LOBSTER COOKER

How Do You Cook More Than 20,000 Pounds of Lobster in Five Days?

Did you know that there is more to the World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker than meets the eye?

The current lobster cooker is celebrating its 14th birthday at the 2022 Maine Lobster Festival. It all began with an idea and a dream. Finally, after years of engineering and fabrication, the cooker came to life just in time for the 2008 festival.

With many improvements and upgrades from the previous cooker, this new machine was untested until one week before the Festival, when organizers did a test cooking of 200 pounds of crabs. The cooker passed with flying colors and was ready to take its place as the World’s Greatest Lobster Cooker. And, wow, did it live up to its name. It operated flawlessly throughout the entire festival.

There have been other cookers over the years, and with each new cooker there were many improvements. This new cooker is state-of-theart, with electronic controls, tremendous capacity, temperature sensors, and safety shut-off devices.

The old cooker used fuel oil and biofuel and occasionally would belch a puff of black smoke. The new cooker uses clean-burning propane, and its design is about 50 percent more efficient than the old cooker and six times more efficient at cooking lobster than the typical outdoor lobster cooker or turkey fryer. This efficiency results in a much better tasting lobster!

A typical outdoor turkey fryer-lobster cooker produces enough heat to cook approximately 15 pounds of lobster in 15 minutes. The World’s

Greatest Lobster Cooker can cook 1,600 pounds of

lobster in 15 minutes. You would need approximately 112 of those outdoor cookers to do the same job.

The new cooker does it with eight individual cooking units, each capable of cooking 200 pounds of lobsters. Lobsters typically are cooked in batches of 100 pounds, depending on requests from the Eating Tent. Once cooked, the batch is put in an insulated tote and carted to the Eating Tent where the lobsters are served with all the fixings. In past years, festival volunteers have cooked and served as much as 26,000 pounds of lobsters in the course of the five-day festival.

The brick wall structure of the lobster cooker is made up of hundreds of customized bricks. Each one was purchased by a Festival supporter, and the proceeds helped pay for the cooker’s construction. The structure that houses the cooker is more than just a building; it is a monument to all of the past and future Maine Lobster Festivals, a testament to the enduring strength of the local lobster industry, and a symbol of the ongoing commitment to the spirit and vitality of the overall community.

The Rockland Festival Corporation, the city of Rockland, the Rockland Harbor Commission, and the endless list of volunteers make Maine, the Midcoast region, and the Maine Lobster Festival the best there is. Come see for yourself!