Lamb dishes in the oven are involuntarily associated with good old England, Sunday lunch, glasses of mulled wine, a fireplace and Sherlock Holmes. Therefore, a review of recipes should start with a few purely English traditional mutton dishes.
To do this, we need a two-kilogram lamb shovel, it must be said that the sheep of English breed are larger than ours, and if the lamb shovel that you purchased is less than two kilograms - that's okay, reduce the time it spends in the oven. Two cloves of garlic, which must be cut very thinly. Sixteen shoots of rosemary 2 cm each. Olive oil. Salt and freshly ground pepper. Six potatoes of 180 grams each. One kilogram of unpeeled pumpkin, cut into 5-centimeter pieces. A tablespoon of plain flour. One and a half cups of beef broth and 500 grams of green peas.
So, let's begin. First of all, it will be necessary to preheat the oven to T = 220 C and make a 16-inch cut in meat with a small sharp knife. In each cut, you need to put chopped garlic and a sprig of rosemary. Put the spatula in the baking dish, grease with olive oil, sprinkle with pepper and put in the oven for 15 minutes. The first stage was successfully completed. Oven lamb dishes are usually troublesome and lengthy, but this English recipe does not seem to create much difficulty. Let's see what will happen next.
We reduce the temperature in the oven to 180 C, and at this time we cook potatoes. We cut it into four parts, put it in a large cup, add two tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. We put the pumpkin in another cup, salt and pepper, pour the oil. We approach the third stage of the "rally" - lamb roast in English.
We take out the spatula from the oven and lay our potatoes along the edge of the mold, prepare the dish in this form for another 40 minutes, then lay the pumpkin around the leg and cook the next 50 minutes. English chefs claim that after going through all these stages, you will get well-baked mutton roast with potatoes. Move on.
We take out the spatula from the mold and put it on the dish, cover it with foil and set it aside - let it rest a bit. We increase the temperature in the oven to 230 C and return our vegetables back to the oven. And we ourselves will make gravy or, as the English call it, gravy.
We put the pan over medium heat, pour flour and fry it for a minute, stirring with a wooden spatula. We raise the beef broth and pour it into the pan. Increase the flame to strong. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, and reduce the flame to medium. Cook for 4-5 minutes until the gravy thickens. Serve lamb with vegetables, gravy and green peas.
Oven lamb dishes are also popular in Ireland. Preheat the oven to 200 C. The meat is cut into pieces (600 g). Potatoes (750 g) and carrots (500 g) are cut into cubes, about a centimeter in size, onions (250 g) are cut into circles. Half of the vegetables are laid out in layers in a baking dish, pepper, salt, lay a layer of meat on top and pepper and salt. Now vegetables are stacked in reverse order, pepper-salted and sprinkled with chopped herbs. The whole structure is filled with broth and put in the oven for two hours. Remember to close the mold with a lid.
As we can see, lamb dishes in the oven in the British Isles are cooked the same way. Potatoes and vegetables are always present. Vegetables are used very different. Lamb with savoy cabbage is especially popular. It is simply chopped - it is cut in half, the stalk is removed, and the cabbage itself is cut into thin strips. If we take the previous recipe as the basis, then you just need to add two more layers of cabbage. The stew is even juicier, more aromatic and tastier. Try it - you won’t regret it!