Levi Brown for The New York Times; Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero.
The gleaming, massive lamb shank on these pages, impressive though it may be, is not the most effective way to serve what amounts to the shin and ankle of a lamb.
It's glorious, for sure, but it has a number of disadvantages, the first of which is that a small-to-moderate lamb shank weighs in at more than a pound, a nice serving size in the '70s (or the Middle Ages) but a bit macho for most of us these days. The second is that it's difficult to cook — size alone makes it awkward, and penetration of flavors is an issue. It's difficult to eat. And finally, that same graphic quality that makes for such a gorgeous photo reminds some people more of its source than they'd like.
Besides, I've slowly begun to realize that my most successful lamb dishes were made from what was left over from a meal of lamb shanks. A couple of months ago, when braising season began, I cooked two sizable lamb shanks and, of course, enjoyed them. But I really got into it over the following couple of nights when I wound up using them to create a marvelous ragù and then transformed the ragù into a lamb-tomato-bean stew that could not have been much better.
Why not, I thought, do all of this intentionally, with planning? It makes sense, after all: get that initial, long, slow braising done leisurely and in advance and then have two wonderful ingredients with which to build other dishes. Two? Well, yes: the meat itself and its barely seasoned juice — dark, natural, laden with fat.
It took me something like 30 years of cooking lamb shanks to arrive at that idea, and it took two hours to execute. I seared the daylights out of two shanks — not only are they big, but they really have three sides worth searing, so this takes a while. But since I was doing only two, I didn't need a massive pan, and although it can hinder the searing, I kept the pan partly covered to reduce spatter. (If you have an oven that gets really hot — say, 550 degrees — and you have a pizza stone in there to put the pan on, you can preheat it for a half-hour or so and do the browning in the oven, thus brilliantly containing the mess.)
The browning done, I turned the heat down, poured off most of the fat and added a splash of liquid: white wine, I thought, was best, though red wine or good stock would do as well, and water would be fine. Ultimately the juice will taste mostly of lamb.
From then on, the process was simple: braise over low heat, turning occasionally and tossing in a bit more liquid (after the initial wine, I used water), until the meat literally falls off the bone. The timing of this will depend not only on the level of your heat and the size of your shanks but also on their intrinsic tendency to soften (and, indeed, one may be done 20 minutes before the other). But in every case this took under two hours.
I let the meat sit in the juice for a while, then just shredded it into a bowl, after which I stored it and the juice separately. An ambitious cook like my friend Ed Schneider would look at these products and immediately think ravioli, then set about making fresh pasta and putting a little production process in motion.
I wish, sometimes, that were me. But at that point, all I can think is: I have the most amazing stuff in the fridge. How can I most quickly and easily use it to make dinner? The three recipes that follow the initial preparation were some of the answers I came up with. (A couple of others were, frankly, less successful.) I think the inside-out ravioli (that is, a normal dish of pasta with ragù) is among the most useful preparations you can make with braised meat, and it was the one I turned to first. You might try it with three or four chopped carrots added at the beginning for extra sweetness.
The other two are a little more unusual, but they're just as logical, because they're simply quick versions of dishes that are typically cooked long and slow.
The precooking technique doesn't reduce the total time of cooking, of course; it just allows you to break it up. In the last few weeks, I braised shanks while cooking a different dinner, while working and while watching football. The "largely unattended" tag is for real: I turned the meat and checked the liquid level about once every 20 minutes.
The shredded meat will keep well for up to a week; the juice, if sealed by its fat (that'll happen naturally), will keep even longer. But my guess is that you won't be able to resist using both pretty quickly.
Recipes: Slow-Braised Lamb Shanks | Tomato Sauce With Lamb and Pasta | Indian Lamb Curry With Basmati Rice | Chinese Braised Lamb Shanks
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Eat: Giving Lamb Legs
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2012/12/eat-giving-lamb-legs.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Eat: Giving Lamb Legs
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar