Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

Left over from our Easter feast, we had a great many grilled lamb chops as well as a good bit of sauce poivrade. It seemed obvious to me that the best way to make use of these leftovers was to make a classic lamb stew, termed a navarin in France. A navarin is a classic Easter dish all over France, typically made with shoulder and often containing turnips, navets, after which the dish likely took its name.

Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

The classic method sees raw lamb shoulder browned and removed from the pan. Into the pan go flour and tomato paste and then a sauce is made after these two items brown. The lamb goes back into the sauce and the whole goes into the oven to braise. When done, the vegetables are usually cooked separately, at least in higher caliber restaurants, and combined with the meat and sauce just at service.

The goal is to have an unctuous and richly flavored sauce napping tender lamb and perfectly cooked vegetables. The vegetables often vary according to the season, but carrots, potatoes, turnips, and onions are fairly standard. In the spring, a navarin printanier might also include asparagus, favas, or green peas.

Beautiful Plate of Stew Vegetables

This particular navarin that I made last evening had necessarily to be made differently, given that I was starting with cooked lamb and also because at home, I am not cooking each of my vegetables separately. Moreover, I was certainly not paring them into beautiful lozenge shapes as do the high end French restaurants. Sure, I can do it, but I'm not competing for Michelin stars here, just trying to get a delicious dinner on the table as efficiently as possible.

I started by prepping the plate of vegetables you see above. Because I intended to poach them all together in lamb stock until they were just done, I paid special attention to cutting them such that they would all cook and be done at the same time. I used potatoes, carrots, celery, and halved shallots. Were I making this at the restaurant, I would have used whole tiny potatoes, tiny baby carrots, whole spring onion bulbs, baby hakurei turnips, tournéed celery root, fava beans, a couple morels, and perhaps some fern fiddleheads, each cooked separately.

Next, I boned out the lamb chops and cut it into bite-sized chunks, then made a stock using the lamb bones, vegetable trimmings (and especially the shallot skins, which give brown color to the stock), a few parsley sprigs, and the leftover sauce poivrade (glace de viande, shallots, green peppercorns, and the reduced and strained red wine lamb marinade).

At dinner time, I strained the stock and returned it to the stove at a simmer in which to poach the vegetables. Once the vegetables were nearing doneness, I seasoned the stock, added the lamb cubes, and then proceeded to thicken the sauce with an addition of glace de viande and beurre manié. It is vital, when making a dish with cooked meat, to add it at the very end, such that it just heats through.

Beurre manié (literally "handled butter," meaning kneaded butter) is equal parts room temperature butter and flour kneaded into a paste. By coating the flour with fat, the flour does not lump when added to a hot sauce. It is one of the simplest ways to thicken a hot sauce on the fly and is a technique that every cook should know.

One of the principal tricks of making dishes with highly reduced and long-cooked stocks is achieving the perfect balance so that the sauce dances across the palate rather than lying there limp and listless. I spent a lot of time with my cooks in the restaurant walking them through the process. We would taste the sauce and most often it would start dead and flat. To counter this, I use two weapons, spice and acid, acid being the primary tool.

The tiniest little hint of bite in the sauce will help perk up the taste buds and to that end, ground white pepper is the saucier's friend. A tiny bit goes a very long way because ground white pepper is very piquant. I dusted the surface of my stew with a hint of white pepper and stirred it in.

Spice aside, what really contributes to a lively sauce is acidity. All the long cooking and resulting extraction of collagens creates a palate coating and dull sauce. A tiny bit of acid will fix this. I can remember tasting a dull sauce with my cooks, adding a few drops of good Sherry vinegar to the sauce, and retasting. Watching their eyes light up at the revelation of what acid can do for a sauce was a great reward.

In the case of my sauce last night, I was prepared with Sherry vinegar at hand, but because I made the stock with leftover sauce poivrade (made from most of a bottle of red wine, plus some of the green peppercorn brine, both wine and brine being acidic), my sauce was lively enough after adding the scant amount of white pepper.

Navarin d'agneau, what a great use of leftovers!