I was ambling through South Melbourne Market with The Spouse looking for menu ideas when I noticed one of the butchers had some lovely pink, lean shoulders of lamb labelled “Jamie Oliver”. Not that I imagined Jamie O had been hanged, drawn and quartered, though no doubt there are a few people in the US who’ve been gunning for him after he exposed some of their eating habits.
One of Jamie’s shoulders was mine for around $16 and I went home and Googled for his recipe which turned up “incredible roasted shoulder of lamb with smashed veg and greens”. Nothing fancy, just a slow-cooked roast but it looked delicious.
I didn’t make the smashed veg – potato, swede and carrot cooked till tender, drained, steamed and mashed with lashings of butter. But we did have boiled potatoes, steamed sugar-snap peas and carrot batons.
This is an easy dish to prepare and needs little input from the cook but the lamb was meltingly delicious and the gravy well flavoured.
My only real change to the recipe was the garlic. I buy Australian-grown garlic with its nice fat cloves. I left the skins on but halved the individual cloves lengthwise and placed them cut side up under the lamb, and cut side down on top of the lamb. At the end of cooking I squeezed the soft garlic pulp into the sauce ingredients. Mmmm!
My spring lamb shoulder weighed in around 1.2kg and there were plenty of leftovers for hearty roast lamb sandwiches for a couple of days. The joint was fairly lean and the cold lamb was meaty and not at all fatty. Sourdough bread with a restrained scraping of butter, lamb, plenty of salt and pepper and “delish”.
Jamie Oliver’s Slow-Roasted Shoulder of Lamb
The lamb
a large bunch of fresh rosemary
1 x 2kg shoulder of lamb
olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 bulb of garlic, unpeeled, broken into cloves
The sauce
1 tablespoon flour
500ml good-quality hot chicken or vegetable stock
2 heaped tablespoons capers, soaked, drained and chopped
a large bunch of fresh mint, leaves picked
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
The slashed lamb is rubbed with oil, and seasoning, garlic cloves and rosemary are added. I'd have been more generous with the rosemary if there'd been more in my herb pots
Preheat your oven to full whack. Slash the fat side of the lamb all over with a sharp knife. Lay half the sprigs of rosemary and half the garlic cloves on the bottom of a high-sided roasting tray, rub the lamb all over with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place it in the tray on top of the rosemary and garlic, and put the rest of the rosemary and garlic on top of the lamb.
Tightly cover the tray with tinfoil and place in the oven. Turn the oven down immediately to 170°C/325°F/gas 3 and cook for 4 hours – it’s done if you can pull the meat apart easily with two forks.
The lamb shoulder with another 30 minutes' roasting time left. The meat has retracted from the bone
Remove the lamb from the oven and place it on a chopping board. Cover it with tinfoil, then a tea towel, and leave it to rest. Put a large pan of salted water on to boil for your greens. Pour away most of the fat from the roasting tray, discarding any bits of rosemary stalk. Put the tray on the hob and mix in the flour. Add the stock, stirring and scraping all the sticky goodness off the bottom of the tray. You won’t need gallons of gravy, just a couple of flavoursome spoonfuls each. Add the capers, turn the heat down and simmer for a few minutes.
Finely chop the mint and add it to the sauce with the red wine vinegar at the last minute then pour into a jug.
As you can see, the meat could be pulled apart with a couple of forks. It was beautifully tender and the sauce was delicious
