Cooking with lamb fat

[ipsedixit]

Do you?

If so, do tell.

Be it Salo, Qawrama or Duhnlyat, or just simply lamb lard ... how do you use it in your cooking repertoire?

[foodperestroika]

I use it to make plov, of course!

[luckyfatima]

I don't know about lamb fat, but goat and sheep fat (dumba, the fatty tailed sheep) is used in some Afghan-Northern Pakistani cooking as a cooking medium in some dishes (usually for frying or braising the meat. It is also used more broadly as an addition to kabaab mince to ensure that the end result is soft and moist. The best mutton seekh kabaabs are filled with extra fat worked into the minced meat mixture. Chunks of fat are skewered in between meat chunks on meat tikka skewers for the purpose of moistening them with fat and infusing the meat with the smell and taste of charbroiled smokey burning fat.

[GTM]

It depends on your tastes. For my taste, lamb fat is good, and the best part of lamb blade steaks pan fried with nothing else but salt, pepper, may be a bit of oregano and a splash of lemon juice or vinegar at the end to deglaze. Great with nan or pita, but the point is the fat. The same in particular biryanis, where the idea is to get big chunks of fatty meat to the point where the fat is not custard, nor chewy, but right at the transition where the infinitely delicate membranes holding the fat cells together sort of burst in your mouth, with just the right "give" and the meat is neither fall apart nor chewy, but the exact gelatinous quality that also depends on the age, sex, exercise, and feed of the animal. Lamb fat does not just happen but is the end result of thoughtful animal husbandry.The closest to dumba in the US is the Karakul breed. Fat from different parts of the animal has different liquid crystallinity and different phase transition temperatures, and organoleptic qualities.

Fatimaji is referring to the kidney fat, that is ground into the seekh kebab and chicken reshmi kebab bases. Usually that is castrate goat, fed chickpeas to satiation, and kept stationary in stalls for the last months of life. Barbary goats have excellent quality in the subcontinent, among the many breeds available, but we are not speaking here of muscle fibre or other meat parameters.

In other cases, excellent chunks of muscle, 2 pieces, are interspersed with one chunk of tail fat from the dumba, and grilled on hardwood charcoal with no other adornment save the delectable fat. With fresh nan, and a simple salad this is beyond words. But all depends on how the animals have been grazed on wild browse and mountain herbs, and how they have been cared for and butchered. Not possible here except with Navajo sheep grazing on sagebrush.

Tabakmaz is a dish that depends on fatty lamb breast for its success, often being cooked in clay saucers in embers, all of which contribute to its unique crusty deliciousness. Goat does not have the thick subcutaneous fat that lamb breast has.

Completely stupid, inexpert and misguided Indian cookbook writers speak of triiming fat off the leg of lamb while cooking "curries". A) the leg should not be used for "curries", whatever that dish might mean for the benighted authors and their hapless, eager-beaver know-it-all acolytes, because American or NZ leg turns powdery dry, & B) fat and gristle is SO central to gravied dishes that need to seethe in fat, with as little water as possible. So, neck, tail, shanks, trotters, fatty shoulders, are to be used, and FAT needs to remain to be RELISHED along with meat, bone, marrow and collagen, with flatbread and salad with every bite. Lamb fat is essential to the taste of meat cookery, as far as North Indian braised meats are concerned, and it must be present on the meat. Even ground meat has many different forms, some with substantial quantities of fat, chopped by hand in particular ways.

In Calcutta, we had long ribbons of meat sliced with the grain with an appreciable border of fat. This meat was marinated in spices and threaded tightly on skewers, and in the parlance of that city, this was the seekh kebab! What a marvelous work of art, this self basting meat, packed in sapid pleats. It is a pity that our know-it all Indian mavens have never found it useful to introduce such in NYC or elsewhere, where their apparently omniscient tandoorias have made critics wax omniscient about subcontinental meat cookery after just a meal or three!!

[luckyfatima]

Great post. You are speaking my language. Lots of new info for me as well. Thanks.

[paulj]

The problem I have with nearly all lamb in the USA (mostly from Australia or NZ) is that the 'phase transition temperatures' are all wrong - it solidifies at too high of a temperature, leaving a waxy coating on the plate and on the roof of my mouth. A lower melting point is what makes pork fat so much palatable than lamb or even beef.

[GTM]

The Canadian government conducted a study some decades ago that concluded lamb fat among several animal fats studied to be the most harmful for cardiac health, precisely for the reasons you have suggested! While they did not research goat fat, I suspect that it would tie with lamb.

Pork fat depends on the types of feed used, and I remember reading a British farming textbook of veenrable years that dealt extensively with this topic. However, you forget that there are large populations on this planet for whom goat and lamb are the ONLY acceptable meat source, e.g. Hindus, where many of the orthodox who do consume meat on certain religious or feasts will abjure all other animals, even chicken, save fish.

Off topic, for the subset mentioned above, the goats etc. must be non-castrate, male, and below the age of puberty. Given the fecundity of the breeds involved in India, these are very young animals younger than 3-4 months, with not a trace of fat in them, and extremely delicious. There is only a single (delicious!) way of cooking the sacrificial animals, without garlic and onions, in contrast to the myriad marvels of secular meat cookery, which is non-kosher to the orthodox. Nepal, though, manages to stretch the envelope with young river buffaloes in ritual sacrifices. I have no idea how they taste!

[Infomaniac]

I use fatty lamb pieces in an Armenian green bean and tomato dish called Fassoulya (sp?) where I brown the fatty lamb pieces in the pan before adding in the green beans, onion and tomato. I remove the pieces after it's cooked but it adds a nice distict flavor to the dish.

[souschef]

Why not use duck fat instead?

[ipsedixit]

I'm not thinking of lamb fat as a substitute, but rather as a unique ingredient all onto its own.

[David11238]

I recently pan fried some rabbit livers in day old seasoned lamb chop grease. They were pretty good.

[opinionatedchef]

yikes.for my taste, lamb fat is completely undesirable. the fat left in improperly/untrimmed lamb is what causes lamb to taste gamey/off to so many people. i am , ahemmm, a big lover of fat, but just not lamb fat.

[Robin Joy]

Right with you. I'm a big lamb fan, but lamb fat cannot really be used in cooking anything except lamb meat, which generally already carries enough (often too much) fat of its own. I usually spoon some fat away when browning minced lamb to make a shepherd's pie.

Even frying a very lean cut is probably best done just with a little neutral oil.

[gembellina]

Right. While I do love a nice short pastry made with tasty beef fat for my steak pie, I think I'd draw the line at lamb fat - it would be too overpowering.

[JungMann]

I usually save the fat I trim from lamb to use to flavor vegetable dishes by sauteeing in olive oil onions and seasonings. A little goes a long way towards adding flavor.

[ipsedixit]

Have you been able to buy just lamb lard?

[JungMann]

I think one can buy shredded lamb tallow at the halal market, but it is much easier for me to use my trimmings and render the little bit I need to add flavor to stews.

[sunshine842]

I don't usually use or save lamb fat -- for the lamb itself, of course -- or thrown into a stew or shepherd's pie.

But the fat itself tends to be just gamy enough that I don't care to use it for anything else.

[Joebob]

In general, I use the fat from whatever animal I'm cooking; bacon fat for pork, etc. to give more flavor. I don't cook lamb very often though, but would do the same if I had lamb fat saved.