Breast of lamb

[zakelwe]

My local butcher it very good but I can't park near to him so I tend to do the normal supermarket thing but the problem is they always tend to do the more popular cuts and nothing approaching the variety of the butcher. However I went into Sainsbury's last week and found breast of lamb. It was 4 times the price of the butcher, but they had taken the bones out and a lot of the fat, so more like 2x the price, still £4 for 1 kg of meat is not bad.

Problem with breast of lamb is it is rather fatty and although I like that a lot of people don't but I found a recipe that gets rid of most of that.

Here it is boiling with some onions and carrots in white wine. The white wine is very important



Can anyone guess what recipe I did.. google may give you a clue. Bloody good cheap meal.

Regards
Andy


I did complete it but forgot to take any more pictures due to brandy intake, so I will finish off this weekend.

[Mobile Chicane]

With the fat rendered out, I bet it would make a very nice shepherd's pie, biryani, or pastilla.

[OnTheOverrun]

Boil it, dry it, marinade in hoi sin and roast on a very low heat at the bottom of the oven for as long as you can bear. Then shred it with a fork and serve with pancakes, shredded spring onions and cucumber and a bit more hoi sin as you would for crispy aromatic duck.

[Don]

This is my favourite breast of lamb recipe.

Don said:

OK. This one is disgraceful - Tatws Popdu or "Potatoes in the Oven".

It's a Welsh folk dish and there are loads of variations and recipes - but this is the one I do.

Peel enough potatoes to fill the bottom of a small lasagne dish. Maris Piper are good - chop 'em up into three pieces each as you would for roasties. Fill that lasagne dish.

Take some stock made from your Sunday roast bones or whatever and add a small quantity of sage and onion stuffing mix to it. Pour over the potatoes - the liquid level should come half way up the potatoes.

Now take a breast of lamb. This is the cheapest, greasiest cut of lamb available. You want it with the bones in. Take a cleaver or large knife and cut it up between the bones so you have strips of it.

Lay the strips over the top of the potatoes. I like to sprinkle some finely chopped rosemary on top.

Roast in a medium hot oven. For a long, long, long time. You need to do this until the lamb on the top has roasted right out and become crispy and delicious. All the fat should have melted out.

OK. You can guess where all the fat went, right? Yep. Into the potatoes below. During the roasting time the stock will have boiled dry and the potatoes will have part boiled, part steamed and finally roasted in the lamb oil. The lamb will have been kept moist on the bottom by the stock steam at first...

Personally at this stage I pour off the excess fat but traditionally you didn't as it all added flavour...but as a peasant dish, of course, the layer of potatoes would have been three or four thick spreading the fat out.

Serve with mashed swede/carrot together. A serving is a few crispy lamb strips, four roast potato pieces (with the odd crispy stuffing) and a spoon of the mashed veg.


£2.50 makes enough for two hungry people.


The above recipe takes practice to achieve an edible result. Once "right", however, it's actually delicious.

From the cheap meals thread:

Cheap Meals

A few PHers have tried it with some success.

[Don]

Are you doing the one from the MEAT book?

[Pferdestarke]

Personally I'd salt it, put it on a wire rack and cook at 180 degrees until I was satisfied that it was crisp enough and that sufficient fat had rendered. I find lamb fat to be the most congealing of all the meats.

I really like lamb but there's something about cold leftovers that is very unappealing. On the contrary cold beef or pork in a sandwich with appropriate condiments are highly desirable.

[soad]

I used to make minted lamb stir-fry's. Toss in some egg noodles too. Lovely

[pacman1]

I picked up a breast of lamb from a farm shop a while back, amazed at how much meat was on it for less than four quid.
Couldn't be arsed to find any cooking suggestions, so made the recipe up as I went along. Great fun wiv a bottle of plonk!
I elected to score the skin, cover it in chopped mint, olive oil, s & p, Cooked it flat on a trivet, sealed on a high heat, then low and slow.
Half way through I removed a lot of the fat from the pan, tossed a load of garlic cloves, root veg, spuds etc in the remaining juices with some white wine, sprigs of rosemary and whole mint, removed the trivet, placed the meat on top the veg then back in the oven until all the juices had been soaked up by the veg..
Crispy skinned, succulent deliciousness! One of the few ad hoc attempts from my kitchen that I was quite proud of and I could actually remember the cooking details! :hic:

[WestYorkie]

Sorry guys but I was told about breast of Lamb by a relitive so asked at my local Farmshop.
I paid the grand total of fk all for 3 breasts. They normally cut them up for dog food as no one wants them.

I slow roasted mine. But I'm interested in some other recipes.

[tim-b]

Pferdestarke said:

I really like lamb but there's something about cold leftovers that is very unappealing. On the contrary cold beef or pork in a sandwich with appropriate condiments are highly desirable.

Leftover lamb goes nicely in a curry though! Especially if you have some of the gravy left too, I did this last week and it was very tasty.

[Tanguero]

+1 for Tatws Popdu !!!! Superb!

[zakelwe]

Some good stuff posted above on how to handle this sort of thing, if you take a bit of time and effort then all the best bits of breast of lamb can be done without the bad bits.

I was doing this recipe

http://www.somersetfarmdirect.co.uk/Recipes/hughfe...

Very nice cheap nibbles for the whole family on the Saturday night. The dry white wine really dials out any leftover fattness on the lamb




Lovely with some red wine.

Andy