Traditional Lobster Bisque Recipe

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Last updated on October 12th, 2021 at 03:08 pm

It felt so fancy to walk up to the meat and seafood counter and ask for three lobster tails. I don’t know why but it seemed lavish. I hadn’t cooked lobster before making this lobster bisque recipe. In fact, I hadn’t had much experience with lobster at all before this.

So don’t be scared if you haven’t cooked it before either. It isn’t too complicated to cook the lobster correctly, so you don’t have to be afraid of messing it up.

Whenever I say bisque, I can’t help but think back to a comedy sketch all about bisque. Give it a watch for a quick food-related laugh. Mostly about the restaurant owner over-pronouncing bisque. You’ll never hear the word bisque the same again.

History of the Dish

I did not realize how much variety there is to a lobster bisque recipe. There are a lot of ways you can cook the lobster, make the stock, blend it up, thicken it, etc.

From my understanding, the word bisque comes from French meaning twice cooked. This makes sense since the general method is to cook the lobster, remove and reserve the meat, and then cook the shells further to build flavor in a stock to be used as the soup base.

Bisque first came to be known as a crustacean soup in 17th century France. In a truly authentic bisque, the shells are ground to a fine paste and added to help thicken and flavor the soup. We will not be going that traditional with our recipe today.

Instead we will use two of the common methods for thickening a bisque – rice and heavy cream.

If you are serving it as an appetizer, then it is commonly served in a mug so that you can sip it straight from the dish.

Tools for the Lobster Bisque Recipe

This recipe is a bit involved. It’ll take some time and work on your part. Though some of that time will just be the stock or soup simmering in the pot.

You will want a large, heavy-bottom pot. We will cook the lobster, build the stock, and cook the final soup all in that same pot. I like to use a large Le Creuset enameled cast iron dutch oven. But any large pot would probably fit the bill.

For straining the soup, you will need a fine mesh strainer. This will get the majority of the stuff out of the stock – the rest will get blended up in the following steps. If you want to make sure that even more is strained out, then you can line the mesh strainer with cheesecloth. That is what I typically do when making my homemade chicken stock.

Bisque is a blended soup. So you will need something you can blend everything together with. And you will likely need to work in batches to get it done because it is a large pot of soup after all. For this, you can use an immersion (stick) blender. But I highly recommend a powerful blender, like the Vitamix I have, to get the smoothest soup possible.

Having Bisque

My wife and I had the opportunity to travel to the New England area in 2016. The goal was to hit up six of the seven remaining states that my wife had yet to visit. And then later we would cap it off with a grand trip to Alaska. But that’s for another time.

While in Boston, my parents told us we had to make a stop by Legal Sea Foods. Specifically to try the lobster bisque. So we did.

We ordered a cup of the bisque, along with a few other items from the menu. The food came to the table and we started to dig in. I began with the bisque. It was great – though I think probably my first experience with the soup itself. So I did not have many comparisons by which to judge it. My first or second spoonful had a large chunk of lobster.

I thought, ‘Great, this is a nice chunky soup. They did not skimp.’

And then my wife had some soup. And could not find a single other large piece of lobster. It seems we had only one chunk. There were some small scraps of lobster meat floating around, but nothing like the first chunk.

So, unlike that experience where I had to apologize to my wife for accidentally eating all of the lobster out of the soup, we will make one with lobster spread through each bowl.

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