Leg of Lamb

I've been looking for an excuse to cook a leg of lamb, but that's a lot of meat for two people, so I needed to wait for a group dinner to prepare one. I decided to cook one (the smallest leg that I could find) just recently when Ann invited Andreas and Michelle over for dinner, along with mutual friend Erika. 

Michelle, Ann, Erika, and Andreas

It Would Be Rude to Start Without Sparkling Wine
Crémant d'Alsace

It's Almost Thanksgiving!

Ann and I started coming up with ideas for a menu based around leg of lamb a few days beforehand. When I learned that Erika is a vegetarian, I wanted to make a side for the lamb that would stand in as a great vegetarian entrée. Given that I was thinking about a classic Italian marinade for the lamb, why not continue with the Italian theme, such as cannellini in the style of pasta fagioli? That's some classic, home-style comfort food and perfect for a cold, pre-Thanksgiving evening.

Ann wanted to make an appetizer too but we never did settle on anything. I thought I might make some small risotto cakes, but I heard her mention something about stuffed dates in her musings. And so I resolved that if I could find them at the store, I would bring them to her. Luckily, our store has a great selection of bulk foods including dates, so I bought some and a bit of sliced prosciutto. Below you see a photo of Ann's handywork, pitted dates stuffed with goat cheese, some wrapped in prosciutto and some not, roasted in a hot oven for about 10 minutes.

Prosciutto-Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Goat Cheese

Back to the leg of lamb. I wanted to roast a leg of lamb in part because I love it, in part because it is something that I cannot serve to every crowd (Dyce, I'm looking at you!), and in part because of the last two dinners with Michelle and Andreas. For those two dinners, Andreas wanted to see cooking in action for the first and for the second, I made a paella, which is pretty much the textbook à la minute dish, a dish that must be cooked actively just before serving.

What I really wanted was a menu that involved very little last minute cooking and that would let me socialize. I am no longer the chef who stays in the kitchen while the guests socialize and dine. When we invite people to our house, I would rather spend my time with them rather than in the kitchen, a 180-degree departure from my former life as a chef.

The leg of lamb I could butterfly (remove the bone and open up flat like a book) the day before and then marinate by placing it in a plastic bag with a mix of red wine, olive oil, and black pepper, with lots of both garlic and rosemary added for flavor. Then on the night of the dinner, all I would need to do would be to put it on a sheet tray in a hot oven until it reached 125F internal temperature, about 20-25 minutes. After it rested for 20 minutes, then I would slice it, a simple thing that would not take me away from guests. Moreover, I would precook the beans in the afternoon and then while the lamb was resting on the stove top, I could put the beans into the oven to reheat.

Roasted, Butterflied Leg of Lamb

The cannellini beans could not be simpler to make and are exactly what I make for pasta fagioli except they have no pancetta (to remain vegetarian) and no pasta (so to remain gluten-free). I started with a soffritto of leeks, carrots, and celery that I sweated in olive oil in an oven-proof pan with a lot of garlic and fresh rosemary. Once the vegetables were soft, I added a couple tablespoons of doppio concentrato tomato paste to a bare spot in the middle of the pan. After the tomato paste caramelized a bit, I deglazed with a slug of white wine, scraping all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan.

Next I added a bit of dried basil and a bunch of stemmed and sliced cavolo nero (Tuscan black kale, easily my favorite kale) along with a bit of water and about five pounds of pre-cooked beans. I let everything simmer for about twenty minutes to bring all the flavors together. Just as the lamb was coming out of the oven, I put a low flame under the beans and drizzled them with great Tuscan olive oil and freshly grated pecorino romano. Into the hot oven they went while the lamb was resting to get warm and delicious.

Cannellini in the Style of Pasta Fagioli

Erika Brought Beautiful Flowers

Do you know the best thing about leftover leg of lamb? It slices beautifully and makes the best sandwiches, such as the open-face cheesesteaks below. To make them, I sliced the lamb thinly, sliced and wilted an onion, and sliced a block of Tallegio cheese. The bread, I drizzled with olive oil and browned under the broiler and then topped with lamb, onions, and cheese. Into a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes they went to melt the cheese and warm the cold lamb through. Delicious and a great reason to roast a butterflied leg of lamb.

Open-Face Cheesesteak: Lamb, Onions, and Tallegio

Cannellini Salad with Shrimp, Olives, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Cavolo Nero

I'm blogging about this salad merely because I would like to remember it. In the course of my life, I have cooked and forgotten so many dishes, many of which I wish I could remember. Every now and then, Ann will show me a photo of a dish and I will look at it and say "That looks good!" to which she will reply, "You cooked this!" I'm afraid those are the hazards of cooking for years on end with a menu that changes nightly. 

Cannellini Salad with Shrimp, Olives, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Cavolo Nero

Now that we are in late spring here in Central Oregon, our eating habits are making their usual seasonal shift. During the winter, we frequently have a warm dish of shrimp and white beans. But when the weather turns warm, we crave cooler foods such as salads. This particular salad is along the lines of the warm dish, but everything is cool and it is dressed with a quasi-vinaigrette of lemon juice and olive oil.

This salad is really just a combination of things that I keep on hand all the time in the pantry with a bunch of cavolo nero from the refrigerator, a bunch that really needed to be eaten. You may know cavolo nero, literally "black cabbage" in Italian, by any one of a number of names: lacinato, lacinato kale, dinosaur kale, black kale, Tuscan kale, Tuscan black kale, and so forth. It is one of my favorite leaf vegetables for its great texture and flavor. Like all the sturdy leaf vegetables, it can be served raw, long-braised, or anywhere in between.

I'm giving a recipe below, but please believe me when I say that I didn't measure anything. Salads, like soups, are extremely free-form and almost anything goes.

3 - 15 ounce cans cannellini, drained

1/2 cup diced sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil

3/4 cup pitted Kalamata olives

1/4 cup fresh basil, thinly sliced en chiffonade

juice of one lemon

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon Kosher salt

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 bunch cavolo nero, destemmed and thinly sliced

4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

1 pound of medium raw shrimp, peeled and deveined

Place the beans, tomatoes, olives, basil, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and oregano in a salad bowl.

Wilt the cavolo nero in a saute pan with olive oil and the sliced garlic. When the cabbage is wilted, add 1/4 cup of water to the pan and quickly braise the cabbage until all the water is evaporated. Add the cabbage to the salad bowl.

Film the pan with more olive oil and cook the shrimp until they are just done. Season and add to the salad bowl.

Mix all the salad ingredients and adjust as you see fit, adding salt, oregano, lemon juice, or olive oil as needed.

You can serve it at this point, but the flavors will come together better if you let it stand for a half an hour on the counter. It is also delicious having spent a night in the refrigerator.

Kale and White Beans

It's full-on September now and I can feel a shift both in my cooking and what I want to eat. Stews will no doubt start to feature more prominently on this blog now, including this kale and white bean stew. This stew feels so Tuscan to me, probably because the way I make it is hardly different from Tuscan bean classics ribollita and pasta e fagioli. Seriously, add stale bread to kale and white beans and you have ribollita. Add ditalini and you have pasta fagiole. 

As good as those two dishes are, right now, we're keeping simple carbs like bread and pasta to a minimum, so it's just plain kale and white beans for us. Not just any kale and white beans though. It's cavolo nero and cannellini, both staples of the northern Italian kitchen. I like them not because they are Italian in origin, but because they are both best in class.

Kale and White Beans: Cannellini and Cavolo Nero

The initial step in almost any stew or ragout is to prep the vegetables that you will sauté and leave in the dish to lend their flavor to it. Collectively, these vegetables are known as many things in many regions: mirepoix in France and in restaurant kitchens worldwide, sofrito in the Caribbean and the Portuguese-speaking world, trinity in Cajun Louisiana, Suppengrün (soup greens) in Germany, and soffritto in Italy.

Soffritto: Vegetable Prep

My usual soffritto consists of onions, carrots, and celery. However, because of the horrid wildfire situation and not being able to get out to the farmers market for almost three weeks, the pantry was bare. Just like anyone in Italy would have done, I improvised with what I had on hand. This soffritto was a leek, two smallish carrots, half a mangy zucchini, and half a shallot. It worked.

Destemming Cavolo Nero

Next up is prepping the kale. There's nothing special to it, but there is a useful trick for destemming kale. Gently but firmly make a fist around a leaf of kale so that the naked stem base sticks out between your thumb and index finger. Then with your other hand, grasp the base of the stem and pull it out of your fist so that the leafy part stays behind. Discard the stems on the compost pile. Stack, roll, and slice the leafy green part of the kale.

My preference for kale has always been the Italian kale called cavolo nero (black cabbage). It is also known as lacinato, Tuscan black kale, and, as much as it pains me to say, dinosaur kale. Cavolo nero has great depth and complexity of flavor when compared to our usual curly kale. If you cannot find cavolo nero, use whatever you can find at your farmers market. I have used curly kale, Red Russian kale, and Brazilian couve. 

Cooking the Soffritto and Tomato Paste

Next comes the cooking of the soffritto. In a large pot, heat enough olive oil to cover the bottom, then add the soffritto vegetables along with a sprig of rosemary and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Once the onions start to go translucent, add several cloves of minced garlic (to your liking) to the mix and stir well. Clear a spot in the middle of the pan and add a tablespoon or two of tomato paste to the bare pan, spread it out a bit, and let it sit until it starts to caramelize and brown. Stir the tomato paste in well.

Tomato Paste: Brand and Pack Do Not Matter

Before I get back to the process: a word on tomato paste. I like Italian doppio concentrato (double concentrated) tomato paste in a tube and not because it is Italian and somewhat expensive. I buy it for convenience. I can squeeze out the small amount that I require for any given dish and put the remainder back in the refrigerator, unconcerned about spoilage. I gave up on cans of tomato paste decades ago. No matter how small they are, they always contain more tomato paste than I can use at one time and I don't want to fool around repackaging tomato paste.

It turns out that American tomato paste comes in cans and Italian tomato paste mainly in tubes. This is because of differences in packaging lines. We're set up for cans here in the States, whereas in Italy, they're set up for tubes. The different production lines have differing processing temperatures, higher here and lower there, so Italian paste is brighter red and fresher tasting whereas American paste is deeper colored and more cooked in flavor. Because the first step in using tomato paste is to caramelize it on the bottom of the pan, processing temperature makes no difference in the outcome of the final dish.

I have tried a lot of tomato paste brands and they're all just fine. Relative to American tomato paste, Italian paste is a lot more expensive (up to four times) but still, a tube is inexpensive to buy. If you want the convenience of a tube, buy an Italian brand. If that doesn't matter to you, buy the least expensive American brand.

Kale and White Wine Added

If you have caramelized the tomato paste well, some of it will be stuck to the bottom of the pan. To aid in getting all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan, add a glass or two of dry white wine, and scrape the bottom of the pan vigorously. Let the mixture cook for a couple of minutes to evaporate some of the alcohol. Then add the kale and wilt it a bit.

White Beans and Chicken Stock Added

Finally, add cooked white beans. This is about four pounds, a single pound of beans rehydrated and cooked. Then add chicken or vegetable to just below the surface of the beans and cook over a moderate flame until the consistency is what you want. I like a bit of liquid in my beans, but I am not aiming for it to be soupy.

Kale with White Beans

I have already walked through the process above. Here are the ingredients for a large pot of kale and white beans that will serve four people generously.

2 carrots, diced

1 large leek or one large onion, diced

1 stalk of celery, diced

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 sprig of rosemary

1 pinch red pepper flakes

1-2 tablespoons of tomato paste

1 bunch cavolo nero (about a dozen leaves), chopped

4-8 ounces of dry white wine

3-1/2 to 4 pounds of cooked cannellini

1 quart of chicken or vegetable stock (or water in a pinch)

salt to taste

Quantities of everything are adjustable to your liking or to what you have on hand. As you read earlier, I had shallot and zucchini in my last batch.

And it should go without saying that this stew is better the second day, so make it a day ahead if you have that luxury.

If I were having company over, I would garnish each bowl with a drizzle of olive oil, a bit of grated pecorino, and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes.

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.