Wine Brine
Apr. 8th, 2003 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikVegetarians beware
So this weekend I ran across legs of lamb on sale, and I'd been meaning to play around with brining a leg of lamb before next Thanksgiving. (Which is about the right time frame here -- if we roast meat twice other than at Thanksgiving, it's a really meat heavy year around here.) So we grabbed it.
Brining is a very trendy way of cooking meat at the moment. I have mixed feelings about it, actually -- sometimes the meat ends up tasting a trifle... fake, I guess. Flavorful from the brine solution, but as if it's natural flavors had been diluted. And it can be too salty. But in general, it does give tasty results, so I forge ahead.
Anyow, the next problem is that I usually soak lamb overnight at least in red wine before cooking, and I'm pretty devoted to this method. (In fact, if I end up feeling like looking at lamb again this year, I think I will braise it in a clay pot in wine.) After some thought, though I decided to compromise and do both -- I made up a brine solution using red wine (a somewhat dubious merlot) instead of water. Since this was an experiment, I went for minimalism -- for two cups of red wine I used 1/4 c. sugar and 1/8 c. salt. (If I were to do it again I might slightly reduce the sugar.) Put the lamb in a closely fitting container, and the wine brine covered it nicely. I let it sit for over a day, shaking it from time to time, and turning the lamb over once.
So today, realizing that I really needed to cook the lamb even if I wasn't feeling very reliable, I fired up the oven. (The temperature in the oven varied between about 325-425, tending more towards 350.) I pulled the lamb from it's brine and let it dry on a rack, tied it, and when the oven was hot enough, popped it in. It cooked for almost an hour and a half.
Near the end of this, I browned a shallot in a little oil, added the remaining brine, and reduced it over low heat. And started water for noodles, and got the green beans ready...
Eventually the thermometer proclaimed the lamb at an internal temp to about 150 (yipes! I was aiming a little lower, but it shot up at the end) and I removed the leg from the oven. I deglazed the pan with a little water, added the drippings to the wine reduction, and thickened it will a roux to make gravy. (My original intention here was to thicken it with an egg yolk, and I still think this would have been a very good idea. However, faced with a big charred piece of flesh in front of me, I found myself unable to cope with the thought of that much richness and chickened out. If I had gone this route, I would have removed the reduction from the burner and let it cool before beating in the egg yolk, and then added the drippings and returned it to medium low heat, whisking vigorously, to thicken.)
The meat was unbelievable. The fruitiness of the wine came through, and it wasn't over salty. It was tender, and juicy... The gravy was pretty magnificent too, though next time around I will probably use only half the brine for the reduction -- the wine almost overpowered the drippings, and while the end result was very tastey, it seemed a waste of such a nice underlying lamb flavor.
And we will be in lamb sandwiches for a while ;-) (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jenk posted something about a serving of meat being about three ounces... and you know, that really is about all the meat I felt like eating.)
So this weekend I ran across legs of lamb on sale, and I'd been meaning to play around with brining a leg of lamb before next Thanksgiving. (Which is about the right time frame here -- if we roast meat twice other than at Thanksgiving, it's a really meat heavy year around here.) So we grabbed it.
Brining is a very trendy way of cooking meat at the moment. I have mixed feelings about it, actually -- sometimes the meat ends up tasting a trifle... fake, I guess. Flavorful from the brine solution, but as if it's natural flavors had been diluted. And it can be too salty. But in general, it does give tasty results, so I forge ahead.
Anyow, the next problem is that I usually soak lamb overnight at least in red wine before cooking, and I'm pretty devoted to this method. (In fact, if I end up feeling like looking at lamb again this year, I think I will braise it in a clay pot in wine.) After some thought, though I decided to compromise and do both -- I made up a brine solution using red wine (a somewhat dubious merlot) instead of water. Since this was an experiment, I went for minimalism -- for two cups of red wine I used 1/4 c. sugar and 1/8 c. salt. (If I were to do it again I might slightly reduce the sugar.) Put the lamb in a closely fitting container, and the wine brine covered it nicely. I let it sit for over a day, shaking it from time to time, and turning the lamb over once.
So today, realizing that I really needed to cook the lamb even if I wasn't feeling very reliable, I fired up the oven. (The temperature in the oven varied between about 325-425, tending more towards 350.) I pulled the lamb from it's brine and let it dry on a rack, tied it, and when the oven was hot enough, popped it in. It cooked for almost an hour and a half.
Near the end of this, I browned a shallot in a little oil, added the remaining brine, and reduced it over low heat. And started water for noodles, and got the green beans ready...
Eventually the thermometer proclaimed the lamb at an internal temp to about 150 (yipes! I was aiming a little lower, but it shot up at the end) and I removed the leg from the oven. I deglazed the pan with a little water, added the drippings to the wine reduction, and thickened it will a roux to make gravy. (My original intention here was to thicken it with an egg yolk, and I still think this would have been a very good idea. However, faced with a big charred piece of flesh in front of me, I found myself unable to cope with the thought of that much richness and chickened out. If I had gone this route, I would have removed the reduction from the burner and let it cool before beating in the egg yolk, and then added the drippings and returned it to medium low heat, whisking vigorously, to thicken.)
The meat was unbelievable. The fruitiness of the wine came through, and it wasn't over salty. It was tender, and juicy... The gravy was pretty magnificent too, though next time around I will probably use only half the brine for the reduction -- the wine almost overpowered the drippings, and while the end result was very tastey, it seemed a waste of such a nice underlying lamb flavor.
And we will be in lamb sandwiches for a while ;-) (
jenk posted something about a serving of meat being about three ounces... and you know, that really is about all the meat I felt like eating.)
