Comments on: lamb in hay

By: anthony

anthony — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:10:04 +0000

seal the meat well, get the caramelisation…… place the hay into a pot large enough to hold the joint, heat the pan to get a good smoke coming from the vegetation, place the lamb on top,taking care to ensure any juices from the meat does not stop the hay from smoking, cover tightly and cook in a moderate oven till the required “doneness” is arrived at. i think it is important to think of this as a smoking technique to impart flavour to the meat, not a wet cooking technique that will tenderise an otherwise already tender cut…. works at the restaurant i work at anyway.

By: fraser

fraser — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:58:08 +0000

Yep, I think was completely my mistake

By: Ian Westbrook

Ian Westbrook — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:55:10 +0000

The mistake might have been in the hay you got from the local pet shop…? I saw this recipe once on BBC Food and Drink (the lamb and hay braised/simmered for a long time in water), and the idea is that the sweetness from the (fresh) hay goes into the meat…

By: Bottom Feeder

Bottom Feeder — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 09:46:11 +0000

Urgh, looks like a still-born lamb, still steaming away in the barn

By: JoLaCroute

JoLaCroute — Thu, 19 May 2005 16:17:50 +0000

Hi
I’m french and I never heard anything like cooking stuff in hay!! Yuck.
Poor Hugh must have been fooled by some mischievous old farmer!
Excellent work with your pork pie, though.

By: Lena Zavaroni

Lena Zavaroni — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:31:24 +0000

Man Alive! Just took a really good look at that picture of the offending item, above. It looks revolting! What a waste of a sheeps’ leg. I hope the rest of it was also hacked up, minced, kebab-ed and not wasted on such an ugly recipe.

By: Lena Zavaroni

Lena Zavaroni — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:28:19 +0000

“Torch the fucker next time!”

LOL!

That’s one way!!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:58:41 +0000

Maybe you didn’t blacken the hay enough?
In his recipe HFW describes scraping away the blackened hay.
From the photo above, your hay still looks quite golden which is possibly why the very hayey taste persisted?
Torch the fucker next time!

By: Yorkshire Soul

Yorkshire Soul — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:30:02 +0000

If you look at medievil recipes, you often find that meats were marinaded, this wasn’t to disguise the flavour of bad meat, but because meat couldn’t be kept for long as they had no way to keep it (I shan’t digress into pickling, salting or smoking here, we’re talking fresh meat), meat would often be a little tough, a good marinade would soften the meat prior to cooking.

By: X-Lydia

X-Lydia — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 06:02:52 +0000

Are people still solemnly still repeating the old Victorian canard that medieval and Renaissance meat was always rancid, and thus needed to be highly spiced?! Next they’ll be telling us to “moisten” sandwich bread with butter or mayonaise, or to sear meat “to seal in the juices”. Seriously, highly-spiced rancid meat would have tasted like just that, and no one, no matter how hungry, would have eaten it.

As for Lamb in Hay, I suspect it works best with tasty, aromatic fresh hay or fresh herbs, rather than ordinary farm-fodder. I’d like to try it with rosemary twigs.