Rack of Lamb from Hell

Recently, I happened to find a rack of lamb at an affordable price and decided to make a great meal out of it. I also brought home from the farmers market a bunch of cavolo nero and a quart of new potatoes, stopping by the store for a bottle of Nebbiolo, probably our very favorite varietal. This was going to be a celebratory meal: we just can't afford rack of lamb or Nebbiolo very often.

Rack of Lamb, Roasted New Potatoes, Cavolo Nero

It's not often that I cook a restaurant-quality meal at home. I don't have the ingredients, the kitchen, the staff, a commercial dish machine, or, if I'm being honest, the driven desire to do it any longer. But every once in a while, I do like to make a great meal for my favorite diner, Annie. I don't do it to impress her: she's seen all my tricks by now. I do it because I want to do it for her; in short, it's the principal way that I show her that I love her.

You'd think that with me being a chef, that everything would go along just great in the kitchen. You'd be wrong. Life happens to chefs too, but I think we're probably more accustomed to stuff going wrong in the kitchen and figuring out how to get dinner on the table anyway. The photo below is proof of that.

At the restaurant, when things would go wrong, I was so focused on solving the problem while managing an entire kitchen and a board full of checks that I had no time or energy for getting upset. Here at home, however, when things go wrong, I have plenty of time to get mired in anger and rant and fume.

I'm having a hard time letting go of the mindset that everything must be perfect. That's hard to do after a career in an industry that expects perfection and is unforgiving of even small mistakes. Restaurant Gods forbid that lamb chops go out medium instead of medium rare: you're going to get crucified on the review sites.

When you own a small restaurant and you and your staff depend on you to keep the doors open, the pressure to avoid negative reviews that might slow traffic is overwhelmingly intense. That pressure cooker mentality is not good for anyone's mental health.

So, while this is a story of how to prep a frenched lamb rack like you might find in a restaurant, it is also the story of a cascading series of problems that erupted while putting this dinner together. It is also an introspective story in my quest to let go of the restaurant mindset. It's not a particularly noble story, but it is an honest one.

Lamb Rack as Bought

So here is the lamb rack, before it turned into the rack from hell, just as it came from the butcher. It has been frenched by cutting away the meat from the tips of the bones. While most people would be satisfied with this lamb rack as is, I'm used to running a restaurant at a higher caliber. For my standards, there is way too much fat cap left on the rack and the bones are not nearly clean enough. You can see how especially sloppily the first bone has been frenched.

Trimmed Lamb Rack

I spent about ten minutes prepping the rack, a not insignificant amount of labor. First, I trimmed the fat cap back to what I wanted. I didn't want all the fat on top because I wanted to put a crust on the rack. In addition, there is another layer of fat that you cannot see below this top layer. You can see this in the first photo where I have cut the rack into chops. Also, you can see the pile of trimmings that I have removed from the so-called cleaned bones by scraping them down with a knife.

Mustard Glaze Ingredients

For this presentation, I wanted to coat the rack in breadcrumbs and to get the breadcrumbs to adhere to the meat, I made a glaze of mustard, olive oil, rosemary, and garlic. This is a classic French technique that you can detect from the phrase à la diable, in the style of the devil, on old-school menus. The reference to the devil results from the spicy piquancy of the mustard.

 

Mustard Glaze

I use olive oil to thin the mustard mix to the point where I can brush it on the lamb rack. I coated both the top and bottom sides of the meat and then rolled the rack in panko, pressing the panko into the mustard glaze. Other breading will work, but I really prefer the crust that panko gives. Panko for the restaurant came in the same size bags as 50-pounders of flour. We used to blow through those giant bags of panko.

Breaded Rack of Lamb

You can see the breaded rack above. I don't put breadcrumbs on the end, but you could if you wanted. It would be more difficult, but not impossible, to brown the breadcrumbs on the ends.

Seared Rack of Lamb

Next up, I browned the rack in a pan, to give the breadcrumbs some color and to firm the crust. Here is where things started to go south. I don't have a pan that is big enough to really sear the rack, as you can see from the bones hanging over the edge of the pan. Also, on the far left of the photo, you can see where a lot of the crust fell off. I was getting pretty irritated at this point, asking myself quite loudly why I put all this effort into dinner, just to have it start falling apart. To be fair, I was raging.

Back in the restaurant days, we would keep mustard and panko handy. We'd repair the damage and brown the patched spots by basting them with boiling oil until they were as browned as the rest of the crust. I just wasn't equipped to do this at home, having already cleaned up the breading station.

I was so invested in the labor in prepping the lamb rack to this point that I got really torqued, beyond any rational basis. All the while, Annie kept urging me to let it go and telling me that it didn't have to be perfect.

New Potatoes and Rosemary, Ready to Roast

A few minutes before the lamb went into the oven, I put the new potatoes in to roast and gave the cavolo nero a quick sear. Cavolo nero, black cabbage in Italian, is also called lacinato, Tuscan black kale, and dinosaur kale, my least favorite name for this wonderful green. I'll have to do a post on it sometime. It took years at the restaurant to find someone who would grow it for us. Once I found that person, cavolo nero was a near constant on the menu.

Roasted Rack of Lamb, Resting

When the potatoes were about halfway done, I put the lamb rack in the oven. This is where things really, really started to piss me off. Not using my brain, I put the lamb rack on a sizzle platter, as I have done a million times before at the restaurant.

This reminds me of a table of 18 people, 14 of whom ordered lamb racks. And naturally, they ordered them all five temperatures from rare to well done. It's pretty intense not only to cook fourteen racks simultaneously, but to time them such that they all come up to different temperatures at the same time. And then there is the small problem of keeping track of which is which. I was a crazy lamb-cooking chef that night!

This night, however, I thought to go sit down with Ann while the rack roasted to temperature. Shortly after doing so, she asked me, "Why is smoke pouring out of the oven?" And before I could get to the oven, the smoke detector started blaring and would continue to go off for the next ten minutes.

If you think I was irritated by the crust falling off, that was nothing compared to opening the oven, being blinded by smoke, and seeing a pool of lamb fat burning on the bottom of the oven, all the while being serenaded by the @#%$#! deafening klaxon of the smoke detector.

Remember the second layer of fat that I mentioned earlier? It started melting in the heat of the oven and ran down the bones which, of course, were hanging over the edge of the sizzle platter. Drip, drip, drip all over the scorching gas flame cover at the bottom of the oven. Idiot!

I transferred the rack to a sheet tray, like I should have done in the first place. And while cleaning molten fat from the bottom of the blazing oven while the gas was roaring, in not quite my finest hour, I yelled obscenities at the f'ed up nature of our kitchen, our super-sensitive smoke detector, the shitty ventilation, and less than ideal home cookware.

With Annie's soothing words, I finally got myself calmed enough to move on with dinner.

Timing lamb racks, especially whole 7- or 8-bone racks, is tricky. One end of the rack is much larger than the other. Half racks, 3- or 4-bone racks, are a lot easier because the size difference between the two ends is much smaller. It's the same for the rack of any animal, but larger racks such as pork, elk, or beef are so much bigger that the timing is not nearly so critical. Antelope racks are smaller and also a bit trickier to time.

When I cook a whole lamb rack, I am looking to take the rack out of the oven when the large end is still bleeding rare. After resting, it will finish medium rare while the small end will end up an acceptable and juicy medium. When I plate a whole rack for two, I divide the chops between the two plates so that each diner gets some less done chops and some more done chops.

When the large end of the lamb rack reached 118F, I pulled it and set it up on the cutting board to rest for 20 minutes. There is no profit in cutting a roast right out of the oven. It will bleed out all over. To allow for resting, you need to count on an additional 5-7 degrees cook up while it rests, which is why I pulled the rack when the large end was very rare. As you can see in the photo, it ended up at very pretty medium rare, just where I wanted it.

Reducing Petit Verdot

While the rack was resting, I went about making a sauce, a modified beurre rouge, a classic French butter sauce. To do so, I reduced a glass of inky dark Petit Verdot until it was syrupy and then stirred in a couple large spoonfuls of the leftover mustard glaze which thickened quickly. I set the pan on the counter to cool, an important step for making any butter sauce.

Red Wine and Mustard Reduction

When I was ready to finish the sauce, I put it back on a moderate flame and added enough water to thin it so that I could whisk it. As I was gently warming the sauce, I whisked in a couple tablespoons of ice cold butter, cut into small cubes. As the butter melts, it thickens the sauce. You have to do this at cool temperatures or the butter sauce will break, leaving a separated oily mess in the pan. So it is always best to let your pan cool before trying to finish the sauce with butter.

 

Finishing the Beurre Rouge

Finally, I plated everything while Annie poured us glasses of Nebbiolo. Being retired, our budget rarely stretches to afford Barolo or high-end Barbaresco, so we have to drink around the edges of the area. And Vietti makes a great declassified Nebbiolo that can only be labeled as Langhe Rosso. For the budget conscious Nebbiolo fan, year in and year out, Perbacco is a smart buy.

The plate up was simple as you can see in the photo at the very top of this post. I put a bit of cavolo nero on top of a pile of roasted potatoes in the middle of a large plate. Then after making a teepee of lamb chops around the potatoes, I napped the edges with the beurre rouge.

Vietti Perbacco, A Great Inexpensive Nebbiolo

In the end, after all the disappointment and fuming on my part, the rack from hell provided a wonderful, sumptuously luxurious meal, our first in a very long time. I thank Annie for putting up with my irritability.

Revisiting the beginning of this post, I see part of my problem letting go. Annie is not a diner; she's my wife. She's not reviewing my food on Yelp. She's my biggest cheerleader and her dinner doesn't have to be perfect. She loves me regardless. And paying our mortgage no longer depends on what comes out of the kitchen. Someday, I hope to really take that to heart. It's an ongoing struggle.

As for dinners from hell, remind me sometime to regale you with the story of the packed house Saturday night when we had to, unknown to guests, shut the kitchen down to fight a blazing grill fire. For twenty long minutes, nothing came out of the kitchen, a night that I will never forget and one that puts my trivial lamb rack trials in perspective.