Roasted Leg of Lamb- Kitchen Conundrum with Thomas Joseph

hey everybody thomas joseph here now easter easter brunch easter dinner are you planning on having a delicious lamb roast but maybe you're a little intimidated by it you're unsure of how to go about doing it well today i'm going to share with you some tricks and tips in making the most delicious lamb roast you really need to know those tricks you guys what i have in front of me here today i'm using leg of lamb and this is a boneless leg of lamb i'm just gonna flip this over and show you guys so the bone would typically run along the center here and our butcher has removed the leg for us you can certainly ask your butcher to do that if you really want to try and do it yourself it's not that hard to do i'm going to just kind of show you how to truss it so it's a nice uniform shape which helps to encourage even cooking so what you need is some butcher's twine this is cotton butcher's twine you can buy this at any kitchen specialty store they even have it in supermarkets on smaller spools grab a good amount here and before i trust i want to do one thing and this is really what you should do you should season the lamb up with a little bit of salt and pepper we're actually going to create a marinade for this lamb so that it has even extra flavor but i'm going to season the inside with some salt and pepper be pretty liberal with the amount of salt that you use you have meat here that's about three inches in thickness so you need a good amount of seasoning to really penetrate into the meat and bring out all of those wonderful flavors salt and pepper i'm gonna fold this back up now and this is a four pound piece of lamb and leg of lamb is pretty lean you guys it doesn't have a lot of fat to it so you don't want to cook this for a very long time we're looking to cook this till it reads about 130 degrees to 135 degrees with a digital thermometer so this isn't a piece of meat that you would stew for a very long time or braise for a very long time because it doesn't have all of that connective tissue that maybe a shoulder of lamb would have to begin trussing i'm tying a piece of twine at one end and what you want to do is you want to take the long end of the string like this you want to loop it around your fingers and then you're going to bring this under the roast shimmy it back about an inch and then you should be able to take this long piece here and all you do is you slide it back and forth and you want to compact the roast here with a good amount of pressure but you don't want it to be too too tight you want it to be a nice compact shape but not with too much force so you're going to basically repeat this process over and over until the whole thing is trust and if you didn't really want to kind of do this method if it's if it's a little too difficult for you you could certainly cut a bunch of little pieces of twine and you could easily just tie them up like this but this is kind of the fast method and this is the method that a lot of butchers use because you're not wasting time cutting all these little pieces of twine so shimmy back and forth so now once you get to the very end here what you're going to do is you're going to take the twine and you're going to go you're going to flip the roast you're going to bring the twine all the way around you're going to flip the roast again and then tie these two together just tie it in a little bit of a knot trim away any excess twine and there you have a nicely trussed roast now this promotes even cooking you guys so it creates that uniform shape so that you know that it will take the same amount of time to cook this end as it will to cook this end over here so transfer this into a resealable plastic bag and i'm going to get started on my marinade just gonna give my hands a little bit of a wash before i do i'm using really classic ingredients when it comes to lamb a little bit of lemon so this is the peel of two lemons that's been coarsely chopped here i have two tablespoons of chopped rosemary a little bit of salt and pepper of course you always need salt and pepper a quarter of a cup of olive oil and then the juice of the two lemons so just squeeze this in give this a bit of a stir pretty easy right and now take your lamb add one head of garlic because they're slightly crushed and then the marinade zip this up and then this goes into the refrigerator overnight is best you can flip it halfway through so that the entire roast gets kind of flavored and permeated with those wonderful aromatics so our lamb it's been marinated overnight and you guys whenever you're roasting a big piece of meat like this you want to make sure that you pull it out of the refrigerator for at least an hour so that it has a chance not to come to room temperature but just to take the chill out of the meat you don't want to start with a cold piece of meat in the oven because what's going to happen is that whole roast is going to be super cold the outside is going to cook at a faster rate than the inside so you're going to end up with something very rare in the center but an overcooked exterior so i'm just taking some paper towels and blotting off some of the excess marinade here that will really help to give a nice golden brown color to the outside of your roast here because again if you have excess moisture on this what's gonna happen you're gonna create steam and steam isn't gonna give you the color that you're looking for so blot it off just with a paper towel like this and now we're ready to roast the lamb so i have my oven it's preheated to 450 degrees and i have my roasting pan i'm gonna go get it has some potatoes in it so i have two pounds of yukon gold potatoes these are cut into about two inch pieces and now what i'm going to do is just kind of spread them out to the perimeter of the pan i'm going to put a wire rack into the bottom of the pan here and what this does is it helps to lift the roast up off the bottom of the pan and it gives some airflow around the roast which will again it will help it to cook evenly so this is going back into that 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes and then reduce the temperature down to 300 degrees for about 40 minutes our roast is out of the oven now it's been in again in total almost about 60 minutes and now i'm going to add some asparagus to this just to kind of complete the meal a little bit so this is a pound of asparagus i'm gonna season it up with some salt and pepper toss it with some olive oil and then these get positioned around the roast and the potatoes and this goes back into the oven you guys again it's at 300 degrees for about 20 minutes until the asparagus is cooked it's tender and the roast you guys needs to register about 130 degrees on an instant read thermometer so back into the eye alright so our lamb it's completely done it's been out of the oven and of course whenever you guys are roasting anything and you want to serve it you need to make sure that you let it rest for a little bit of time it needs about 20 to 30 minutes to rest after cooking and before slicing so that all of those wonderful juices that are in the meat don't rush out so that's what i have here i'm going to take a pair of kitchen shears and you just want to remove the trussing here you don't want to bite into any of the twine and now to slice you want to make sure that when you're slicing this especially since it's the the leg meat of the lamb you want to do nice thin slices nothing too thick so take a nice thin blade i'm using a carving knife here and thinly slice the lamb this looks beautifully cooked it's nice and rare i can't wait here you guys so i'm going to take a little bit of lamb and a few of these wonderfully roasted potatoes and some asparagus so there you go guys now if you have any kitchen conundrums use the hashtag kitchen conundrums and let us know what problems you're having and we'll solve them for you enjoy guys [Music] you

Channel: Everyday Food

Views: 195,065

Keywords: Recipe, Recipes, Cooking, Cook, Food, Dinner, Easy meal, Dinner tonight, Everyday Food, Home made, Sarah Carey, Martha Stewart, Family meal, easy cooking, how to, food ideas, quick dinners, fast recipes, easy recipes, quick recipes, lamb, leg of lamb, meat, dinner

Id: BJ5xyiIXvjQ

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2017