I wonder if the reason is that New Zealand and Australian lamb is really lamb. I think most American “lamb” is really mutton.
It’s kind of weird that people want to cover up or suppress the flavour of it. IMO, It’s a feature, not a bug.
Lamb, larded with anchovies, rosemary and garlic is pretty amazing - these additions enhance it, rather than masking it.
Cumin also pairs well with it and, used sparingly, heightens the ‘lambyness’.
This is the way. I make little slits and stuff them with anchovies and rub it with rosemary and garlic.
Pigs aren’t dirty if given the chance to be clean. They do sometimes cover themselves with mud as sunburn preventative, as they have no hair. And sheep can be pretty messy around the tail end if not shorn recently.
Cotton and wool aren’t an either-or. They’re better for wearing in different weather: cotton’s better when it’s hot, wool’s better when it’s cold.
Pigs can eat nearly anything and used to be raised quite cheaply on leftovers; though commercial pigraising doesn’t work that way any more. (How much of it does work you might not want to know; especiaally considering how smart pigs are. The lambs are at least often raised on pasture.)
Lamb meat tastes unfamiliar to many people in the USA and many people don’t like unfamiliar flavors. If your taste buds are expecting beef, it’s going to taste off.
Have you looked at beef prices lately?
Lamb’s gone up too; but nowhere near as much.
Goats are browsers. They’ll eat grass if that’s what they’ve got, but they’ll eat quite a range of other stuff too.
Any animal kept too many head per area of pasture will eat that pasture down into barrenness. That’s a problem with keeping too many in too small an area, not with the species.
You can get it at the farmers’ market I’m part of (not from me, from a different vendor.)
If you’re in LA, though, that isn’t going to be much help.
I’ve seen lamb shoulder at the grocery, but the groceries where I’m living now carry very little lamb at all; and despite this area having a fair number of farms raising sheep what they do have usually comes from Australia, and tends to be leg (priced cheaper than most of their beef, these days) or very expensive chops, though sometimes shanks.
I’ve had non-gamey American lamb. It is going to be affected by what they’re fed; might also be affected by the breed. The American lamb I’ve had has been small-farm raised and while that’s not guaranteed to affect the feed it often does.
Almost Canada, Washington.
Clean. Huh. Have you ever actually been in contact with a living sheep? They don’t know how to use soap and water, don’t use toilet paper, and like many herbivores have no inherent reluctance to stand in their own shit.
Which is not to say they’re walking sewers, but I wouldn’t describe them as “clean”.
Well… cotton does not run off and get lost/fall into holes or ravines/eat the wrong thing and drop dead from the results, and cotton does not have predators wanting to peel off the fluffy stuff and eat the tasty, tasty meat inside. From the standpoint of harvesting the fluff, cotton doesn’t run away and it doesn’t squirm and fight against you when removing fluff.
We bred sheep for meat and wool, not for smarts.
Which is not to say cotton doesn’t have its drawbacks.
I have cleaned raw fleece. I repeat, sheep do not comprehend toilet paper. Getting clean, fluffy wool requires processing.
Lamb is expensive in the US because not many sheep are raised for meat in the US and as a result a lot of it is imported. As an example all the lamb at the store where I work comes from New Zealand, meaning from about as far away as it is possible to come while still being on the same planet.
Pigs can be clean, too, if given a lot of space. If a person was locked in a pen where you had to pee and poop I don’t think they’d be clean and sweet-smelling either.
Unless you’re talking about some kind of technical distinction between lamb and sheep of similar size and age then this can’t be so.
Mutton is meat from an adult sheep. Lamb is from a sheep that is less than a year old. Mutton is gross, IMO.
Same here. I’m getting swoony just thinking about it.
I used to have to cook lamb patties in my dorm cooking days. I thought they were a lot greasier than beef and a lot more liable to spit hot grease at you when you cook them. Plus I thought they tasted baaaaaaaaaaad.
We default to lamb for red meat. Here we can find it at Costco consistently, and of course there are halal butchers within a mile of our house. It’s cheaper than analogous cuts of beef. (We typically buy leg, not the more expensive loin chops.) I am also partial to a duck now and again, though.
I do have a halal butcher nearby but last time I checked them out they were very expensive. Maybe I should give them another look.
Because it sucks.
When I worked at the musuem, I had a visitor from Australia and we got to talking about food for some reason. He thought the lamb here in the United States tasted awful and wanted me to tell him why. I didn’t know. I told him that for most Americans lamb wasn’t a regular part of our diet and it was typically reserved for Easter or other special occasions. He didn’t believe me when I told him salami in the United States wasn’t made from horse meat.
Grilled lamb chops, mmm!
And one of the best meals I ever had was a buffet at a Glasgow hotel. A highlight was a tender rack of lamb.
A couple of John Buchan’s books, set in Scotland 100+ years ago, mention “mutton ham” as a special treat. I suppose that means a leg or shoulder of salted smoked mutton?
If anyone hasn’t read Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” yet, or seen the TV version, here it is:
The wikipedia article contains spoilers:
Sorry for the FB image, if you can’t see it.
Looking around on line, it looks like American lamb can be up to 14 months before slaughter while New Zealand lamb must be under 12 months of age at slaughter.
Is this enough to make a difference in flavor? I don’t know. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence in this thread that American lamb is stronger tasting than imported lamb. One possible cause of that is American lambs being older than imported lambs.
Wow. I didn’t think that movie was that popular.
AFAIK, that movie is very popular.
So I’ll once again plug one of my new YouTube rabbit-holes:
She’s a mid-twenties third generation Australian sheep farmer working on her family’s gigantic (~6,000 acres) primarily sheep and crop farm with her herding dog. 7,000 ewes many of which produce twins and some triplets - probably 15-20,000 free-range sheep at max in a given year. She’s absolutely hilarious as long as you don’t mind copious casual Aussie swearing - you get an example less than a minute into this one:
Yep - wooly butts and no sheep toilet paper. They have to give them Brazilian buzzes to clear the shit and piss-soaked wool off their asses so they don’t get ‘fly-struck.’
Yep - lots of sheep as above. All for the meat trade these days as apparently it costs more to shear non-Merino sheep than they get for the fleece and Merinos are apparently less hardy and not a great meat sheep.
Yeah, in one of the videos she demonstrates how low you can go until a sheep bite will actually pull that final grazed-down clump of grass up by the roots and damage the pasture. A very large percentage of these videos are her herding sheep (by truck and dog) from one paddock to another and supplementing with hay and grain as needed. Basically grass-fed, but grain-supplemented sheep.
I love lamb, buy imported Australian leg of lamb semi-regularly at Costco and I really enjoy getting a fairly unvarnished view of where my meat comes from (in a general sense).