Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder
Feb 10th, 2008 by Paul
A month or so ago I bought an offset smoker, and I’ve been experimenting with a few different cuts of meat in it, This weekend I decided to do a fairly sizeable ( nearly 3kg ) whole shoulder of Lamb. This should have been a cheap cut of meat, but the butcher actually charged me more for it than he was selling legs of Lamb for, a bit strange, but I prefer shoulder for a slow roast anyway.
I saw an Episode of Jamie @ Home where he made an awesome looking Slow Lamb dish, so I decided to follow it as a rough guide ( going from memory ). The end result is amazing! I made a Mint and Caper Gravy to go with it too. I used a few chunks of hickory and uncovered the meat briefly to get some smoke into it, but I won’t cover that in the recipe, as most people don’t have a smoker.
Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder
- 1 Shoulder of Lamb
- Big bunch of Rosemary
- 2 whole garlics
- Olive Oil
- Salt and Pepper
- half mug of red wine
break up the garlic into cloves and crush them with the flat of your knife, chuck out any loose bits of skin, but don’t bother peeling them. Scatter about half the Rosemary and half the garlic on the bottom of a large roasting pan.
Cut a criss-cross of lines into the fatty side of the lamb shoulder, and rub olive oil all over. Season well all over with salt and pepper. Put this fat side up into the pan. Cover with the rest of the rosemary and garlic. Put the mug of red wine in the pan and cover the whole thing with foil.
Put this in a slow oven ( 150-170 C ) and cook for 4 hours. At this point push a meat thermometer into the meat and keep cooking until it reads 75 C or so.
Remove from the oven and wrap the lamb in foil to rest it.
Gravy
Pour the juices from the pan into a saucepan, cover and put in the fridge. Chuck out the rosemary from the bottom of the pan, but leave the garlic. Smush the garlic with a spoon to squeeze the flesh out. When the juices have cooled and the fat has formed a solid skin, take it out of the fridge and throw out the fat solids. Put the pan over a medium heat and pour in the juices ( or if you’ve used a foil pan like I did, give it a scrape and pour from it into the saucepan ). Stir it well. Pour in the red wine from earlier and scrape to make sure all the tasty stuff is mixed in. add about a cup of chicken stock and simmer for a few minutes.
Add a table spoon of flour and stir well, pour gravy through a fine seive and press down on the solids to get all the flavours out of them, pour back into your saucepan over a low heat. Chop up some mint leaves and throw in with about 2 tablespoons of rinsed capers. Take off the heat. Carve the lamb and serve with the gravy.
My camera is missing the gravy photos .. damn … sorry!
