Home menus go on the lamb, lasagne’s toast

Look, lasagne was all very well for your first lockdown, but I think we’ve all moved from amateur to professional status by now. The world is changing, our cooking is changing, and takeaway offerings from our top restaurants are changing. We need something more than slabs of pasta encasing rich ragu and cheesy bechamel. And we’re getting it.

The first clue came when Good Food released its top 20 recipes of 2021 (so far). “We’ve crunched the numbers,” it said. The winning recipes were for “three lamb shoulders, two Dauphinoise potatoes, and a new spin on spanakopita”.

Not a single lasagne to be seen, elbowed out of the way by slow-cooked shoulders of lamb.

It’s probably not a surprise, given it’s everything we love about lamb, only slower. The basic template is to rub the meat with a spice mix, or garlic, lemon zest and herbs, and leave overnight. Then cover it with foil and bake for 3 hours at 140 or 150C before lowering the temperature to 110C and baking for a further 3 or 4 hours until the meat falls from the bone or your potatoes are done, whichever comes first. Remove the foil for the last hour and you get the best of both worlds – gelatinous meat that shreds at the touch of a fork, and crusty, almost caramelised skin. It’s the perfect lockdown recipe, actually; it’s not as if you’re going out and can’t keep half an eye on it.

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More clues pile up when I look at restaurant-meal, home-delivery offerings. On the Providoor site – founded by Melbourne’s Shane Delia of Maha – slow-cooked lambs are stacked shoulder-to-shoulder, from Maha’s own with roasted eggplant and tahini to the overnight roasted shoulder with malted barley from South Yarra’s Botanical Hotel. Or there’s always Supernormal’s Xinjiang lamb shoulder with spring onion pancakes, or Persian-spiced lamb shoulder from Brunswick East’s Rumi. It gets tougher – the choice, not the lamb – with Providoor Sydney, as The Apollo’s oven-baked shoulder with tzatziki battles it out with Matt Moran’s slow-roast with mint salsa from Chiswick in Woollahra.

The next culinary lockdown cliché was always going to be something meaty, cook-ahead and comforting. But at least we’ve moved on from bloody lasagne.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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