13 May 2025
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, has been cooking up some classic lamb dishes..
I’ve had a flurry of requests recently for lamb. From the client asking about a casual buffet for a family birthday all the way through to the client looking for an elegant tasting menu for a special anniversary with close friends, everyone’s looking to get their teeth into some new spring lamb.
Despite running a catering company and therefore being quasi-obligated to be a stalwart fan of every kind of food, I’ve actually never been that taken with our woolly friends – well, from a culinary point of view; I have nothing but fondness for the gambolling version.
That said, over the years I have narrowed my objection down to lamb that’s been stewed, which for me brings out a strong iron flavour, while roasted or pulled lamb, and cutlets or steaks are all far more agreeable to my clearly rather fastidious palate.
However, I have happily discovered that adding intense flavour to a stew, as with a deliciously fragrant tagine, for example, then lamb simply sings. The astringent meat flavour is balanced out by the sweetness from apricot, prunes or pomegranate.
Despite it sounding like a fad-diet meme, lamb thrives on ‘low and slow‘ – that is long sojourns in a cool oven.
Shoulder joints are particularly happy with this sort of treatment, especially after a nice massage with some perfumed oils or spice rubs. Shoulder joints are the Champneys yearly-pass-holders of the lamb world.
As well as low and slow, lamb is versatile enough to take some aggressive heat, too. Lamb caramelises beautifully (we’ve gone from spa to tanning salon) and its robust flavour can withstand some fierce charring. And thank goodness for that, given one of my favourite recipes is for Moroccan-spiced lamb meatballs that I often forget about as they sit in the pan sizzling away.
One patch is invariably more charred than the rest, but as long as I realise before the smoke alarm goes off, it’s usually only an improvement to flavour.
Meat that favours the chronically scatterbrained certainly gets my vote.
And on the subject of charring, I like to use my griddle pan for lamb cutlets precisely because of the blackened stripes it bestows. They’re not only aesthetically pleasing, but give such a satisfying, smoky hit to your mouthful.
I recently made cutlets, in fact, with some leftover orange zest. I’d planned on adding the zest to some mascarpone topping for a cake I’d made, but then decided to leave the finish pure white rather than orange-hued. Not wanting to waste the zest, despite not being fully convinced it would work, I smeared it (I’d used a microplane, not a rinder, so it was more of a paste and easily spreadable) over the cutlets along with salt and black pepper, then griddled as usual.
I found the result most agreeable: served with a fresh, semi-Greek salad (containing olives and cucumber, but no feta as I had none), the floral, orange hit provided a real point of difference, and livened up the richness of the meat.
My husband was less of a fan, possibly because there was something slightly desserty about it all. Perhaps a combination of capers and orange zest crushed into a sort of tapenade would have solved matters. There’s always next time.
