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This Seafood Stew is a creamy and decadent, made-from-scratch bisque loaded with vegetables and a variety of seafood. When I was cooking at the restaurant, I would make a version of this soup every year as an appetizer course on the New Years’ Eve Prix Fixe Menu. I modeled this dish after a soup from my childhood, served regularly at Ipswich Seafood, a little fish market and grocer in my hometown that has the best homemade soups. As a teenager, I used to sneak out of school during lunch and head to Ipswich Shellfish for a bowl of this soup. Was it worth in-house suspension? Yes, it was.

I haven’t made this soup since I left the restaurant in 2020 but I’ve thought about it (and craved it) often. I just didn’t have the space in my home kitchen to make this recipe, but I’ve recently moved and upgraded kitchens and was very excited for the opportunity to make this for New Years. Most of the recipes on this blog are easy and straightforward and minimize dishes to wash. This recipe does not. It’s really a two-day process and requires a bit of prep space. Sure, you could do it all in one day, but it would be a long messy day in the kitchen! You will read through the recipe and be tempted to take shortcuts, to buy shelled and deveined shrimp and shelled lobster meat, to buy seafood stock from the soup aisle of the grocery store. Don’t do it. There is no store-bought seafood stock that comes anywhere close to this one. Trust me, it is worth the effort. This recipe uses every bit of the lobster and shrimp, including the shells and guts (aka tomalley and roe). You simply cannot achieve the same flavor without these parts so please, buy the crustaceans whole, and don’t take shortcuts with the seafood broth.

There are some shortcuts you can take, though. You can buy already prepped and cleaned squid. You can pour the broth through a coffee filter or muslin cloth and eliminate a day of “sediment settling” in the fridge.

There are lots of variations you can play around with. You could make this an all-Lobster Stew. A variation that I am particularly fond of. Simply triple the amount of lobster and omit all the other seafood. Or play around with different combinations of seafood. Just keep in mind the optimal cooking times for each type of seafood varies and put them in the pot accordingly. Squid (“Calamari”) will need to cook for 30-45 minutes or it will be tough. Octopus is the same and can cook for even longer. Use firm fish that won’t flake apart in the broth like salmon, mahi mahi, or sea bass. Scallops also work great. All raw bite-sized seafood (except calamari and octopus) should only be cooked for 2-3 minutes, just before serving. Already cooked seafood (lobster, cooked crab if using) should be added at the very end, just to warm it through.

Notes on Recipe Techniques

This recipe is all about techniques to extract the maximum amount of flavor from the seafood that you use and to cook each different type of seafood for the optimal amount of time.

To Cook a Live Lobster:

You can buy cooked lobsters from the seafood counter or frozen section of the store for this recipe, but if you live somewhere where live lobsters are available, that is definitely your best option. If you are buying r lobster, place 1 inch of water in a large pot and bring it to a boil. Humanely kill the lobster by either placing it in the freezer for about 10 minutes or driving a knife through its head, between the eyes. Andrew Zimmerman Cooks: How to Kill a Lobster is a good how-to video on dispatching lobsters by Andrew Zimmerman. Once the lobster is dead and the water is at a rapid boil, add the lobster to the pot and cover. Listen carefully for when it returns to a boil. Once boiling, set a timer and steam the lobster for 7 minutes per pound, 10 minutes for 1 1/2 pound lobsters. Run the lobster under cold water or plunge into an ice bath to stop the cooking. You can cook up to 3-4 lobsters in a large pot (5 Gallon) but never try to cook more than that in one pot. Calculated the cooking time based on the average size of the lobsters in the pot, not the total poundage in the pot. For instance, a pot with two 1 1/2 lb lobsters should cook for 10 minutes 30 seconds after the boil returns (1 1/2 lbs x 7 minutes), not 21 minutes (3lbs x 7 minutes).

How To Clean a Whole Lobster

Have a medium bowl handy.  Working over the bowl, remove the legs, claws, and tail from the body.  Lobstery water will likely gush out when you are separating the bits and you will use this in the broth.  Using a nutcracker or a hammer and cutting board, crack the shells and remove the meat.  Reserve the meat and the shells in separate bowls.

Take the body and open it up, separating the shell from the underside where the legs connect.  There will be some yellow/green/blackish stuff in the cavity and some red roe (eggs) if you are lucky.  Use a spoon and scrape these guts into the bowl with a spoon.  This may sound and look nasty but it is really delicious and the secret to the best bisque ever.

After removing the guts, pick out the meat from the body.  There is actually quite a bit in there and most people waste it when eating lobsters.  At the location where each leg connects to the lobster, there is a cavity filled with bite-sized pieces of lobster meat.  You may need to break apart the cartilage-like elements that separate these pieces of meat in order to get to it, but you can easily do that with your hands- no special tools needed.

When you are done you should have 3 bowls, one with lobster juices, one with meat, and one with shell (including the little legs and body scraps).

Use this same technique for crab.

To Flambé:

If catching something on fire in your kitchen makes you nervous, you can omit this step and simply deglaze the pot with brandy or sherry.

If you want to try this technique out, make sure there is ample space above the stove (without kitchen towels hanging or kitchen cabinets that could catch fire).  Use a long-handle grill lighter or light a long wooden skewer on fire and then touch the flame to the booze in the pot.  If you have a powerful commercial-grade gas stove, you may be able to just give the pan a little shake and catch it on fire from the burner flames.  But if you are using an electric, induction, or average residential gas stove you will need to manually ignite the booze.  Brandy will flame up better and last longer than sherry.  The booze will pool in the lobster shells and curves of the onion pieces.  Those are good places to light.  You will want to light the alcohol as soon as you pour it into the pan before it is diluted by any liquid in the pan or the alcohol cooks away so make sure you have everything nearby and ready before you add it. It’s always a good idea to keep a tight-fitting lid nearby in case anything gets out of hand and you need to cover and extinguish the flames.  You’ll be using the lid in the next step anyway.  All that being said, this is a small amount of alcohol, and it won’t flame up very high or last more than a couple of seconds.

How to Cleaning Calamari (squid)

You can usually buy cleaned squid, already cut into rings, at the store. However, with supply chain issues, when I went to make this soup, I could only find blocks of frozen, whole, uncleaned squid at the grocery store. I didn’t mind because I knew what to do with them after years in commercial kitchens but I was surprised that the store would sell them in that form because it is definitely not intuitive for the average shopper. In case you find yourself in the same situation, here is how to prepare a whole calamari:

1- remove the head/tentacles from the body.

2- Squeeze between the eyes with a forward (towards tentacle) motion. With the other hand, place your fingers inside the tentacles to catch the “beak” that will come out.

3- Cut right in front of the eyes, separating the tentacles from all the guts that came out with the head. In these guts, you will find the little ink sac. If you are really ambitious, you can very carefully set the ink sacs aside for squid ink risotto or homemade squid ink pasta.

4- Squeeze the remaining guts out of the body. This will be the eggs, if present, and the swim blatter. Also remove the piece of cartilage, aka “the quill,” that runs the long way up the body and helps the squid maintain its shape in the water.

5- Next remove the fins and with them the purplish skin that covers the body. Cut the now all-white body into rings.

To Cook Calamari:

For tender calamari, you can either cook calamari low and slow or quickly and for just a few seconds.  Anything in the middle will be tough and chewy.  For this soup, I use the low and slow methods for tender calamari.  It needs to cook for a total time of 30-45 minutes.

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