Grilled Lobster Tail Recipe with Garlic Butter (2018)

Hi, Jason Ganahl, GQue Barbecue. Are you looking for the perfect pairing for your ribeye or tenderloin? Well, I've got it for you. It's a buttery, garlicky lobster tail. If you want to see how we do that, it's coming up right now. Here at GQue Barbecue, we are all about the grilling and chilling lifestyle. If that's something that interests you, smash down that subscription button, hit that bell notification, and you won't miss any of our videos. We have guests over at the house. I always like their reaction when I put a beautifully prepared steak and some pretty vegetables in front of them. However, I get a bigger reaction where I pair that with a lobster tail. I always thought lobster tails were pretty difficult before I started cooking them. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. They are so easy to make. Today, I'm going to show you how to make them on your grill. We haven't made a lot of seafood videos. However, we've made one bourbon bacon-wrapped shrimp that's absolutely fantastic. Put it in the iCard up above. Go ahead and click that to see that. I'm also going to put it at the very end of the video. The first thing I'm going to do is get this garlic butter base going. I'm going to begin it by grabbing one of these half-oil pans. I'm going to add about a stick and a half of butter to that. I'm then going to squeeze two lemons in there. I'm going to mince up, finely, two garlic cloves. Be sure to get a fine mince. I'm also going to add, oh, about a half handful of parsley. The parsley's mainly for color. Cayenne pepper for some kick. Add as much as you can handle. I'm then going to add some salt, since it was unsalted butter, and some pepper and get this going on the Weber kettle. We want to get this completely melted down. Today's lobster tails run anywhere between four to five ounces. They can get really big. These are a little bit on the smaller end, so they're going to cook up kind of quick. Two different ways we can cook them. We can cut them in half and cook them in the shell. I think that's a good way to cook them if you're going to take the meat out to use the meat in something else, like lobster ravioli or something like that. Today, we want these to be presented really nicely on a platter next to a steak, or all by themselves. So we're going to do a cut right down the middle of the shell so that we can take the meat out, so it'll make a pretty presentation. What I want to do is take the scissors, cut it all the way down to the fins right here. And I'm going to be really delicate. This first kind of section right here, you can break these completely off. We want the lobster meat to hang over the front and make for a pretty presentation. So you can break this first section off, removing all these pieces. Then you want to be a little bit more delicate as you kind of go through here. I find putting my thumbs in, opening them up, hear that snap, breaks them open. If you get too rough here, you can break these shells into little pieces, and then you have little bits of shell in your lobster. So once you've got that, take your thumb down on the bottom right here, and break the meat away from the shell, and then push up on it, and it will release it entirely from the shell. And you can pull it up and set it right on top of your lobster shell to make for a beautiful presentation. This garlic butter base is coming along nicely. The aromas I'm getting off of this is amazing right now. Strong notes of acid from the lemon and the garlic. It smells absolutely wonderful. You can add whatever you like here to the base. I've tried it before with hot sauce. However, what I'm showing you guys is just a very simple garlic butter that everyone seems to like. So these lobster tails are cut up, and they look absolutely fantastic. I'm gonna squeeze some fresh lemon juice over them, and then apply some of the rub. It's gonna give it a beautiful color. So these lobster tails have this shell underneath them. That's gonna allow them to cook indirectly, even though we're cooking them directly over the live fire. At 350, 400 degrees, you're looking at about a minute and a half to two minutes per ounce. Cooking lobster is very easy, very straightforward. However, like other seafood, it's tightly bound muscle structure, and lack of fat makes it less forgiving. Lobster can go wrong very quickly. We wanna make sure we cook it no longer than 140 degrees. So I'm gonna be checking it with a Thermapen. These guys are gonna take about eight minutes total to cook. We're gonna let them cook for about three minutes before we start applying the base. So these guys have been cooking for about two to three minutes. Look at the lobster tails themselves. Look how they went from that really dark color to that beautiful orange. That's gonna look so pretty paired up next to a steak. So I'm gonna go ahead and give these guys a base. A little trick here is not to actually brush it on there. Just let it drop on there. If you brush it on there and that rub's not set up on there, you can brush all that rub off. We don't wanna do that. These guys have been cooking for another minute and a half or so. I'm gonna apply another round of base to them. I'd say they got about another minute, minute and a half to go. So we'll go ahead and hit them with another round of the garlic butter base. Look at that. Doesn't that look good? Oh yeah. These are gonna taste fantastic. I love the color of the shell as they cook, how they get nice and bright and orange. These guys are coming along nicely. By drizzling the garlic butter instead of basting it on there, we get to leave all of our rub intact, which is gonna give it that real pretty color. Lobster is notoriously known for when you overcook it, and it gives it a very unpleasant texture. So we wanna pull these guys right at 140 degrees to ensure we get that delicate, soft, buttery, sweet lobster. Here we are, 140. So it's time to pull it. What you can do for a garnish is take these lemons from the garlic butter, put them down on the grate, get those beautiful grill marks. It's really gonna make the lobsters pop when you use them for garnish. One last application of this garlic butter, and then I'm gonna take those charred lemons and squeeze some of that lemon juice over there. It's gonna be sweet, and it's gonna really make that lobster come to life. I would give my left arm to have one of those next to a two-inch thick tomahawk rib eye. If you wanna see more videos like that, go ahead and click my face right there. If you wanna see that bacon-wrapped bourbon shrimp that I was telling you about earlier, go ahead and click that video right there. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.