How to perfectly roast lamb
With winter approaching, a good roast is the perfect comfort food centrepiece for any social occasion, even if it’s just Sunday lunch for the family. A lamb roast is a firm favourite, but it can be daunting – with getting the roast on, serving drinks, and chatting with your guests, it can all pile up quite quickly.
When the multi-tasking goes wrong, it is easy to overcook the meat and end up serving boot leather. To avoid that bother, here is a handy guide for you to cook a roast lamb perfectly, every time.
1.Prepare a sea salt and pepper rub
Some meats just don’t need anything other than a little salt and pepper. Salt is an excellent flavor enhancer because it actually opens up your taste buds and this really wakes up the flavor of meat and vegetables. It also helps the meat to retain water so if you like your lamb juicy don’t skip on the “Dalmatian rub” (just plain salt and pepper). Use coarse salt—rather than table salt—when seasoning meat, the larger grains distribute more easily and cling well to the meat’s surface.
2.Make small incisions in the surface of the meat and push rosemary into the slits
Fresh herbs and spices always add a depth of flavour and can transform an ordinary lamb roast into a real showstopper. Add hearty herbs like thyme, rosemary, oregano, sage, and marjoram to dishes early on in the cooking process i.e before roasting so that they release. Making small incisions with a knife and inserting the rosemary into the slits will allow more of the meat to absorb the flavour of the herbs.
3.Get your cooking times right and let the meat rest before serving
For perfect medium rare lamb, 30 to 40 minutes per kilo in at 160°C oven is a good rule of thumb. If you like your lamb a bit more well done then add a further 10 minutes per kilo. An important thing to remember is that the meat keeps its heat, so when you remove your lamb from the oven it will still cook for another 10 minutes or so.
Resting the meat is an essential step in serving a perfect lamb roast. When meat is cooked the proteins in the meat heat up and set, the more cooked the meat, the more set the proteins have become. By letting the lamb stand away from the heat before serving allows the juices, which have been driven to the centre of the meat, to redistribute throughout the meat and be reabsorbed. In short by resting the meat your lamb will lose less juice when you cut it and be far more tender and juicy to eat.
4.When you drain the fat from the pan, keep a little of the pan juices to add to the gravy
An essential part to any roast is delicious gravy. By incorporating the fat and juices of the lamb you will end up with a much thicker, richer and tastier gravy. To make gravy using the pan juices from your roast follow these easy steps:
- Take the roasted meat from the roasting dish and set the meat aside to rest.
- Drain away a little of the fat from the pan if it seems excessive (you’ll need about one tablespoon of fat). You will be left with a little fat and the brown residue from the roast meat.
- Place the roasting dish on a stove top and bring the pan juices to the boil over a medium heat .
- Add in a pinch of flour and stir.
- Reduce the heat a little and cook, stirring often until the flour mixture is well browned. Make sure you scrape up the tasty meat residue as you stir.
- Take the roasting dish from the heat and slowly pour in a pre prepared stock, stirring constantly until well combined. If you add the stock too quickly, it will be harder to combine with the flour mixture.
- Return the roasting dish to the heat, bring mixture to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 3 minutes, stir occasionally.
- Season with pepper and salt.
5.Careful how you serve! Carve against the grain
It’s not simply the cut of meat that determines how tender it is, it’s also how you cut the meat. Looking at a slice of meat you will notice that it has a grain, just like wood. The grain is the direction that the muscle fibers are aligned. By cutting against the grain, you will cut through the fibers and shorten them – this makes it easier to chew through, since a lot of the hard work of breaking up the muscle fibers has already been done for you, but by slicing meat with the grain you will end up with a chewier piece of meat, one that could have been more tender if it was just sliced differently.
And there you go – now you know how to confidently cook up a perfect lamb roast that will impress your guests and have the family looking forward to the next one. I always enjoy it best with a bit of mint sauce, but the gravy alone is all you really need.
I hope you get to enjoy this delicious meal with good company and loved ones as the evenings grow colder.
Great tip on oven temp and time.