Jul. 4—There may be no dish — and surely no sandwich — as emblematic of Maine summer as a lobster roll.
An immodest heap of succulent local lobster meat just barely dressed in mayo is the star of the dish, of course. But visually speaking, what helps make a lobster roll truly iconic is the split-top bun, a type of bread you won’t often find beyond the borders of New England.
It’s a top-loading, bottom-hinged bun with flat, open-crumbed sides that typically get slathered with butter and griddled until brown and crisp. Here, we also use split-tops for other seafood handhelds like fried clam rolls and crab or shrimp salad rolls, as well as Maine Italian sandwiches. And we certainly use them for hot dogs, red snapper or otherwise, while the rest of the world makes do with regular ol’ side-split hot dog buns.
In a way, the split-top bun defines a traditional lobster roll every bit as much as the sweet meat it envelops. There are exceptions to the model, of course. Food writer, cookbook author and 13th-generation Mainer Nancy Harmon Jenkins said some of her favorite Midcoast lobster rolls — such as the one from the Keag Store in South Thomaston — come on a burger bun. Yet many more people would argue that a lobster roll made with a burger bun or bread slices is just a lobster salad sandwich, while a lobster roll on a standard side-split hot dog bun is just plain wrong (on multiple levels, more on that later).
But it’s not just tradition at work here. The split-top bun is uniquely qualified for this particular supporting role. It’s arguably the perfect bread for the job, both from aesthetic and functional standpoints.
Mainers can take particular pride in the split-top bun, which is believed to have originated in Portland. Though as it turns out, it’s not so easy getting to the bottom of the split-top bun’s origin story.
‘WHO KNOWS WHO’S FIRST?’
According to popular lore, sometime in the 1940s, the Massachusetts-based Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain commissioned Portland’s J.J. Nissen bakery to develop a top-sliced bun specifically for their fried clam strip rolls. They wanted the roll to be top-sliced, and hinged on its flat bottom, so that their clam rolls would be easier to prepare, serve and eat.
A spokesperson for Bimbo Bakeries USA, which today owns the J.J. Nissen brand — Nissen’s Portland bakery closed in 1999 — was unavailable for comment for this story, and area food historians were unable to confirm that Nissen first developed the split-top bun. Some regional food historians, like Sandra Oliver of Islesboro, were leery of crediting Nissen.
“Lots of times what happens is that people take something that was already happening and they popularize it, but they didn’t make it happen originally,” Oliver said, noting that it’s quite possible that a smaller bakery or even home bakers were already making split-top buns, and the Nissen bakery adapted a recipe for their own purposes. “It usually isn’t often that clear how these things happen.
“I always worry about the word ‘first,'” Oliver added. “Who knows who’s first?”
The origins of the lobster roll itself are equally murky. Though they were likely made by home cooks earlier, some of the first-known commercially sold lobster rolls seemed to emerge in the 1920s, from places including the Nautilus Tea Room in Marblehead, Massachusetts (where they sold for 25 cents), and Perry’s Restaurant in Milford, Connecticut, where the Connecticut-style lobster roll — warm lobster meat tossed in drawn butter — is thought to have been born.
Bayley’s Lobster Pound in Scarborough is among the first places in the state to serve them in Maine. Bayley’s launched in 1915, and fourth-generation business operator Susan Bayley Clough said her great-grandmother, Ella, started selling lobster rolls from out the window of her Scarborough home in the early 1920s.
Like other lobster roll progenitors, Bayley’s was looking for a profitable use for one-clawed lobster culls. Turning them into lobster salad made sense. Lobster salad had been around since at least the early 19th century — Lydia Maria Child’s recipe for lobster salad in 1829’s “The American Frugal Housewife” is one of the earliest-known examples in print. But the innovation of serving the salad on bread of some sort took longer.
“Lobster salad had been around for well over 100 years by the time somebody thought about putting it in a roll,” Oliver said.
MATCHING TEXTURES
But if nobody can say for sure where or when the first lobster rolls using split-top buns originated, the pairing seems divinely inspired.
“They’re the perfect vehicle,” said Sarah Sutton, co-owner of Bite Into Maine, which sells tens of thousands of lobster rolls each year, both at their local stores and food trucks and via mail order business. “The ratio of bread to lobster (with split-top buns) is very good. You don’t want more bread than lobster, by any means. And you can butter-grill the sides because they’re nice and flat, so you get that consistency of the warm, buttery, crispy outside with the cool, creamy lobster roll — it’s the ideal complement.”
Sutton grew up in Wisconsin and said when she first came to Maine 21 years ago, split-top rolls were a revelation. She said the popular brat rolls in her home state aren’t nearly as well proportioned as lobster rolls.
“Brats, in my opinion, have just too much bread,” she said.
“The biggest reason the split-top bun is right for a lobster roll is it helps the roll be all about the lobster,” said Luke’s Lobster co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Ben Conniff.
“The split-top bun has a tender enough texture that it envelops the lobster, but it doesn’t overwhelm it,” he continued. “You get the soft texture that melts in your mouth and leaves you with the flavor and texture first and foremost of the lobster, with just that buttery blanket around it.”
Clough agreed that the bun’s soft, squishy texture is key. “You need the bread’s consistency and texture to match the filling,” she said. “Ham and cheese is going to work on a harder bread or on ciabatta or something. But if you put lobster and mayonnaise inside a bagel, when you bite down, you’re going to have a mess. You really need a nice soft bread.”
Bayley’s uses fresh-baked, preservative-free buns from Amato’s Bakery, the same buns Amato’s uses for its small Maine Italians. There are fancier split-top buns, like the brioche ones Bite Into Maine uses, or the Japanese milk bread (shokupan) dough version that Little Spruce Bakery in Biddeford makes for the likes of SoPo Seafood and Higgins Beach Market in Scarborough. Little Spruce co-owner Justin Flakne said their buns have a subtle sweetness that complements the lobster meat, along with a little more chew than the standard split-top.
But plain white bread versions from big commercial makers like Bimbo, Pepperidge Farm or Country Kitchen can absolutely do a lobster roll justice, which is amazing for a sandwich that averages about $35 (and considering you’d be rightly wary of putting, say, Wagyu beef burgers on a supermarket white bread bun).
THE PERFECT BUN FOR THE JOB
McLoons Lobster Shack, a Maine lobster roll mecca in South Thomaston, sources its split-tops from Bimbo. “It’s one of those things where it’s a non-fancy, non-artisan-style roll, as white and bleached as can be, but it works so well for the lobster roll,” said co-owner Bree Birns.
She finds that the Bimbo bread is pleasantly doughy with a more satisfying chew and a touch more sweetness than Country Kitchen split-tops. It’s more substantial, too, making it better from a practical standpoint.
“I’ve filled a lot of these lobster rolls,” Birns said, noting that McLoons sells about 500 lobster rolls a day during the height of the summer season. “The lobster meat needs to be able to stand up and not just fall over on itself. So if you have a flimsier, airier roll, it’s just going to break the roll.”
Practical concerns help explain why split-tops have it all over side-split buns when it comes to lobster rolls. Part of the reason Howard Johnson’s wanted split-top buns for their clam rolls was so that the fried strips wouldn’t just spill out onto the plate, as they would with buns that rest on their sides. Standing upright on their flat bottoms, the split-tops also offered a more bountiful presentation for the dish, with the golden clams mounded along the top of the sandwich.
“Using a split-top for a lobster roll means you see a lot of lobster,” Oliver said. “The presentation is really gorgeous that way. If you crammed that into a (side-split bun) and put it on a plate, what you would see is roll.”
But it’s the open-crumb sides that give the split-top bun its biggest advantage. The exterior of side-split commercial hot dog buns is mostly crust — soft, bland crust with faint, unremarkable toasted taste that wouldn’t enhance lobster in any significant way. It’s the same kind of crust that many kids insist you remove from their sandwiches, to give an idea of its appeal.
Split-tops, by contrast, are butter delivery devices. In effect, the lobster roll’s bun is like two pieces of buttered toast, thoughtfully connected by a flat-bottom hinge. And butter could not possibly pair better with either bread or lobster.
At Bite Into Maine, Sutton said they trim the crusts off their side-split, gluten-free lobster roll buns so they can griddle them in butter. “It just elevates them so much for a gluten-free bread,” she said. “We’ve had people be like, ‘My God, what kind of gluten-free bread are you using?'”
“The art of making a sandwich is something that people don’t think about much,” Clough said.
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