lamb

How To: Roast a Leg of Lamb

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Roast Leg of Lamb

I was recently lucky enough to buy half a Dorper lamb, freshly butchered and delivered into my hot little hands from its farm on Hindmarsh Island.

We haven’t had something as simple as a roast leg of lamb for AGES so it was time to crack out the meat probe. Not too much time needed to be spent googling the right temperature. My parents have just acquired an oven with meat probe and had handily cooked a leg of lamb a couple of weeks prior. They cooked to 74°C which, by mum’s standards, was perfect. We opted to cook to 71°C as we like our meat a little pinker.

If you don’t have a meat thermometer then you should really buy one, because otherwise you have to do all sorts of complicated calculations regarding weight, oven temperature and whether or not you have a bone in the meat. I can’t help you with that!

However, what I can help you with is prepping the meat.

Our family tried and tested approach is to stud the meat with garlic and rosemary. If you’re inclined, you can also add anchovy to that mix, but on this occasion I went with just garlic and rosemary.

Take a small, sharp knife and plunge it into the lamb flesh to create little pockets. You can see from the photo that you want quite a few. The more you have the more the meat will be infused with the flavours of garlic and rosemary.

Now, thinly slice a clove of garlic. You need slivers of garlic so that they’ll melt into the meat as it cooks and when you eat it you’ll get the garlic flavour throughout rather than big bursts of garlic. Stuff the slivers of garlic right into the pockets – no garlic should be sticking out because if it does, it will get burnt and taste bitter.

Next stuff in little slices of anchovy (if using) and finish with small sprigs of rosemary, say a cm or two in length. The rosemary can stick out.

Do this all over the lamb (including underneath).

Then you’re ready to roast! There’s no need do anything fancy like you would do with pork (for crackling) or a fillet of beef. Just straight into the oven until done.

Make sure you rest the meat, covered – at least 20 minutes. Once the meat is out of the oven is the point at which we start doing most of the vegetables (roasted ones excepted).

Roast Leg of Lamb

Serve on hot plates, with roasted and steamed vegetables and plenty of gravy (make sure you add the juices from the rested meat to the gravy!).

Perfect for a Sunday dinner but good enough to be special occasion food.

Xinjiang Lamb Recipe

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A super quick and easy recipe that I’ve had earmarked for ages. This lamb recipe is perfect for the BBQ – so definitely keep it in mind as the weather warms up.

The recipe comes from the New Zealand Herald, and I had no idea who/where/what Xinjiang is. It transpires that it’s a region in north west China that’s home to many ethnic groups, but the Uyghur make up roughly 45% of the mix. Given how much we enjoyed the food at Tangritah Uyghur back in 2010 (hmmm, really must go back there), it’s no surprise that we both thought this recipe was top notch.

You do need to start this a day ahead, to give the lamb time to marinate. But other than that, this is insanely easy and quick.

Begin with approximately 1kg of lamb shoulder, cut into bite sized cubes. In a bowl, mix 2 tbsp ground cumin, chilli flakes to taste (the recipe calls for 1 tbsp, but perhaps the chilli flakes in NZ aren’t quite as hot as they are here …), 1 tbsp of black pepper (freshly ground is always best), 2 tsp of ground ginger and, if you have it, 1 tsp of ground Sichuan pepper. We couldn’t track this down in a hurry (which means the supermarket didn’t stock it) so left it out and I don’t think we missed it at all. Perhaps with it dinner would have tasted even better!

Add 4 tbsp of peanut oil, 4 tbsp of soy sauce, 4 cloves of garlic, minced, and salt to taste. Toss the lamb through the marinade, ensuring every piece is well covered and then refrigerate overnight.

The recipe is a bit more exacting about what to do and the order in which to do it. I had already cut up the meat and dumped it in a bowl, and Andy just mixed all the marinade ingredients through the meat – so assemble it whatever way suits.

If you’re going for the kebab look, soak bamboo skewers in water for at least an hour and then thread on the lamb and grill. We couldn’t be bothered and were going to just BBQ it until we discovered we were out of gas! So we ended up pan frying the lamb – which worked a treat except you do need an industrial strength extractor fan, otherwise your house will end up smelling like a lamb frying factory.

We served the lamb with spicy fried potatoes and some steamed vegetables. It would work just as well in a wrap with a yoghurt sauce, or served with a couscous salad.

We had a ton of leftovers (although not as much as you might expect!) and it turns out that the meat is almost as delicious, the next day, straight from the fridge!

Rogan Josh

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Rogan josh spice mix

Ages ago I won a copy of Just Add Spice, by Lyndey Milan and Ian Hemphill. I have actually made a couple of things from it, including an excellent fish dish, but not blogged them. So today we redress that with the book’s take on rogan josh.

Rogan josh is a Kashmiri dish which is typically made with lamb but I’m sure this dish would work just fine with any other meat of your choice.

Just Add Spice has a lot of emphasis on making your own spice mixes, which I wish I found in more recipes. I always like to compare recipes for dishes such as this and while googling came across too many that gave lists of ingredients that included “jar of Rogan Josh curry paste”. Sigh.

If you can spare yourself the 5 minutes (or so) to make a spice mix it’s an invaluable thing to have in your culinary drawer. There are plenty of times when making a curry needs to be a quick exercise and if you have a decent homemade curry powder you save yourself a ton of time (and money).

Having said that, in this case the recipe gives you just the measurements you need for the finished dish but you can always double or triple up. The other thing about this spice mix recipe is that you don’t need to toast the spices at all. It’s just a case of measuring them out straight into the grinder and off you go.

Don’t be too pernickety about measuring things out here – you’re working with rough ratios and we’re not baking. So, into your grinder measure out: 2½ tsp coriander seeds, 2 tsp cumin sees, 1 tsp paprika, ½ tsp each of chilli powder, ground ginger and turmeric and ¼ tsp each of fennel seeds, nutmeg, cardamom seeds (from green cardamom) and cloves.

Measuring out nutmeg is a bit of a pain so I just grated what looked like roughly the right. Cardamom seeds – well, yes, if you only have pods there is a bit of bother here. You’ll need to get the seeds out of about 5 pods. The pods are easy enough to break into: a firm whack with the back of a solid knife will do the trick.

Grind everything up into a powder. This makes approximately 2 tbsp.

Although this supposedly makes enough for this recipe I found I had some leftover which I used up next time I needed to jazz up some meat.  Of course, it would work perfectly well for vegetarian dishes too!

For the rogan josh itself, take approximately 1kg of diced lamb (we used leg) and marinate it in a mix of plain yoghurt and the spice blend. The recipe calls for 500g of yoghurt but, based on my experience, this will be way too much. Tread carefully with your yoghurt!

You only need to marinate it for about 15 minutes so don’t feel you have to start this recipe a day in advance.

On the stove, heat ⅓ cup of mustard oil in a heavy casserole which will be OK in the oven. When it’s hot, add some chopped onions (I used 3 – I suggest you use some judgement depending on how much you like onion!) and cook until golden. Add 5 or 6 cloves of crushed/chop garlic and then the lamb and yoghurt mix.

Give it a stir, then add ½ tin of chopped tomatoes and bring to a simmer. The place in a preheated oven and leave it to do its thing.

The book says to have the oven at 100°C (80°C fan) and to cook for 2 hours. This temperature is just waaaaaaaaay too low. After two hours the meat was barely cooked through, the sauce hadn’t even begun to thicken up and dinner was starting to look a long way off.

When cooking meat slowly like this you don’t want to hit a boil – you want things to stay just under a simmer. And I guess that is why the recipe suggests putting the curry in the oven on such a low heat. Next time I’d just cook this on the stove because it’s much easier to keep an eye on how quickly things are moving, and it’s also much easier to take the lid off to allow for sauce thickening up. If you do want to use the oven I think I’d be starting things off at around 150°C and seeing how they progress.

When the lamb is cooked and tender serve with rice, garnished with coriander.

On first eating this dish I thought it was really dull – the yoghurt really seemed to have washed out the flavours of the spices. However, the next day it was much tastier, so I suspect the problem lay in the fact that the oven cooking had been at such a low heat the flavours (and sauce) had had no opportunity to concentrate. I may have also been too generous with the yoghurt marinade.

I later used the leftover spice mix in something else and it was perfectly tasty so I can’t lay the blame there.

The spice mix I will definitely make again but as a whole, this curry recipe doesn’t really cut the mustard.