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.

Focaccia

Thought I'd write a quick post about the joys of Focaccia, which is an Italian flat bread for those of you not familiar with it. I first tasted Focaccia when I was an exchange student at the Italian University of Padova, and have loved it ever since. It has a light yet doughy texture, with a subtle chew, and is very often cooked with crusty salt and herbs - my favourite way of preparing it.

Two shallow Focaccia ready to go in the oven

The best thing about Focaccia as far as I'm concerned is that it can be prepared so easily - that is if you have a bread machine at least. Not that I bake bread in a bread machine, that really wouldn't be possible with Focaccia. It's the kneading and rising side of things that I use it for. Some people love to knead I know, they see it as a source of relaxation, but to me it's simply a pain in the hands!

My bread machine is an old Panasonic model, well over ten years of service but never misses a beat. It has a good selection of different settings, but only one is much used in my household, 'Pizza'. This is only a 45 minute cycle, but provided you give your dough a good hour or two once the bread machine cycle has run then, it works well for a whole range of different Italian style flat breads, not least of which is Focaccia.

Here's the recipe I use. This amount will do for a large lasagne style deep dish, or for two regular flan dishes as shown in the pictures.

• 1 tsp dried yeast
• 450g Bread Flour
• 1½ tsp salt
• 2 tsp sugar
• 275ml water
• 2 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for coating the pan and for drizzling)

The method is quite simple:

1. Empty the yeast into the bottom of the bread machine bucket, add the flour on top, then sprinkle with the salt and the sugar, pour on the water, and finally add the olive oil.
2. Let the machine run the Pizza cycle or similar, then leave the dough undisturbed for an hour or so.
3. After the hour is up, pour a generous amount of olive oil into a deep baking dish and empty the dough out into it. Turn the dough in the olive oil to coat it, knocking it back and pushing firmly into all the corners so that it fits the rectangle. Leave for another hour or so somewhere warm, covered in a tea towel.
4. After the second hour is up your dough should be quite risen. Now push your finger deep down into the dough, but not quite to the bottom, to make the characteristic holes. Scatter generously with rosemary leaves and sea salt, and drizzle with more olive oil.
5. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200ºC for 15-20 minutes until as brown as you prefer.
6. Leave to cool briefly, for as long as you can resist that gorgeous, soft, herby and salty delight ...

Topping and other flavours can be added according to season and taste, this year my wild garlic with caramelised lemon zest worked particularly well.

Wild garlic and caramelised lemon zest at the front, plain wild garlic at the back.

If you'd like to see more pictures of my Focaccia's being prepared, head over to my Focaccia pictures in Picasa Web Albums.

"Red Devil" Cheese Scone Noses: A Comic Relief Special

Way back in 1988 a new institution was born in this country - Comic Relief. I was back in School back then, but I remember it quite distinctly, as a friend and I (Ben Clover I seem to remember) had been given special dispensation to stay up late and watch the live broadcast on the TV, in the sixth form common room. Powered only by a variety of hot drinks, plenty of toast, and an army of assorted spreads, we made it through right to the end of transmission. I can't for the life of me remember much about the broadcast, except for the strong sense that things were amiss in large chunks of Africa, and that Lenny Henry wasn't entirely sure what was going on for most of the programme, but at least I can say I was there.

Fast forward to 2011 and Comic Relief it still with us, and as fab as ever. Tomorrow is comic relief day, and for once I decided to cook in honour of it, and something a bit unusual to boot. A spicy - and very red - variation on my Mum's cheese scones.

Red Devil Cheese Scone Noses

Now my Mum's cheese scones are - of course - the best cheese scones on the planet. Aren't all Mum's cheese scones? I make them myself quite often, they're a particularly brilliant way of using up milk and cheese which has started to lose its lustre, shall we say. I've even done variations, my Brie & Lemon Balm Scones the most successful so far. But tonight I thought I'd push the boat out, and try something a bit ... well ... odd.

The most long running theme of Comic Relief has to be the red nose, and in fact the whole enterprise is often referred to as Red Nose Day - or RND as it's now cropping up on Twitter. So what, I figured about Red Nose Scones? But not just plain old red noses, but spicy, hot, cheesy red noses. To the kitchen! Actually, I had no way of making any any red food at all at this point, bar adding vast quantities of tomato puree, but luckily my neighbour Angela was happy to share some food colouring that she had spare, so I was in business.

But back to the recipe. Really simple, First here's the cheese scone recipe, sans Comic Reliefness ...

"Red Devil" Cheese Scone Noses

by Rich Osborne, March 17th, 2011

A spicey twist on a classic cheese scone recipe, perfect for comedy events. Should take about 20 minutes or so to prepare, 15 minutes to cook, so 35 minutes in total.

Ingredients

• 450g plain flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 teaspoons of baking powder
• 1 teaspoon mustard powder
• 200g strong cheddar cheese, grated
• 100g butter, thickly diced
• milk to mix, up to ½ pint

Now that will make you fab cheese scones, which need to be shaped and baked in the usual way. I have a trick (actually, my Mum has a trick) with the preparation of the dough too, but that'll have to wait till another time. The processor took a nasty slice off my finger, so my typing's a bit slow tonight ...

To make my RND Red Devils you just need to make the following additions:

• 4 teaspoons of red food colouring (Less than four might well work, but I had four, so I used four. They do need to be REALLY red, after all)
• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 dash hot sauce, e.g. tabasco or similar
• 1 tablespoon of tomato puree

Method

Mix all the dry ingredients in a food processor, then add the butter and process briefly. Add the cheese, process briefly again and then add the food coluring, the hot sauce and the tomato puree. Then start to add the milk with the machine running until the mixture forms a firm ball inside the machine.

Shape into walnut shaped balls and bake in a fan oven at 180° for 15 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack.

What you should end up with is something like this:

Front lot ready for the oven, back lot are baked already and now cooling

With the quantities from the recipe above you should end up with at least 30 red devil noses, hopefully more. Personally I got 35 out of it (it may have been 36 actually - I've lost track of how many I've eaten already).

I think they would be fab split in half whilst still warm, and served with cold butter, especially a chive or garlic butter, but they need to go to work tomorrow to join the other baked goods being sold to raise money for charity. Of course everyone else will be producing sweet cakes and the like, so chances are my little red devils might be coming home again with me - but then again you never know. They are damn tasty, and on comic relief day anything might happen ....