Pleasant House

whole lamb for butchering

Waste not want not! Working your way around a whole lamb is just like working your way around a whole deer. If you purchase a whole lamb from a commercial butcher that deals with the public or a farmer’s market, it may may come without the head and the hoof joints. What you are left with is a quite manageable carcass.

You can begin by thinking about the animal in quarters. There is the front quarter, or the shoulders, as well as the hindquarter, which is the back leg or the rump. Then there is the saddle, which is in between and contains the loins and ribs. You can think about the front and back quarters as the portions that will need longer cooking methods such as a long, slow roast or braise, and the saddle as the portion that contains the lean, tender, quicker-cooking loin meat.

The shoulder would be delicious cooked up the way I did this front leg of venison, from Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson. To remove the front legs, find where the shoulder blade meets the back, near the neck,  and carefully separate the shoulder from the body, keeping the leg attached. Think of it as a giant chicken wing. The shoulder meat can also be cut off and cubed for lamb stew. The neck can be removed by cutting between the vertebrae and reserved for roasting. The neck meat is deliciously gelatinous and wonderful when used for a soup or stew.

The back legs are a little trickier to remove as they are a bit hefty. Begin by turning the lamb on its back and pressing the legs down like a butterfly, then work your knife between the body and the inner thigh. You will find the hip joint, which is where you will separate the leg from the body. One thing that you will notice when removing the quarters is that you will be cutting very little meat; instead, you will be following the natural seams and joints. Think of two big chicken leg and thigh quarters.

Preparation of the hindquarter meat is varied. A classic preparation is none other than the roast leg of lamb. To prepare a leg of lamb for roasting, remove the lowest joint, the shank, and reserve it for stewed beans. Secondly, marinate the leg with salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary, and olive oil, and roast it to your desired temperature. As you become more ambitious with your boning knife, the further you will be able to go with preparing the leg next time. You may want to try removing the thigh bone while leaving in the shank bone, stuffing the thigh and then tying the whole thing up. Or, you can divide the leg naturally into various roasts with your boning knife by following the natural seams in the meat.

It’s no coincidence that the most expensive cuts of the lamb also require the most skill to butcher. The loin, or saddle, is where the tender lamb noisettes, chops, and T-bones are located. The easiest, albeit the least earth-shattering way of dealing with this portion, is to run your boning knife down each side of the spine and under the meat while angling your blade at the ribs to remove the whole loins. These loins can then be sliced into noisettes or medallions for sauteeing or grilling.

Advanced lamb saddle butchery requires a saw and some special techniques to achieve the classic lamb rack and chops that you see in the premium meat case or on your $35 restaurant plate.

Finally, let’s not forget the typically forgotten parts of the lamb. If you buy a whole lamb it may come with some of its organ, such as the heart, tongue, liver, and kidneys. These parts are called offal. Liver and kidneys have very strong flavors that people tend to either love or hate.

liver, heart, and kidneys

Lamb liver is very tender and requires minimal preparation. There will be a very fine membrane covering the liver, which can be easily peeled off with your fingers. Any white pieces of vein or tissue should be cut off. The liver is then ready for sauteing or grilling. Here, I skewered the lamb with a fresh laurel leaf and piece of bacon, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and grilled it until medium rare.

liver with laurel and bacon

The kidneys are also easy to clean. I like to split them through the middle, opening them like two sides of a book, and snip out the the veiny part that is in the little inside curve. I recently incorporated lamb kidneys into a sweet-and-savory pithivier.

pithivier

Unlike the liver and kidneys, the lamb heart lacks the strong flavor many people expect to taste in organ meats. But it is also the toughest organ and requires a long cooking time. Trim any extraneous tissue from the heart and stuff it with some good bread stuffing. Wrap it in bacon and braise it in the oven for a couple of hours.

stuffed lamb hearts wrapped in bacon

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another useful organ(s) of the lamb. The testicles, or lamb fries, don’t typically accompany the whole lamb; you’ll have to buy them separately, but definitely give them a try. Sweetbreads and brains are also other tasty organs that can be purchased separately.

lamb fries

Finally, after all the butchering you’re left with a pile of bones and bits of meat. Roast the bunch and make a hearty stock. You can freeze the stock for the future, or when it is nice and rich, fish out the scraps, pick the bones clean, and return the bits to the broth with whatever else you think would make a nice soup. Bits of scraps can also be ground to make a delicious lamb burger.

That’s lamb butchery with one knife, in a nutshell.