Lamb Stew

There's nothing really novel about lamb stew. At heart, it's quite a humble dish of lamb, vegetables, and gravy. But there is a vast difference between how professionals and home cooks approach this dish. And a vast difference in the finished dish as a result.

Carefully Constructed Lamb Stew

At home, one often cooks all the stew ingredients together, meat and vegetables until done and then thickens (or highly reduces) the cooking liquid. The vegetables will likely go all at once into the pot once the meat is cooked to avoid overcooking them.

On the other hand, at a high-end restaurant, each ingredient will be pre-cooked just to the point of doneness, combined with a meticulously-made gravy when the dish is ordered, and reheated before service. In this way, each of the constituent ingredients is cooked perfectly with nothing overcooked.

Here's a sketch of how I made this batch of lamb stew which is pretty much identical to how we would have made it at the restaurant, if we could have sold something as pedestrian as stew. Fine dining customers, especially those for whom such a meal is an unusual splurge, usually want to order something "luxurious" that they can brag about to their friends: steak, lobster, foie gras, etc.

This tendency makes it really hard to sell something such as a stew, which you must do if you are running a nose-to-tail restaurant like ours that was based on whole animal butchery. Selling the non-glamorous parts of the animal at such a restaurant involves a precise combination of wording on the menu and pricing ("menu engineering"), but that is a topic that would require an entire chapter in a foodservice textbook. It is a topic in which I am highly versed but which is way beyond the scope of this, or any, blogpost. If you're a chef reading this and need help, I do consult.

Step 1: Make a Great Stock

To make the stock, I had been saving scraps of meat and bones over the last few days. This stock was made from lamb trimmings, steak trimmings, the backbones from spatchcocking game hens, the bones leftover from the roast game hens, and a few chunks of pork neckbones.

To start, toss the bones and some aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery, onions in chunks) with oil and roast in a hot oven (400-450), turning as necessary, until the bones and vegetables are really well browned. 

Stock Bones Before Roasting

Well-Caramelized Bones After Roasting

Once the bones were roasted (about 45 minutes with four turns at about 400F), I removed them to the stock pot, covered them with water, and then poured very hot water onto the sheet tray and scraped up all the brown bits (what we call in chef-ese the fond or "bottom" in French). I then poured the water and brown bits into the stock pot so as not to lose any flavor.

If I were making a super-fancy stock, I would pour lamb stock over the bones instead of water, which would be called a double-stock. I often make chicken soup by cooking raw chicken in chicken stock, yielding a double stock just to get a more intense chicken flavor, our poultry in the US largely being bland.

Once the bones and liquid are in the stock pot, I added other flavorings such as leek leaves, onion peels, parsley stems, a sprig of rosemary, and a couple sprigs of thyme. These items add depth of flavor; the onion peels also add brown color and they were used as a dye in olden days. I often collect these bits in a bag in the freezer to add to my stocks.

Step 2: Prepare Each Ingredient Separately

Once the stock had cooked slowly for about 4-5 hours, I removed it from the heat, strained out the solids, and returned the stock to the stockpot. While the stock was coming back to a light boil, I cut into bite-sized cubes the remainder of a lamb shoulder that I had roasted to medium rare.

I then cut a couple yellow potatoes and a couple large carrots into the same size pieces as the lamb and poached first the potatoes and then the carrots in the stock until they were done. Then I put a bag of frozen pearl onions into the stock to cook. I am not ashamed to admit that I use frozen pearl onions; the labor and cost savings in using them is immense.

At the restaurant, we would have focused on using baby vegetables rather than cut ones, just to up the wow factor of the dish. I would have asked my growers to harvest tiny carrots and new potatoes and my crew and I would have probably stood around and peeled small shallots in place of the pearl onions.

It's likely we might have used baby hakurei turnips and tiny chanterelle mushrooms as well, in the appropriate seasons. All these ingredients and all this work would yield what we call in chef-ese a very soigné ("carefully prepared" in French) dish, but man, that's too much expense and labor for home cooking!

Mid-Stream in Cooking Each Ingredient Separately

Step 3: Finish the Gravy and Reheat the Stew

Once all the vegetables were cooked in the stock (and thereby lent their flavors to the stock), I then continued to reduce the original gallon and a half (six quarts, roughly 5.5 liters) down to the final volume of gravy that I wanted, concentrating the flavors. I then seasoned the stock with salt and white pepper to taste. You really don't want to season a stock before it is reduced because you'll end up concentrating the seasoning and will end up with an oversalted stock.

A professional hint that I have passed on to many, many young cooks: if your highly reduced stock tastes flat, add a drop or two of vinegar (I like sherry vinegar for this) and see how that helps. Highly reduced stocks are likely to be flat and bland because of the highly concentrated amount of gelatin that they contain. Acid will bring new life to such a stock.

Once I seasoned my stock to my taste, I made a batch of beurre manié, roughly equal parts flour and room temperature butter kneaded into a paste. Kneading the flour and the butter creates a great sauce thickener that you can whisk into a stock, eliminating any worry of lumps in your sauce.

I added small lumps of beurre manié to my simmering sauce, whisking it in, until the gravy was as thick as I wanted. A decent rule of thumb is that one tablespoon of flour and one tablespoon of butter will thicken one cup of liquid to a heavy cream consistency.

A lot of chefs will skip the beurre manié altogether, opting to sauce their meat and vegetables with a glace or demi-glace, both highly concentrated and very thick stocks. I find these sauces to be too thick and too sticky for my liking, but that's just me. YMMV: your mileage may vary.

All that is left is to combine the stew ingredients with the gravy and reheat. You can do this in any fashion; this time, I put everything into a casserole and reheated it in the oven. At the restaurant, we would have assembled an individual portion up on the range top and then put the hot stew in an oven-proof serving dish into a very hot oven for five minutes or so before calling for a runner to take it to the dining room. [More than likely, we would have covered it with a sheet of puff pastry and baked it until the pastry was golden and risen.]

Lamb Stew, Ready to Serve

These are a few hints on how a professional chef might approach a humble stew with an eye to elevating it slightly. There's nothing difficult about this method, but it does involve a significant amount of time to do. If you have time to do this, it will elevate your stew game. If not, at least you may better appreciate all the pains to which chefs go to assemble even the most humble of dishes for you.