This is a recipe based on one by the great Jamie Oliver and the ori­ginal is avail­able online at his site.

I love well cooked lamb, the way the juices flow from the intensely fla­vour­ful meat together with the tex­ture with real bite, well roas­ted is simply the quint­es­sen­tial Brit­ish dish. This is my idea of cook­ing on a Sunday; instead of sit­ting there bast­ing meat, sweat­ing over pota­toes or cut­ting up veg, this dish is entirely pre­pared in advance and then just left in the oven for four hours. That’s four hours down the pub, enter­tain­ing your guests or mak­ing love to your wife.

Four hours well spent!

After which, you will be presen­ted with a lamb dish fit for a king and tast­ing suc­cu­lent enough to entice even the most ardent beef fanatic.

I have made this dish many many times and there is a knack to it and a few simple rules that can really help turn this into some­thing special.

What you will need:

1 large high sided roast­ing dish.

Sil­ver foil enough to cover the above twice.

ingredi­ents:

1. 1 un-boned shoulder of lamb (make sure that it is fully defros­ted and warm enough to manipulate)
2. Olive oil (I use the Extra Vir­gin for this, but either is fine)
3. 1 whole bulb of gar­lic, pealed into its cloves
4. Fresh rose­mary sprigs (the stand­ard packet is fine, if you have your own then about a handful)
5. 2 red onions, peeled and quartered
6. 3 car­rots, chopped
7. 2 sticks of cel­ery, cut into short pieces (even if you hate cel­ery – like me – this dish bene­fits for includ­ing it)
8. 1 large leek trimmed and cut into pieces
9. 4 toma­toes, halved
10. 2 bay leaves
11. Fresh thyme sprigs (same deal as the rosemary)
12. 2 x 400g tins plum tomatoes
13. 1 bottle of red wine (more about wine selec­tion below)

Optional:

• A little mash potatoes
• Or per­haps some bread

Wine choice:

When cook­ing with wine the tempta­tion is to buy wine from the low end of the spec­trum of price, that it makes no dif­fer­ence to the foods taste.  This is simply not true; it does. The choice of wine is always vital to the taste of any­thing and buy­ing a really ter­rible or unsuit­able wine will greatly reduce the qual­ity of the final dish. Check that the wine is good with Lamb is the basic advice. Most will note this on he bottle. Any­thing that say “good with pizza” is not some thing you should really be drink­ing, let alone cook­ing with!  I tend to aim for a bottle of about £5-£6. This is because of a simple fact about glob­al­isa­tion (you can skip this if you want):

Wine costs a finite amount to mar­ket, bottle, ship and tax.  Say that out of the cost of your aver­age bottle this amounts to £2. So if you pay £4 for the wine, half the money that has gone out of your pocket was not spent on the mak­ing of the wine.  More often that than not, all things being equal, this will mean that the wine maker had less abil­ity to make a good wine.  If, how­ever, you pay £6 for the wine, now as before £2 goes into the mar­ket­ing etc, but now a whole £4 goes to the wine maker enabling him to make a bet­ter wine. So for only adding £2 to your wine choice you are gain­ing a £4 value in the poten­tial qual­ity of the wine.

Of course, there are excep­tions in everything and super mar­kets can reduce wines to clear, some areas can have a reduc­tion for cur­rency fluc­tu­ation and indeed some grow­ers cant make a good wine with £20 in their pocket, but it is a rule of thumb that works and is used in he wine trade itself. I find it very accur­ate when buy­ing wine made in Europe for example.

So which should you go for?  Well, I think that heavy wines are out, they will over­power the meat. So no Pinot. Noth­ing with too much fruit, so no shiraz.  You want some­thing that add a vel­vety taste to the dish, but at the same time you want some­thing that pleases the red wine drink­ers with a hint of the most com­monly drunk wine types.  So, to that end I usu­ally chose a Caber­net mixed with a Merlot.

“A Mer­lot!” you cry, “Didn’t I see on Side­ways that Mer­lot is the worst wine in the universe?”

Well, yes to the char­ac­ter in Side­ways the Mer­lot is the worst of all wines, and the entire Mer­lot pro­du­cing industry took a hit thanks to that idea presen­ted as fact in that oth­er­wise excel­lent film.  The facts are these.  Firstly, the worst wine in exist­ence to the be found in the Car­re­four shops at French ferry ports.  It is the one in white 3lt drums with dubi­ous label, “Red Wine” affixed on them. In wine terms they are the equi­val­ent of the 3-minute-warning and con­tain noth­ing that is fit for drink­ing. I watched a doc­u­ment­ary on the sub­ject of this “wine” that would make your eyes water. Secondly, there are good wines in every pos­sible vari­ety and basing your drink­ing choices on the grape type only is going to lead you to the wrong way and straight into the arms of the ever so slightly unscru­pu­lous major pro­du­cers who are quite will­ing to rest very firmly on their laurels and pro­duce wines that vary massively over two or three years.

This is that I bought for this dish, it cost £4 from M and S.

Pre­par­a­tions and cook­ing instructions:

• Firstly, pre­heat your oven to 200ºC/400ºF/gas 6. Do this first.
• Lamb shoulder can some­times be very very fatty. To com­bat this trim a little of the thick­est pos­i­tions.  Sure this fat will melt and become taste, but there is a tip­ping point where the fat sat­ur­ates the entire dish.  So trim a little, but leave enough to roast with.
• Rub the lamb with the Olive oil, some sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.
• Cut small incisions all over the lamb and poke rose­mary leaves and quartered cloves of gar­lic into each one.
• Put the rest of the gar­lic cloves, onions, car­rots, cel­ery, leeks and toma­toes to the tray, then tuck the remain­ing herbs under the meat.

My dish wait­ing for cook­ing time

• If you need to you can leave the dish at this point cover with cling film and it can sit for a few hours.
• When ready to cook pour the tinned toma­toes over the top, fol­lowed by the wine. The wine should not be right at the lip of the tray.  If you cant fit it all in then drink the rest (bonus!)

Ready to Go!

• Cover the tray tightly with a double layer of foil. Make sure to tuck the foil tight against the rim of the tray, if pos­sible you want to make any leaks unable to run down the side of the disk.
• Put it into the oven. If you are at all wor­ried about leaks of wine into the oven, put a sil­ver foil sheet under the disk to catch the drips.
• Turn down the oven tem­per­at­ure to 170ºC/325ºF/gas 3 and cook for 3½ to 4 hours. You are look­ing to make the lamb soft, the fat to have melted and the bone just able to pull out of the shoulder.  Pull out the worst excesses of twig.
• Sea­son with salt and pep­per if needed! Don’t miss this step!

The final and bril­liant result

To serve:

This is a big dish.  The wine should have firmed up a little and be a sauce, the veg should have retained a little bite and the herbs should have added a great flavour.

I always heat my non-metallic plates in the microwave.

I take off the meat and cut the lamb like bread.  I then lay the meat and spoon over the sauce and veg. You could do a little mash to go along­side, but believe me, you don’t need to.  Per­haps some bread to mop up, but again people are not going to be hungry after this.

So there we have it.

Please feel free to add any com­ments you have about your exper­i­ences with the dish, so any thing you think I may have missed.  Please do check out Jamie’s web­site as well as ori­ginal credit is his.

Regards,

Basho

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