Home | Contents | Recipe toc > Slow-roast lamb
RimJournal: Recipes
There is very little shrinkage. If you are used to having a lot of pan juices for gravy, you will have to use stock instead. The idea is that the temperature of the oven is set to the finished internal temperature of the meat. It will take approximately 3 times as long to cook a roast this way compared to the usual methods. An oven thermometer is needed to check the actual temperature of your oven, as well as a meat thermometer to insert into the center of your roast, well away from any bones.
The finished internal temperature for:
Although you can set the meat on a rack in the roasting pan, I prefer to very coarsely chop an onion into the pan and set the roast on that. Brush or spray the roast lightly with vegetable oil. (Other possibilities are olive oil or bacon strips.) I lay fresh rosemary sprigs across the top. This makes the house smell wonderful all day long. Laura Martin in Wewak, PNG sets a pan of water in the bottom of the oven.
If you are concerned about killing any bacteria and especially if you want rare meat (say a beef roast), heat the meat for 1 hour at 250 degrees F (120 degrees C) and then reduce the oven temperature to the finished internal temperature.
You can actually put a roast in the oven the night before or early in the morning, and forget about it. Set the oven temperature anywhere between 140 degrees F and the finished temperature. The longer it cooks, the more tender it will be. It won't burn, it won't get overdone. When you come back, check the internal temperature and depending on when you want to serve it, adjust the oven temperature up or down a bit.
Remove the meat from the oven and let it rest a few minutes before carving.
Vegetables such as potatoes or carrots will need to be cooked separately. I usually cut them into a little chicken broth and microwave them. Then I add the onions from the roast into the vegetables and crumble the rosemary over both before serving.
Sheep were controversial in the American West and small scale, but murderous wars like the Pleasant Valley War in northern Arizona, broke out between the cattlemen and the sheepmen. One of the last murders in that war took place in the courtroom during the trial when the wife of the murdered man pulled out her concealed gun and shot the accused killer. Basque sheepherders were brought from Spain, because they were the only men who were dependable out on the open range for months at a time.
My favorite is Australian or New Zealand lamb in a Greek restaurant, but slow oven-roasting makes lamb, or any other roast, always tender and juicy. This method of cooking any roast is modified from Adelle Davis's Let's Cook It Right. My mother brought us up on Adelle Davis, but as a graduate student and later as a starving artist, I never had money to buy a roast, so I forgot how she cooked them. I rediscovered this method in my mother's copy of Davis's book and made a few changes.
RimJournal Home | Contents | top of page
Contact us
Photographs, artwork and text are copyright © Carolyn Leigh, 1996-2022. All rights reserved.
https://www.rimjournal.com/recipes/mains/lamb.htm
RimJournal, Tucson, AZ, USA at https://www.rimjournal.com/