Today I did my normal “darn it, I want lamb!” process, which is to buy the cheapest lamb leg at Costco and then cut it down to a “roast” piece, a “stew” piece, and a “stir fry” piece, in decreasing order of sizes.
The “roast” piece is approximately 1 lb 10 ounces (around 750 g, for the metric folk). It’s not particularly thick and it’s vaguely rectangular, unless I roll it back up like it was rolled up originally.
I would like to cook this on my grill, a Smokey Joe that I got a few months back as a wedding gift. I have a chimney starter, and I have about half a sack of plain ol’ Kingsford charcoal and new sack of Trader Joe’s charcoal that’s made with hardwood.
I know that I’ll be seasoning it with garlic, rosemary, and salt.
Would a better griller than me please “explain, as you would a child” (to quote a great film) how best I can do this and end up with a piece of meat that’s not past medium and ideally is around medium rare?
That’s already more seasoning than I’m used to but it sounds good…
while I can’t claim to be a great lamb griller (due to that one being a favorite Men’s Dish around these parts), I can tell you that my usual grilling brigade agrees that it’s better to turn things around several times than to leave them on either side for too long, and to season halfway through grilling than beforehand. YMMV. You need to get the flames good and going first, but not start grilling until they’ve gone down (grilling on the flame and on the cinders produce different results, the cinders are slower as one might expect and starting to cook when the flames are too high is likely to produce burnt meat).
If it’s a thick piece you should do it off the coals for a good bit to make sure it cooks through w/o burning the outside. If this is the case I highly recommend a meat thermometer, the kind that can go in the oven. Personally I’d get the hot coals on one side of the grill, start it over the coals to get some good color on it, move it off the coals so it’ll continue to cook without burning the outside, and stick a thermometer in it. It probably won’t take more then 30-40 minutes total and I’d take it off at about 140 F (but I like it on the rare side and it’ll have some carry over anyway). Let it rest a good 10 minutes lightly tented with foil before you even consider picking up a knife.
If it fairly thin and flat you can just grill it like a steak till it has a nice color on it and then check it.
Forgot to add - when you move it off the coals and stick in the thermometer, but sure to cover the grill, your basically roasting it at this point and you need the heat to build up inside the grill.
Make a mixture of Olive Oil, Lemon Juice, Garlic,Rosemary,Salt and Fresh cracked (coarse ground) black Pepper…make it thick and pasty. Slather that on both sides, re-roll and tie the roast. Gook very slowly over indirect heat. 2+/- hours.
season it and wrap it in foil to retain the moisture. i’d go for marinating it first in some vino and the seasonings but if time is of the essence baste it with vino and olive oil.
a nation of sheep shaggers can’t be wrong who do it this way.
I usually do a whole Costco leg at once. We wind up with a bunch left over, but that’s tasty in the next couple of days.
My preferred seasoning is salt, pepper, mustard, garlic powder and rosemary slathered all over inside and outside the leg. All of those ingredients are pretty harsh when raw, but as they cook, they all mellow and sweeten.
I get my charcoal going and sear off both sides of the lamb - 8-10 minutes per side, but obviously you may have to move it more quickly to prevent char. You do want some dark color just so long as it doesn’t burn.
At this point, it’s about a third of the way to being done. Move it off the heat, and cook slowly - you want an internal temperature that puts it at medium rare, and you want to do that as slowly as possible. About 40 minutes is what it takes most of the time, with heat in the 300 F range… but it wouldn’t be entirely bad to let it take 90 minutes at 250 if you could control the heat that well.