How To Make Grilled Lobster Tails with Garlic Butter

Grilled lobster tails are a fast yet fancy way to serve seafood when the weather outside is just too nice to stay indoors. Despite the hefty price tag, good-quality frozen lobster tails are pretty easy to find, making them an especially good choice if fresh seafood is hard to come by where you live. Instead of going the standard route of dipping the lobster in melted butter, spend a few extra minutes making a garlic butter and you’ll be rewarded with something extra special. Here’s how to do it.

While there are lots of different kinds of lobster out there, the crustaceans fall into two main categories: clawed lobsters and those without claws. The most common and popular clawed lobster is the Maine (also known as American or Northern) lobster, which comes from the cold waters off the northern Atlantic coast. It has two distinctive meaty front claws and four more pairs of legs, and it is what’s most often depicted when you see pictures of whole steamed lobsters. Lobsters without claws, known as spiny or rock lobsters, have five sets of legs that are all the same size and often live in warmer waters, like those the Caribbean and off the coast of Florida. All of the edible meat in spiny lobsters is in the tail.

Frozen lobster tails can be from clawed or clawless lobsters. There are a couple of ways to tell which ones are being sold. Check the package or ask the fishmonger for the region the lobster was caught in. If it doesn’t say, take a look at the color: Maine lobster tails are generally dark green-brown with hints of red. Spiny lobsters are lighter in color, with a range of relatively pale yellows and browns, and some have distinctive spots. Maine lobster tails are prized for their sweet flavor and are more expensive than spiny lobster tails, which don’t cook up as sweet. Both are fine choices for grilling, but if I had to pick one over the other, I’d go with Maine lobster tails.

Because lobsters must be cooked or frozen immediately after they’re killed, raw lobster tails are always sold frozen. Instead of removing the tails from whole fresh lobster, I find it easier to buy frozen lobster tails since they’re usually processed and flash frozen soon after they’re caught. I usually buy one 6- to 8-ounce lobster tail per person, although you can always go smaller or larger depending on what else you’re serving or what your store carries.

The best way to defrost lobster tails safely and evenly is to put them on a plate or baking sheet in a single layer in the refrigerator and let them thaw for about 24 hours. This keeps them at a safe temperature and thaws them more evenly than leaving them out at room-temperature or thawing them under cold running water.

Once the lobster tails are thawed, there’s a little more prep that needs to be done before they hit the grill. Because of their shape — one end is significantly thicker than the other — cooking them evenly is difficult if you keep them whole. To make sure they cook evenly and to create a wide, flat surface for melting the garlic butter, butterfly the tails first.

Butterflying means to halve something into two thinner, more even pieces. For a lobster tail, this means cutting through the hard shell with kitchen shears, then slicing the tail meat in half so that it can open up flat like a book. One other step worth doing is using your fingers to loosen the meat from the shell, which will make it easier to remove the meat once the lobster is cooked. Once butchered properly, the lobster tail meat will cook up evenly without the need for skewers or other tools to keep it from curling up.

To grill the lobster tails, place them meaty-side down on a really hot grill for a few minutes to get some grill marks. Once they release easily from the grill grates, flip them over and top with an easy-to-make garlic butter (the tails will finish cooking as the garlic butter melts). The total cook time depends on the size of the tail. You want the meat to be just cooked through, so aim for an internal temperature of 135 to 140ºF. Serve with lemon wedges for a nice bright pop of flavor to cut through the richness of the garlic butter and the sweetness of the lobster meat.