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Mutton/lamb is the most delicious of all non-fish meats. I don't particularly love beef/chicken/pork but a sunday lamb roast with crispy potatoes and gravy - y
by andrewstuart 3y ago
Mutton/lamb is the most delicious of all non-fish meats.
I don't particularly love beef/chicken/pork but a sunday lamb roast with crispy potatoes and gravy - yum.
BUT - cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting - and anticipate you won't really knock people out with it until you've practiced enough. Jamie Oliver has the best lamb roast recipes.
Lamb leg is extremely cheap at the moment in Australia - $10/KG - so I am practicing my lamb leg roasting skills.
- jahnu 3y agoI love lamb too but my love for it is heavily tempered by its extreme environmental impact :(
- esafak 3y agoLamb had the highest carbon footprint of all animals last I checked. Now I took another look and beef is back on top! https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-chain https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...
- janc_ 3y agoIt probably depends highly on what you feed them...
- nrp 3y agoRuminants inherently have large methane output that drives up climate impact. There are only very early efforts to reduce methane output through diet change.
- Jill_the_Pill 3y agoI think it depends on if you include shipping from Australia to North America in the footprint calculation.
- esafak 3y agoIt doesn't, because shipping 1 tonne of food by sea costs about 0.02kg of CO2, and it's already part of the calculation (under "transportation"). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emission-factors-food-transport https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emission-factors-food-tra...
- Jill_the_Pill 3y ago... per kilometer ... and it's about 8000 km from Australia to New York
- jahnu 3y agoSheep grazing also strips the land bare of deep and complex vegetation upending whole ecosystems. Perhaps in a futile or misguided gesture I try to keep my consumption of lamb to an occasional treat rather than a regular thing.
- martopix 3y agoWouldn't this depend on location and source? I used to live in Scotland, where sheep graze on grass in fields that don't really take away space for vegetables (unless you want to survive on potatoes and cabbage), and they're local. So I assumed they're not that bad.
- superhuzza 3y agoMost of the sheep grazing land in the UK isn't natural - natural trees and vegetation were cleared to make way for more sheep. It's had a large impact on the biodiversity here. https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2020/05/11/biodiversity-impact-of-upland-sheep-grazing-will-take-decades-to-recover/ https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2020/05/11/biodiversity-impact-...
- leetcodesucks 3y ago[dead]
- nraf 3y agoBeen getting shoulder on sale for under $7 a kg at Saccas in Melbourne
- stickfigure 3y agoFor leg, shank, or shoulder chop I would agree with you - a slow roast or braise is the right way to go. But the rack is incredibly tender and easy to cook. Throw some salt, pepper, garlic, and Italian seasoning on it and put it in the oven at 375F, it's perfect in about 25 mins. No cooking skills necessary. At my local Costco, imported Aussie lamb racks are usually about $15/lb.
- GordonS 3y agoWow, disagree - I find that the sweet spot with a rack is very small, maybe 2-3 minutes. Outside of that, it's either too pink or overdone. Maybe it's just me :( For me, the easiest lamb cut to cook is shoulder - just throw it in a low oven for 3+ hours (with some white wine, rosemary, parsley, garlic and lemon), and it's the most delicious lamb you've ever had!
- klyrs 3y agoSurely this is a typo... after 2-3 minutes at 375F, you're serving lamb sushi
- dgacmu 3y agoI believe they mean that the window of time in which it's delicious is narrow. (Because a rack of lamb is fairly thin compared to many meats we roast) To which I would say: meat thermometers are an amazing gift.
- davidw 3y agoYeah, the window of time when you need to pull it so that it's good. As in, pull it 2 minutes one way and it's not done, 2 minutes the other way and it's overdone.
- stickfigure 3y agoJust use a meat thermometer. I guess that's a skill but it's an easy one. Pull it 5-10 degrees (F) before your target temp. I get consistent medium rare every time. I love a braise too! But it takes some planning and it's more work. I can go from "hmmm, what dinner" to plated lamb rack in 45 mins - including defrost time.
- deaddodo 3y agoI was going to say, Americans don't generally eat mutton but lamb isn't terribly uncommon. Lamb is already difficult to get right, which is why many go out to get it (Indian and Middle Eastern, most commonly); mutton is even more difficult, so people don't even bother either way. In addition, goat isn't often eaten in Europe (outside of the Mediterranean, Italy primarily) and other affluent nations, but is fairly common (at least in the Southwest and New York+DC) via Latin American, Middle Eastern and African cuisine infusion.
- floren 3y agoI did a boneless leg roast on Friday and it came out very tender. I spread softened butter with herbs all over the top, then put it in at 425F for 15 minutes, followed by a couple hours at 350F until it was ~140F in the center. Juicy, tender, and nicely pink inside. The leftovers made a couple great sandwiches and finally ended up as a stir fry last night. Americans do ourselves a huge disservice by ignoring lamb (and mutton, and goat, and wild game, and...)
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoWell if you want to cook mutton right then don't just roast it with potatoes in the oven. Make a nice pilaf with it, with a whole head of garlic in the center like they do in Uzbekistan: https://youtu.be/tkCeL6Md0fg?si=q86eBrLRbJBJU4yi https://youtu.be/tkCeL6Md0fg?si=q86eBrLRbJBJU4yi Or stuff the leg with rice, as they do on the Greek island of Imvros: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFVLLIZsh8A&list=PLsmrGn_1E13fCMdWORD96gMSM5Aq35VMq&index=28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFVLLIZsh8A&list=PLsmrGn_1E1... (the meat in the video is goat, not mutton, but it's the same recipe). Or, my favourite (and a recipe handed down by my grandfather, though it skipped a generation): Gioulbasi, a whole leg of mutton wrapped in wax paper, with vegetables and melty cheese, and roasted slow and sweet: https://youtu.be/OZjAiqC3ws0?si=93pwB2DZDNBtgNyF&t=6 https://youtu.be/OZjAiqC3ws0?si=93pwB2DZDNBtgNyF&t=6 Though these days I prefer to be all posh and use a French oven to slow-roast mutton (and lamb, and goat).
- esafak 3y agoIt's curious to me that dish with a Turkish name (gölbaşı, meaning lakeside) should not exist in Turkey.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoI think it comes from Smyrni and the old Greek cities in the coast of Asia Minor, who were for a while a part of Turkey (until the Greeks there were slaughtered like lambs). Anyway we have lots of Turkish loan words in the Greek language. To the best of my ability to transliterate these examples in latin characters: ati, passoumi, briki (ibrik, I think), kazani, charatsi, tsoglani, bairaki, chatiri, dounias, giouroussi, boulouki, dragoumanos, doulapi, and derti, of course, etc. As you can probably tell, we always tend to add an "-i" at the end. We also say "halali" and "harami", which we clearly took from the Turkish. And of course, Tsantirimin Oustoune, and other all time greatest hits: https://youtu.be/NE9sQGPhYbM?si=q-Sk4Yuo_bxjO10s https://youtu.be/NE9sQGPhYbM?si=q-Sk4Yuo_bxjO10s - By Flery Dandonaki (a great Greek singer) https://youtu.be/QDzXPLX8JdQ?si=nRx-Lv7GbIjmaeIG https://youtu.be/QDzXPLX8JdQ?si=nRx-Lv7GbIjmaeIG - By Rosa Eskenazi (a Jewish Greek singer) https://youtu.be/GH7TffsisJc?si=l7sGSt5ZdAmug7jb https://youtu.be/GH7TffsisJc?si=l7sGSt5ZdAmug7jb - By Stelios Kazandzidis (a Pontiac Greek singer) Greece is of the East :)
- someotherperson 3y agoThese views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way. It's not as if the Middle Eastern restaurants or kebab joints are slow roasting the stuff. You can pressure cook it for certain meals (i.e lamb shanks) but it's not that necessary. Lamb chops can also be cooked much in the same way as beef steaks. The most tender part is the backstrap (its marbled like wagyu) and incredibly easy to prepare and skewer. This is followed by the legs. You can even go one step further and skewer more fat inbetween. Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine. I grew up on it, and have probably cooked it about ~150 times for other people. It's always been a hit and I'm not exactly a chef ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago>> Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine. No, make it into a pilaf. In a ceramic oven vessel. If you're from the Middle East, or anywhere around the Mediterranean, that's what your heart yearns for, and your heart knows best. Also, saturated fats but that's not why I brought up your heart :P
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 3y ago> These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way The thing that cracks me up are yuppies caring for their cast iron skillet like it’s a newborn baby. “You can’t use soap on it… You can’t treat it like that… To maintain it you must…” I promise that generations of dirt poor Southerners had bigger things to worry about than following Alton Brown’s directions for cast iron maintenance.
- geon 3y agoI’ve ran mine through the dishwasher. It’s fine.
- 3y ago
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> You can't just go cook lamb any old way lamb is very popular in Italy and there are no "no old ways" to cook it. Not a fan of it, but it's probably one of the most untouched traditional food you can find here.
- whiddershins 3y agoFrom a cooking point of view mutton/lamb is a confusing term. The reason for having two words for this is closely tied to the fact that cooking them is completely different. Lamb doesn’t take a bunch of specialized skill.
- jdironman 3y agoMakes for a good Sunday gravy!
- klyrs 3y ago> You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. Maybe I'm just Italian, but if you just toss a lamb/mutton shank into your otherwise boring red sauce (which you were already cooking low and slow, right?) it goes a long way.
- nwallin 3y ago> cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting Hold on, are we talking about lamb or mutton? Lamb is extremely forgiving. It's tender and has plenty of flavor. It's fine to cook lamb hot and fast like a steak, or low and slow like basically any meat. If you treat lamb like oddly shaped beef or pork you'll be fine. Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you.
- lucideer 3y ago> Lamb is extremely forgiving I'd argue it's more a matter of degrees. Chicken is more forgiving than beef, beef more than lamb, etc. Lamb is far from "extremely" forgiving - it's just moreso than mutton. > Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you. That's all true of lamb too, just not to anywhere near the same extent as mutton.
- mark_up 3y ago> Lamb leg is extremely cheap at the moment in Australia - $10/KG In Fiji only lamb neck is that cheap.
- jounker 3y agoI beg to differ. Difficulty depends upon the recipe. Lamb/mutton tagines are incredibly easy to make. They’re basically “throw it into a slow cooker and come back eight hours later” dishes. You can improve the flavor by browning, but the simplest versions are still wonderfully delicious and basically idiot proof.
- mvdtnz 3y agoYou literally just put a seasoned lamb chop into a frying pan until it's the colour you like. There's absolutely no art to it.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoA tip from my grandpa who was a sheep farmer and roasted plenty of lamb legs: coat it in vegemite before putting it in the oven. Sounds weird and gross I know, but it creates a salty, crispy crust that keeps the juices in.
- j7ake 3y agoLamb is very robust actually. It can be cooked rare or slow cooked and anywhere in between and still be delicious because it’s often fatty and marbled.
- nf17 3y ago$10/Kg? In the US, I used to get the entire leg for ~$12-13(3.5/4kg) at African and Arab stores. The same in India would be around $30