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Once the meat is done I rest everything for at least an hour basting with the cooking liquid every so often. As it cools the rendered fat starts to solidify so you build up a layer of it on the skin of the meat. As a final step you crank the oven up really high (230-250°C), and roast for a final 20 minutes or so to crisp everything up. This is such a forgiving recipe - super simple and as long as you have a few hours it’s pretty much foolproof. The resting gap needs to be at least an hour, but I’ve done as much as four with no problems. This makes it a great method if you’re entertaining - really can’t go wrong. Once crisped, the meat was absolutely gorgeous. Soft and juicy it pulled away from the bone with no effort at all. The flavour is delicate and creamy, a little like suckling pig and… OMG, that skin! I did a side of herby beans topped with breadcrumbs and some grated Comte, they were nice but this was all about the meat! Young lamb is not something we see every day over here but if you come across any I’d definitely recommend giving it a go.

At the weekend we had a few friends over so decided to get something a bit different. Having just come back from a week in Spain I went trawling through my favourite online Spanish food place and found a good deal on their milk fed lamb. They import this direct from the continent and sell it in halves or quarters, the lambs being slaughtered no more than 35 days old. I ordered two quarters, a forequarter: and a hindquarter which I split the leg off: I salted them up and left to dry in the fridge overnight. To cook them I started early Saturday morning using my favourite lamb method from Neil Rankin’s Low and Slow - 120°C oven for however long it takes to get fully tender. With an older lamb shoulder this is around 5-6 hours. This younger version took about 3.5 to get nice and soft and yielding. The method calls for roasting the meat on a rack over some water (+/- some whole garlic cloves). Meat just out of the oven after the first step:

I love them to be around 1.3-1.6kg (so what’s that? Maybe 3-3.5lb). At that size I can roast them very hot and very fast (a la Keller), 220°C to 235°C for maybe 30-40 minutes. Great skin, great breast meat and decent dark meat. I struggle to see a better roasting option.

I absolutely love my all clad 3qt saucier. It’s a great pan, hugely versatile - I wouldn’t be without it.

Wow! I find myself both magnetically drawn to, and utterly terrified of a knife like that. I’ve a feeling that just five minutes in its company and I would be bleeding profusely…

Agree with all that @btbyrd said above. The gripe I’d add to the list is the constant second guessing that induction burners do: I briefly take the pan off the heat, they assume I’m done cooking and shut down I try to cook on high for a while, they assume I’ve forgotten something and turn themselves down i put a tray or something else on the top (away from the one burner that’s on), they go into full meltdown mode and turn off the whole unit literally none of this happens with my gas range. If I leave a pan on too high too long and it burns the food, that’s on me and that’s fine. On induction I’ve lost count of the number of times the “intelligent” unit has messed things up for me by trying to protect me. they're great for boiling water but I can’t think of a single other thing I’d use induction in preference to gas.

this is a great idea - I’ve never had any joy with the two bowls business

Just watched some videos. Looks like it makes quite nice pizza but most of the accessories are unavailable - the frame to do Neapolitan pizzas, the air vent control for the wood burner, the front shelf, the steam injector, the front door for low and slow… so at the moment it’s a decent sized pizza oven with a proportionally longer heat up time (60 mins vs the 15-20 mins for my koda 16). I’ll keep looking…

perfect Paul, thank you for this - I’ll give it a go

This looks interesting - not cheap but some good looking features https://www.gozney.com/products/dome

In my recent experiments with white sauce I’ve found that the amount of flour seems not to make much difference. I’m definitely leaning more towards the “by volume” end of the scale rather than “by weight”. With the latter I find it uses a lot more flour with no perceivable benefit. I love nutmeg but my current go to for that bit of flavour is to add a couple of pieces of blade mace to the milk while I scald it.

Paul, I’d be very interested in your PC coulis method - we’ve been doing pressure cooked stocks exclusively for the last few years. Like you I find them tastier and easier. Care to share the coulis version?

I bought a Buffalo chamber sealer just over 6 years ago now and it's been brilliant. My parents got an identical one and have had loads of problems but ours has been perfect. It cost under £500 brand new so at £80 a year I'm delighted. We use it 4-5 times a week so although it's definitely not a heavy duty device it's been great for home use. This is the one we bought Though this looks like a newer model with similar 6.5L capacity

I'm really interested in this, if it weren't for a painful tax bill I'd probably have ordered already. Use cases for me are: accurate prediction of time to doneness - no idea if this is true till we use it. But if it is, that's massive. And with the multiple sensors its plausible it will be being able to use in situations where my wired probes (also thermoworks @JoNorvelleWalker) aren't useful - eg sealed in a sous vide bag just being a heck of a lot less messy than the wired setup - admittedly an ultra first world problem but this could replace 2-3 probes, their wires, my thermoworks signals unit and just work right out of the drawer: grab a piece of meat, stick it with the probe and I've got ambient, surface and core temperature monitoring instantly. That really speaks to my OCD, I can't stand the tangled wires!

I had a look at it again today and it was much better, the texture was much more pleasant and it was properly scoopable. Possibly a little on the hard side this time given my freezer temp but I could always let it soften slightly I guess. It remains completely smooth - almost supernaturally so! I love this piece of kit

Update on the chocolate frozen yoghurt - A limited success: The mix froze down well, nice and even and got down to -22C with 24 hours. I processed this using the ice cream setting but had to stop it halfway through as the machine started to vibrate quite violently - has anyone had the before? A second go went through fine. The finished product was pretty good, nice flavour with a good balance between the acid tang of the yoghurt and the rich chocolate/cream. Texture was a little less good though - it was super, super smooth but was almost gummy in nature. Not sure if this was due to the stabiliser? It also melted very quickly - I think this might be due to having to process it twice and being too greedy/impatient to let it set up in the freezer for a while

200g milk chocolate 300g Greek yoghurt 150ml milk 150ml cream 5g salt 3g stabiliser 150g sugar 50g glucose I guess the stabiliser amount might be open to interpretation given it isn’t for a specific brand or mix of ingredients. based on the unfrozen taste I’d say it was a winner - but then I am a bit of sucker for acid in my food

First recipe from hello, I’m trying the chocolate frozen yoghurt. it’s currently sitting in the freezer overnight so I’ll report back on the finished product tomorrow, but the unfrozen base tastes great. I did find the mix became very stiff as it cooled - no chance of getting it through a fine seive though, it would have taken a month!

First go with the new toy… I love this thing! I went for the dark chocolate sorbet from the ninja recipe book - largely because I had all the ingredients and it takes five minutes to make. super simple: dissolve sugar and cocoa powder in water, bring to simmer and pour over chopped up chocolate (valrhona guanaja). Whisk to melt and the cool and freeze for 24h. I didn’t check temps of the mix but my freezer is set to -22°C. The creami is super easy to set up, no more than five minutes from box to countertop. It’s not as big as I thought it would be either, it fits nicely under the cabinets in my utility room. I span the mix on sorbet setting, there’s a bit of noise from the ninja but not as loud as a vitamix on full tilt. fiest run left the sorbet a little crumbly so I did a quick re-spin. Wow! This is beautiful! Amazing texture, really dense and super super smooth. I cannot wait to try some more recipes but I think this device will be a game changer for me.

thanks @andrewk512 and @blue_dolphin, really helpful replies I've done as suggested and got a copy of Dana Cree's book on order along with a bit of generic stabiliser and some malic acid. I've got a nice low weight precision scale from previous experiments so should be good to go I'll have a read through those articles now while I wait for it all to arrive - I'll be sure to post back when I've made my first batch...

So I’m going to jump into the creami pool too. My birthday is coming up and hopefully soon I’ll be the proud owner of a pacojet lite any recommendations for a shopping list of the more esoteric stabilisers/enhancers to get in before it arrives?

yes definitely. Tell us more…

https://ninjakitchen.co.uk/product/ninja-ice-cream-maker-nc300uk-zidNC300UK?tracking=searchterm:Creami+ getting very tempted…

I had a couple of balls leftover today. They were obviously totally past it but I thought I’d give them a try. they actually turned out ok!

Got a bit wrapped up in the birthday party yesterday so just posting some results. Overall it went really well, probably the best pizzas I’ve done. I didn’t manage to get that perfect margarita I was after but did some really nice pies. The carbonara one was excellent. the ooni coped perfectly with the larger volume, I did two batches of six back to back with a bit of a break in between then knocked out a few more later in the day. first try with the 60% dough, a marinara garlic bread: a slightly overdone margarita and finally one of birthday boy on his new pride and joy: