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Mutton doesn't fit much our western traditional cooking esthetics where we want tasty but subtle. Lamb and mutton are for different types of recipes. As a fren
by julienmarie 3y ago
Mutton doesn't fit much our western traditional cooking esthetics where we want tasty but subtle. Lamb and mutton are for different types of recipes. As a french guy selling and importing high end food in South East Asia, I've tasted quite a wide array of lambs.
The best lamb is young, but not too young. I'm not a fan of milk-fed lamb where I feel there is quite no taste. The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old. Agneau de Sisteron is a gem. You don't need to be highly skilled to cook it. For cutlets, just pan sear until pink inside. For roast and leg, oven, basted with salt olive oil, some garlic cloves inserted inside the meat. It's truly magnificent.
The older the animal, the bolder the recipes it needs. The best lamb/mutton I've ever had was in Marocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds. So tender it was served from the bone with a spoon. You'll notice that mutton is always cooked in a way to counter balance the strong muttony flavour and sublime it with contrasts. Mutton curries are also delicious for the same reason.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xattt 3y ago[flagged]
- firen777 3y agoyou /s, but the parent comment makes me wonder where in the hell is lab grown meat now.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> I prefer my meat to be ... labeled with words no longer than 5 letters and two syllables Slain pals? Surely that would sell. (There’s a lot of words for “murder” but not many with 5 or fewer letters. Same with “friend”. A thesaurus is only so helpful.)
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y agoWhen I was working construction in Singapore, I used to get mutton biryanis with my field guys. The rice and mutton came wrapped in waxed paper along with a bag of pappadams and a separate bag of "gravy." Insanely delicious and cheap. The only problem was being comatose after such a heavy lunch.
- paulmooreparks 3y agoYes! Mutton biryani and mutton steak (for the uninitiated, that's not what you think it is) are my go-to orders. At any hawker centre I usually make a beeline for the Indian Muslim stall. Of course, as you say, office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems. (Mutton steak - https://www.burpple.com/f/qylhoopk https://www.burpple.com/f/qylhoopk)
- darth_avocado 3y agoThe mutton here references to goat
- resolutebat 3y agoBoth are eaten in Singapore. Unhelpfully, the Malay term "kambing" can refer to either, and consequently so can "mutton". Generally speaking, locally sourced kambing will be goat (it's too hot for sheep in the tropics), but from NZ etc it will be sheep.
- davidw 3y ago> office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems. Reminds me of traditional food in Innsbruck, Austria. It's great if you, say, work in the snowy forests 12 hours a day doing hard labor, but those calories are not real healthy if you're sedentary.
- ur-whale 3y agoI suspect he was not just talking about the calories, as they are other side effects to these type of dishes.
- cachvico 3y ago> in Morocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds That's gonna be Mrouzia :)
- hackernewds 3y agoit's interesting that the article is about mutton, however a lot of comments here are about sheep/lamb. very curious, why not goat?
- palmfacehn 3y agoThe original meaning of mutton is an adult sheep. In English I don't believe there is a proper name for goat meat other than "goat meat". In some areas of the Anglosphere mutton is used to refer to goat meat.
- phlakaton 3y agoSome local curry restaurants in the Bay Area use goat for recipes that call for mutton, and sell it as mutton curry – but I assume that's because mutton is not an option...
- defrost 3y agoIf you visit areas with less domesticated animals that forage semi wild with shepards that check in now and again you might struggle to tell the difference between a sheep and a goat - the varieties of each are broader than many people realise and there is a considerable degree of visual overlap in the full spectrum of Sheep Vs. Goat.
- willvarfar 3y agoSheep and goats are so skeletally similar that archaeologists can't easily tell the difference. I just googled and there are signs like the third cusp of the third molar etc but I remember an archaeologist telling me that they just refer to them as sheepgoats, as though there was some mystical single type in antiquity.
- fractalb 3y agoGreat, you get goat meat when you order mutton in the Bay Area? Here where I live, people sell mutton (sheep/lamb) even when asked for goat meat. I don't know why but people here always prefer goat meat to mutton.
- worthless-trash 3y agoAustralia and New Zealand have Western traditional aesthetics, Lamb and mutton are common here. What changed here ?
- skissane 3y ago> Australia and New Zealand have Western traditional aesthetics, Lamb and mutton are common here. What changed here ? In my personal experience, mutton is not common in contemporary Australia. My local supermarkets (Woolworths and Coles) stock lamb, but I don’t remember either of them ever selling mutton. Maybe some specialty butchers might stock it, I don’t know, there isn’t much culture of eating it among the younger generations. That said, I imagine if I went back in a time machine to the 1950s or earlier, it would be much easier to find mutton in Australia. Only time - that I can recall - ever eating “mutton” was in India - and I’ve been told that a lot of Indian “mutton” isn’t actually mutton, it is goat. You can buy goat meat here, most supermarkets don’t, but I’ve seen it in specialty butchers
- mark_up 3y ago[dead]
- reddit_clone 3y agoCan confirm. Most part of southern India, 'mutton' refers to goat meat. Sheep or Lamb have to be specified specially.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoOMG, every time we visit Grandma we hear the stories about the difference between Lamb and Mutton and that that, actually, everything we buy these days in Mutton and they stopped labeling it mutton because Lamb is more expensive. And nothing is as good at it used to be.
- worthless-trash 3y agoI can get mutton from my local Inala butchers earlier this month, slow cooked for a full day. I never though they were specialty.
- hef19898 3y agoSome of the best mutton I ever head were curries in India, fresh from a farm in NZ, Ireland or Iceland and from those road side bbq places in Tunesia. Since we love it, we have it quite often at home, either as minced meat (sometimes mixed with beef) for all kinds of stuff or from tje bbq. Since mutton is not such a common thing for Germans, if you want good one, you have to get from Turkish butchers. The honey and almond thing is something to try for sure!
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- plugin-baby 3y ago> Some of the best mutton I ever head were curries in India In India is mutton usually goat? That was my experience in south India.
- elSidCampeador 3y ago> In India is mutton usually goat? It depends on which part of India you're in. The parts where sheep are reared will serve sheep. The others will sell goat (but will label it as `lamb')
- nf17 3y agoI can't speak for the entire south, but it is usually goat in most part of Tamil Nadu except a few areas.
- srean 3y agoMutton is almost always goat meat in India. Sheep meat is labeled lamb.
- mharig 3y agoJust googled a recipe for Mrouzia (in German): https://www.ziiikocht.at/2012/06/mrouzia-sues-lammfleisch-mit-honig-und.html?m=1 https://www.ziiikocht.at/2012/06/mrouzia-sues-lammfleisch-mi...
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agohow....can you eat lamb that is still pink? i come from india where the stuff is boiled and roasted for hours and hours and hours and hours.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoAs far as I know, for any type of meat it will go from soft to hard and then back to soft as you go from short to long cooking times. So lamb cooked to pink is quite delicious. But if you want it cooked all the way through, you have to go for a very long time to get back to a nice texture. And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades. Here in Scandinavia our traditional dishes involving lamb are also based on boiling or steaming the meat for many hours. If you had offered my late grandfather a piece of lamb that was pink inside, he would have refused to eat it.
- resolutebat 3y agoThat's also because the primary function of sheep in Scandinavia was to provide wool, so they would be deep in mutton territory by the time they were slaughtered and require low & slow cooking to make the meat edible.
- teruakohatu 3y ago> And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades. Is this true? People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever. Maybe it was more a cultural thing in Scandinavia to boil or steam. I certainly know people who order New Zealand grass bed beef steak well done (while the waiter cringes). On the other hand if you offered me pink chicken I would be revolted.
- tpm 3y ago
- OJFord 3y agoLamb and mutton are perfectly common & popular in the UK.
- pjc50 3y agoLamb is common (mostly from New Zealand), mutton and goat much less so. But mutton does work extremely well in "lamb" curries.
- OJFord 3y agoI didn't say anything about goat, but mutton is common/popular enough to be available in supermarkets (nevermind actual butchers, as you might have to go to for some game or a particular cut or something). The comment I replied to claimed that Americans don't eat mutton because it's unsuited to 'Western cuisine'. Lamb and mutton are no stranger to British roasts, pies, stews, etc. - we don't even have to introduce 'curry'.
- riffraff 3y agoItalian has different words for "grass-eating lamb" and "milk-only lamb" (agnello vs abbacchio). Alas, few people even know there's a difference.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThank you to share! Real question: Can you taste the difference? Would it only be obvious to a food expert?
- agos 3y agoI think in a side to side test it should be subtle but clear
- Arrath 3y agoSimilar to the difference in grass fed vs corn fed beef, I imagine.
- riffraff 3y agoI think so, plus the bone/chunk size differs, lambs grow fast. But it could be just self-convincing. I have noticed stronger taste difference between different producers/restaurants than between different ages tbh.
- mvdtnz 3y agoAs a New Zealanders who grew up in lamb, what a bunch of pretentious bullshit.
- resolutebat 3y agoAs a North European from a country where sheep are raised for wool and the meat is near-inedible, I can absolutely attest that there are huge differences in the texture and taste of lamb and mutton.
- jeltz 3y agoNear inedible is an exaggeration, I do not mind mutton at all and find it quite tasty, but it is indeed very different from lamb.
- resolutebat 3y agoThe problem is not that it's mutton, the problem is that sheep bred for wool are not the same as sheep bred for meat. Plus said country doesn't really have a tradition for cooking mutton, other than "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours".
- mvdtnz 3y agoAre you saying New Zealand ("said country") doesn't have a tradition for cooking mutton? You are dead wrong on that. It may be a little out of fashion today but mutton has been a kiwi staple for generations. You can still reliably find mutton in any given supermarket and mutton cookery goes well beyond "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours". Your post is incredibly ignorant.
- resolutebat 3y agoI think you missed the "As a North European" part.
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- nicolas_t 3y agoSorry, let me pause here for a minute and highlight the fact that this article talks about Mutton in the US which is not traditionally known for "tasty but subtle". I. think that the "tasty but subtle" cooking esthetic is not necessarily "western" or western is to broad a term. It's the cooking esthetic of Cantonese cuisine (eastern), Japanese food (specifically Kaiseki), French food and Teo Chew cuisine to a lesser extent (more seasoned than Cantonese cuisine). It's also seen in other countries in Europe but less so (more often as part of the fine dining which has been influenced by the legacy of French cuisine) Note that while I, personally, mostly tend to like "tasty but subtle", it doesn't mean that I criticize or dislike other cuisine which have their own advantages. And, lastly, as a kid living in a French rural area, I had my share of mutton (which I absolutely detested back then but now can appreciate)...
- justinator 3y agoIt has a changed quite drastically but I (n=1) was raised on Julia Child cookbooks, so tasty (and rich!) but subtle could probably still describe my palette. Traveling France, everything I ate out seemed so familiar and wholesome but it took a lunch of duck to realize why in a lightbulb moment. Child was so influential I doubt I’m alone. I’d eat mutton in a heartbeat (now and as a child) though maybe more because the Hobbit and dwarves did too!
- nicolas_t 3y agoThat's interesting. After watching the movie based on Julia Child's life I was always interested to know how much it had an impact on cooking in the US.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIt's because tastes have evolved, not because of "Western tradition" (whatever that means) per se. Many dishes that can be called "traditional" have fell out of favour.
- bandrami 3y agoHow much of the issue is that in the US yearlings are still sold as "lamb"?
- clan 3y agoWhile I do agree that mutton requires more hardy recipes I strongly disagree about the subtle esthetics of western cusine as such. If that was the case we would all crave goat. A young goat is very tender and delicate. It can probably be found but I have personally never seen it in a shop. I only tried it because a family member keeps them as pets. Another case could be made for the horse. It used to be a working animal and we would happily eat it. But today it is very hard to come by even though it is really tasty. And many would today look at you as if you suggested eating a dog. And let us not even go there :-)
- falsandtru 3y ago> western traditional cooking esthetics where we want tasty but subtle [in America] It means BBQ?
- gadders 3y agoIn the UK there is also "hogget" [1] which is a halfway house between lamb and mutton. Our neighbour raises mountain sheep (mainly because they are hardier and don't need as much help to give birth) that are smaller than commercial sheep. As a result, they weren't really big enough to eat as lamb but were very tasty as hogget. [1] https://www.salterandking.co.uk/blogs/news/what-is-hogget https://www.salterandking.co.uk/blogs/news/what-is-hogget