Rack of lamb my way
I am experiencing a desperate photo problem in that the photo upload portion of WordPress will not work. Period. Rich, our Cornish IT wizard, is on vacation. I will post the photos to this and other posts as soon as it starts working again, promise.
This is a cut so rare in Italy that if I see it I buy it. It is not prepped as it is in other countries, so the frenching of the bones I did. I wasn’t so great at it, but what I couldn’t do was cut the backbone through. That would have made much more difference to the ease of eating it than frenching does.
I'll bet you are missing Raul already.
I love rack of lamb, have used this same recipe for many years and because I ate it alone, the messy bit of the backbone wasn't that big a problem.
Crumb mixture
preheat oven to 225°C or 450°F
fine, dry breadcrumbs, about 125 ml or 1/2 cup for each rack
1/2 teaspoon of herbed salt mixture
1 teaspoon of hot paprika or 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne or peperoncino in polvere
Mix those things together in a flat dish.
Take a generous amount of good, strong mustard in your hands and rub it generously all over the meaty part of a rack of lamb. Dredge the rack in the breadcrumbs, turning and pressing to get every part of the meat covered. Lay it on a cooling rack and let it dry for a while, perhaps 30 minutes.
Place the rack in a shallow pan and put it into the oven. It will take about 15 minutes to become medium rare.
Esselunga at Arezzo often has racks of lamb as they’re cut outside Italy. Even better, they’re baby racks and not racks of mutton. They’re usually also “frenched”. Pity you’re so far from Arezzo.
I do a similar thing with a lamb rack. Except I start the rack in a pan on top of the stove, browning it, keeping it to no worse than rare inside. Then I apply the herb crust and it finish it briefly under a hot grill until the crust is crisp and the meat inside is pink.
Try my way and I will try yours. I go to Arezzo frequently so I will look that up. As I recall, I have passed Esselunga on the way to the A1?
I like my lamb rare– very rare. This is medium rare, but nice and spicy to make up for it.
The SS73/E78 would get you pretty close to Esselunga.