Roast Leg of Lamb with Joan's Accompaniments

I made the roast leg of lamb early one morning (to avoid heating the kitchen) and served it cold with salads in the evening for my old dear friends Kim and Stephen.

I grew up in a cooking culture that cooked all cuts of meat to well done, braised or pot roast style, mostly, and thought the tougher cuts had more flavour. I have had to teach myself how to cook better cuts of meat medium rare.

I cannot forget the image of my a pasture with 6 lambs that my Australian friend, Heather, painted. She and her husband eat only lamb and only lamb that they grow themselves. Every year they buy 6 lambs and then take each one to the abbatoir as the freezer empties. My dream come true --- my own grass-fed lamb all year round. MMMM!

I find Stongs nearly always has some kind of special on for lamb. This week it was fresh Australian leg of lamb. You can also use shoulder of lamb. You always want bone and fat in the meat because that's where the flavour and the nutrients are located.

Health benefits:

Lamb has incredible health benefits especially if it's 100% grass-fed as described in the excerpt below from http://www.mountvernonfarm.net/benefits.html My friend Patrick tells me that eating lamb is a good bet since most lamb is grass-fed. Nowadays, apparently the Australians are also turning to grain finishing. Too bad. Also, Patrick advises me not worry about lamb being tough as it is like pork, always tender.

Don't forget now, eat all the fat to get the health benefits of CLA for your heart and to prevent cancer. You can read more about the benefits of animal fat in Jennifer McLagan's great cookbook called fat.

Mount Vernon Farm website extract

In ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, bison, deer, etc.), feeding grain — even if the grain is organic — produces meats that are not as healthy as 100% grass-fed meats because feeding just a little grain reduces the health benefits of the meat. Grass-fed meat is a lean, flavorful health food. It provides you with high levels of the antioxidant Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which may be one of our most potent defenses against cancer. CLA also fights and reduces obesity, heart disease, “bad” cholesterol, adult onset diabetes, and many other ailments.

Synthetic CLA is available in health food stores, but CLA in its natural form (from 100% grass-fed meat) is 600 times more biologically available to your body, according to Professor T.R. Dhiman of Utah State University as published in the Stockman Grass Farmer Magazine.

Grass-fed meat also has six times the amount of ‘good’ Omega-3 fatty acids, the proper 1:1 ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty-acids (the ratio found in plants; a ratio higher than 1:4 is detrimental to your health and grain-fed meat can have a ratio as high as 1:14), and four times the amount of vitamins E and A than grain-fed meat.

Grass-fed products also contain Activator X, a powerful catalyst only found in animal fats that helps your body absorb and utilize minerals.

All these benefits of pasture finished meat come with about the same amount of fat as skinless chicken, and at a fraction of the calories of grain-fed meat. You will want to eat the fat as that is where most of the benefits are concentrated. This is a super food that tastes great and is reasonably priced, especially when considering the extra nutrients in our meat. You would have to eat five to six servings of grain-fed meat to equal the nutrient intake from one serving of grass-fed, and you would be consuming all that additional, unneeded poor-quality fat and calories as well.

Cooking tips:

I have learned to use a meat thermometer. Patrick can just look at the meat and press it with his finger and know whether is is done. I like this traditional idea, but just don't trust myself yet. In any case, don't over cook lamb because it will shrink considerably. When you look at lamb that is done to medium rare, it will have shrunk a little (the bone will stick out slightly).
Gently press the tip of your middle finger and your thumb together. With the other hand, feel the fleshy area below the thumb. This is medium rare.

For comparison here's how the range goes (not that we would cook lamb that way):
Little finger to thumb - well done (quite firm)
Ring finger to thumb - medium (gives a little)
Middle finger to thumb - medium rare (gives a little more)
Index finger to thumb - rare (gives a lot)
This website explains it in detail:
http://elise.com/recipes/archives/007259the_finger_test_to_check_the_doneness_of_meat.php
Best of this blog:

I use a similar method using my face. If it's the softness of my cheek, it's rare; my chin, medium and my forehead, well done. It'd work a treat if I didn't keep getting distracted and forgetting that I'm cooking at all!

Keep in mind that it takes a piece of meat, any meat, a while to go from raw to medium rare, yet little time to go from medium rare to absolutely inedible hammered well done. My best advice is to pay attention to the juice. When a steak or burger begins to bleed, when the juices coming from the cut are bloody, you are looking at a medium rare temp. If the juices are clear, that is well done. Medium will tend to have an opaque and slightly bloody appearance.

Saskatchewan Sheep Development Board http://www.sksheep.com/cooking_lamb.htm, cooking tips:

Lamb should be cooked at low, moderate temperature not higher than 160° C (325° F). Slow cooking ensures a tender, juicy, evenly coloured and delicious final product.
Internal temperature at the center of the roast: Rare 60° C (140° F) Medium 65° C (150° F)Well done 70° C (160° F).
Lamb with an outside layer of fat or bone takes longer to cook.
Frozen lamb does not need to be thawed before cooking, but will require approximately 1.5 times the recommended cooking time. Braise frozen thick chops, shanks, and neck slices only slightly longer than comparable defrosted cuts. Broil frozen chops and patties further from the heat to ensure that the meat does not brown on the outside before it is fully cooked.
Leg, loin, ribs, shoulder, and shank --- cook by dry heat, e.g. roast. Chops from these cuts --- broil. Shoulder chops --- can also be braised. Breast, shank and neck --- cook by moist heat methods e.g. simmer or braise.


Roast Leg of Lamb

Ingredients:
1 leg of lamb, any size
8 garlic cloves
4 sprigs rosemary


Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. ( 165 degrees C.) for 20 minutes.
Rinse the meat.
Peel the garlic cloves and slice them lengthwise into halves. Don't add salt and pepper.
With a small paring knife, cut incisions into the meat every 2 inches and stuff them with garlic and rosemary.
Season with salt and pepper.
Put a rack into a roasting pan.
Put the meat on the rack, and roast uncovered for 1-1/2 hours or until a meat thermometer inserted into the centre of the meat (not touching bone) registers 130-135 degrees F. (55 degrees C.). Cooking time will vary with the thickness of the meat.
Remove from oven and let rest 15 minutes. Place a foil tent loosely over it. As the meat rests, the internal temperature will increase by several degrees, the muscle fibers will relax, and the juice that has come to the surface of the meat during cooking will begin to return to the center. A well-rested piece of meat will be more tender, and will retain its juices better when you slice it.
Serve well-chilled or hot.
Serve with rhubarb chutney.

Joan's accompaniments:
We’ve been doing those little new potatoes boiled with little onions, even if you buy the large green onions and cut off the green ends and save for salads. Boil that together until done. Then drain and add olive oil, coarse sea salt, and fresh pepper and mix together like a salad but it’s a warm potato dish. It is wonderful. With that I just take a simple lettuce, leafy green or butter, not spring mix, and add an herb (cilantro) and green onion, and then also just add olive oil, salt, pepper. That’s it. Serve with roast meat or fish.