If You Sniff Out This Lobster Red Flag, Remove It From Your Cart Immediately

Lobster may have once been so common on the New England coast that there are legends that it was served to prisoners (although this appears to be apocryphal), but these days it's famously expensive, which means you'll want to pick the right one. Lobster may not be fish, but it is seafood — and you know what seafood smells like, right? It's supposed to be pungent and fishy. Isn't it? Well, no — in fact, if the lobster you're considering buying at the market smells notably fishy, that's a good sign that you should pick another one. Not doing so is one of the classic lobster-buying mistakes.

The smell most of us recognize as "fishy" is actually the smell of the decomposition process. It's the result of a compound called trimethylamine N-oxide, also called TMAO, being broken down into trimethylamine by bacteria. Although you can make fish taste less fishy by soaking it in milk before cooking, you can't really do that with lobster — so if it smells fishy, it's better off avoiding, as it just means it's not fresh. You're going to be paying plenty of money for whatever lobster you choose, so you might as well pick one that tastes good.

So if lobsters aren't supposed to smell like fish, what are they supposed to smell like? The experts The Takeout consulted in our article about lobster-buying mistakes gave us the skinny. According to Grace Vallo, who runs the food website Tastefully Grace, "lobster should smell like the ocean: clean and slightly briny." Nick Vanderbeeken, the executive chef of the Aperitif restaurant in Bali, Indonesia, concurred. "The smell of lobster is mildly salty, but if a strong odor of fish or ammonia is present, it heavily indicates the lobster is no longer fresh."

Some other things to keep in mind when buying your lobster fresh: you want a lively lobster, one that can still move around and use its claws, rather than one that just sits around or moves sluggishly. It might sound macabre, but don't worry too much: contrary to popular belief, lobsters don't scream when you boil them, and there are still humane ways to kill your fresh lobster at home before you cook it.