Slow roast parchment wrapped shoulder of lamb with honey, lemon & thyme

Honey. What a delicious and wonderfully sustainable resource, not to mention natural and chock full of good stuff for the body. But anyone who has tried to roast with it will be well aware of the big down side of any ingredient that is so rich in sugar - burning. Nothing can be quite so depressing as to open the oven and find that your juicy succulent roast, which was supposed to be full of fragrant and subtle flavours, has been pockmarked by acrid black spots which means that even if the roast is salvageable, your gravy surely won't be.

Of course the obvious answer to this malady is just don't use honey or similar in the first place, but I love the stuff, and it's a natural partner for many meats. So the next step is to find a method that somehow keeps the rich flavours but avoids the burning - which is where the parchment wrapping comes in. Sealing meat in some form of protective wrapping is a long revered tradition, whether it's really old school such as wrapping in an (inedible) pastry, or more contemporary such as the latest sous vide techniques. Either way, you need to find a way of keeping the ingredients that have a tendency to burn, away from the direct heat of the oven.

I've done a few parchment wraps so far, mostly lamb, but this is the first that included honey. Lamb is already a sweet meat, but there's something special about the combination of lamb and honey. Thyme again is a natural accompaniment, and at this time of year it's really at its best, with long tender new growth full of flavour. Lemon I feel is often a good idea with fat and strong meat such as lamb, as it cuts through that richness, and also marries very well with the other two ingredients.

This is also a slow roast, as I believe this is the best way to treat a shoulder of lamb, as it breaks down any tough meat into meltingly tender strips, and the natural fattiness of the lamb ensures that it remains juicy even after hours of cooking. It also means that although I have to spend a little time at the very beginning of the day preparing the meat, I have the rest of the morning to myself to do other things, in this case wandering through the Exe Valley watching trains and paddling in the river Exe with my family. Lots of fun :-)

The Recipe

The first step with this is to blend together them ingredient to coat the shoulder of lamb. This should be a whole shoulder on the bone, though off the bone should work fine too. Take 2 tablespoons or so of honey, the same of chopped thyme, and blend with half a lemon - both rind and juice. Add a teaspoon of salt (flaky sea in my case) and pepper to taste if you like it - I didn't in this case.

The coating for the meat - honey, lemon, thyme and salt

Line a roasting dish with some baking parchment ready to fold, and place the meat on it. Now pour the mix over the meat and ensure it's well covered. Don't worry about the underside, it'll all come out in the wash!

The meat covered in the mix

Now wrap up the meat securely in parchment, using several layers to ensure all the juices stay in. I did mine several layers one way, ands then added another load of baking parchment 90° to the first lot.

The meat wrapped up ready for the oven

Now bake this in the oven for four hours at 150°C (fan). You should end up with something like this.

The finished dish

I poured some of the juices out of the wrap at this stage so I could then reheat them and serve with the meat on the table, as the meat was going to rest for half an hour and I wanted to bring some heat back to the dish.

It's a light summer way of preparing a large piece of lamb like this, and comes our very tender. I did get a little blackening in the pan itself where some juices had managed to leak out, so I could have perhaps sealed the parchment more, but on the whole this is a very effective way of using honey in a long slow roast and being able to retain flavour without burning. Served this with potatoes and carrots, as that's what I had to hand, but honestly I think it would be much better accompanied by bread and salad.

One curious point to finish on, even though this was sealed throughout the cooking, you'll notice that there is still some blackening inside the wrapping. Where this had cooked the thyme, honey and lemon glaze the result was outstanding, creating crispy biscuits of herb flavoured honeyed lamb skin. An expected benefit!

You can see the whole album for Slow roast parchment wrapped shoulder of lamb with honey, lemon & thyme on my Google+ profile if you're interested.

Italian Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder with Potatoes & Olives

I'm a big fan of the slow roast, though perhaps I do have something of an ulterior motive. It gives me time to get on with other things (which this Sunday unfortunately meant studying), yet means I can create a delicious tender and well flavoured Sunday roast without having to spend as much time and effort creating it as you might think. This Sunday it was lamb again, but given an Italian twist through the combination of a few recipes.

I rarely if ever follow one recipe, but I guess I'm experienced enough in the kitchen to combine them, picking up their various strengths whilst adapting them to suit what I have in the house and what it is I'm trying to cook. I do have an extensive library of cookbooks, well over 100 now, ranging from small pamphlets produced by local groups like the WI (that's the Women's Institute for international readers) to huge tomes like McGee's On food and cooking and the Italian classic The Silver Spoon. I absolutely love cook books, but much prefer scouring old book shops and charity stores for them, as opposed to buying new ones. I've found some wonderful gems that way, for example the fabulous Time Life Good Cook series.

But back to the slow roast. The tradition of slow roasting like this on a Sunday apparently goes back to the days when villages like mine used to have a communal bakery. Bread of course is traditionally baked very early in the morning, and needs a very hot oven. As these village ovens cooled people often used to bring their meat to the bakery and use the residual heat to cook their Sunday lunch, whilst they went off to Sunday church. Of course the longer you cook a slow roast the more tender and moister it gets (up to a point that is), leading to the idea that the longer the sermon in church the better your lunch would be! Not being a religious person myself, I tend to head to the pub (my favourite local The Lamb in Silverton) rather than the church, but at least I'm supporting some sort of local institution that way. I'd recommend the Dob's Best Bitter in particular, though that may be a bit biased again, seeing as the Exe Valley brewery who make it are based in my village.

I'd chosen a shoulder of lamb from Crediton Farmers market courtesy of Higher Hacknell farm this week, and picked up some waxy potatoes there from Linscombe as well. I knew I had some black olives knocking about at home, so decided to re-do an old recipe from Antonio Carluccio's Italian Cooking, but with a nod to Fearnley-Whittingstall's Meat Book and a touch or two of myself thrown in for good measure. Basically what you need is this - black olives, waxy potatoes, shoulder of lamb, onion, rosemary:

The ingredients ready to combine

Put all this together in a deep roaster, add plenty of seasoning, and toss together to make sure it's all well coated:

Everything ready to go in the oven

Roast in a hot oven (220ºC) for about 20 minutes, then turn down to about 150ºC for another 3 hours or so. Timings not too critical, you've got a fair bit of leeway either way with this sort of cooking - enough for a pint at least. I did baste it once during this time, but it's not imperative. One small note - I don't use my fan oven for this, I use a conventional oven. I find the fan is too hot and tends to dry things out too much with it's constant convection.

Eventually you should end up with this:

Everything cooked and ready to serve

You'll probably need to pour off some of the fat, depends on the meat. I used spring lamb this time around wish isn't very fatty, so only poured off a very small amount, but later in the season they'll be a lot more. Then straight out onto the plate and enjoy!

Flavour wise it's pretty strong, and if you don't like olives then you won't like this. It will depend to a certain extent on the olives themselves though as they tend to dominate - these were particularly strong, even a bit strong for me if I'm honest, but still delicious none the less.

We had a primo with this, something B cooked up with Ricotta, left over home made paste and chives from the garden - it was wonderful, really light and tasty. If you're looking for a light supper in the heat this would be the business I reckon - but that's probably another blog post :-)

Primo - home made tagliolini with a ricotta and chive sauce

Braised Lamb Italian Style

Well I've not blogged here for a while, though I've been cooking as much as ever. Finding the time to squeeze everything in is a pain! I will try and post something up here a bit more interesting soon, but in the meantime here in some more experimentation with the Flip HD video camera, filming a Sunday lunch. Lots of short videos of the various stages.

Been trying to do some Anglo/Italian hybrids recently, so here's a good example of one.

Slow Roast Lamb with Wild Garlic & Red Onion

Finlly, it's back - the wild garlic is here again!

We love a bit of wild garlic, and there's something quite special about the fact that it's abundant once more, something to do with Spring being around the corner, promises of being back in the garden again, salads, warm walks in the sunshine, and even swimming in the river. Much as I love the Winter, whether cosy around the wood burner or playing in the snow, I always get restless towards the end of any season, eager for the next one to start and with it a whole new set of experiences ready and waiting.

And what better to go with wild garlic than lamb. Moretonhampstead had a big foodie festival on Friday (the 7th), and amongst all the things we picked up was a very well hung shoulder of lamb. I do prefer shoulder over leg, but then I like my lamb well done on the whole and think shoulder works much better like this because of the added fat that keeps it moist. I do like rare lamb now and again, but if I'm going to do that then I almost always go for a rack instead of a leg.

We didn't know whether we'd get any wild garlic, as last time we checked two weeks ago there was none, but we popped down to one of our favourite spots and sure enough there was loads of the stuff coming up all over the place. It really is the most profilic free veg you can think of, and it's not as if you need much of it so it'll stretch for many a meal. If you're not sure where to find it then you need to be looking out around stream banks and other wet places.


A close up of wild garlic next to the waters edge. It's the big broad leaves, and has an unmistakeable aroma of garlic, very strong.



A wider shot just up from the water. This is very early in the season but you can already see just how prolific it is. Later on there will be flowers as well, nice to sprinkle into salads.


I love a lamb shoulder roasted very slowly, and for this one (5lb joint) I did it very simply, sliced up two red onions quite thickly and placed into a large roaster, seasoned and then two big handfuls of wild garlic leaves - no need to cut them at all (but the Italian will insist that I wash them :-) and then the lamb shoulder (on the bone as ever) on top of that, with a bit more seasoning. The idea is that the onion and garlic is mostly covered by the lamb to stop them burning, and in return they'll flavour the meat from the underside and cook down and become a sort of sauce for the meat. Then in a normal oven at 150°C for about four hours. At least that's the idea ...


Ingredients all ready to go.



Wild Garlic & Red Onion ready for the meat to go on top


... I did add a glass of white wine after an hour or two to keep it moist but then had to go and teach online for a while, and by the time I got back the onion and garlic had cooked a bit more than I had hoped so we only managed to salvage about a third of it for the meal, but it was exceptionally tasty. And the lamb? Lovely flavour, incredibly tasty, and the skin was so light and crispy, kind of like fresh lamb crisps. I think the best comparison is with crispy fried duck, as you get the same sort of tender meat and crispy skin. Next time I really must pack it into a smaller roaster so that there's less chance of over cooking the onion/garlic, and maybe add a bit more liquid too neat the end of cooking.

Needless to say we've now got bags of leftover meat to play with plus loads of lamb stock from the bones. I think I might take that whole crispy duck idea a bit further - I feel some pancakes coming on ...