your preparation, not first.

  4. Heat the oil in a heavy pan until it shimmers. Lay the lobster cut side down. Add the butter, let it foam, and baste for 2 to 3 minutes, until the flesh turns opaque and the edges take colour. Season.

  5. Wilt the spinach in the same pan for 30 seconds, in the lobster butter. Salt it.

  6. Spinach down, lobster on it, the sauce spooned over the flesh and around the plate; never over the shell. A squeeze of lemon on the lobster, not in the sauce.

  7. Serve at once, and say nothing about the vanilla until somebody asks.

The grader’s note

All of this is timing. Lobster overcooks in the time it takes to plate it and a beurre blanc splits if you look at it wrong, so the sauce is made last and the lobster hits the pan when the plates are already out. As for what the vanilla is doing: lobster is sweet, and vanilla is the only thing that reads as sweet without adding sugar. It rounds off the iodine and lifts the roast. If the plate tastes of pudding, you have used twice the pod Senderens used once.

Made with

Grade A Indonesian planifolia.

Every recipe here is written for a real bean: graded, signed, and sold by weight.

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