In like a lamb: Exploring spring's signature meat
IN THE MIDDLE of a rich lamb-shank dinner at Chez Henri, I began musing about lamb, the classic springtime dish made from little creatures that’ve recently been frolicking in fields of green alfalfa. Then I woke up. Most of the lamb I eat comes frozen, from New Zealand or Australia. And other than an odd lamb chop here, a rack there, and maybe the occasional shank, there are precious few lamb dishes on most local restaurant menus — and very little of it comes from sustainable sheep farms in New England. But shouldn’t lamb be New England farmers’ ideal meat? They’re small, they’re hardy, they can’t eat that much. Then there’s the added bonus of making chevre from goats’ milk and using their sheared wool to knit sweaters.
But it’s not that simple. I discovered that there are two significant limitations for lamb: supply and demand, and what KO Prime’s Jamie Bissonette terms “meat finesse.” According to chefs like Bissonette, Andy Husbands, Ana Sortun, and Lydia Shire, a lot of professional and home chefs don’t know how to cook most cuts of lamb. “Unlike a steak that you can throw on the grill for 12 minutes,” explains Bissonette, “lamb requires finesse.”
Boston’s meat guru, John Dewar, of John Dewar & Co., set me straight about why lamb farming is a hard go, especially for most New England family farms. “The demand isn’t high enough to justify the higher prices that you’d have to charge for locally raised lamb,” he says. “Lamb farming is an expensive proposition, as opposed to raising pork or beef. It’s a problem of economies of scale. It takes nine, 10, 11 months to get a lamb to a marketable weight of approximately 85 pounds. You could raise a steer to 850 pounds in 20 months and have an easier time selling more of the cuts — not just the middle cuts that most people know how to cook, the rack and the loin.” Even out West, where there are plenty of lamb-friendly grazing areas and a longer grazing season, lamb farming is a marginal business. In the US, producers have only 47,000 lambs ready for market on a weekly basis, versus 620,000 head of cattle. The Australians and New Zealanders can raise lambs profitably because they do it at the same scale that we do cattle ranching in this country. “They have the economies of scale thing down in New Zealand,” Dewar says. But there are still a lot of local chefs who swear by domestic lambs raised in Vermont, New York, and Colorado.
“Lamb is like pork: it tastes like what it eats, which is why it matters how and where it’s farmed,” says Bissonette, who finds domestic lamb “beautiful — darker, cleaner, richer than imported lamb.” When he can, he buys lamb from upstate New York and serves his rack roasted simply with rosemary and garlic and finished with fennel pollen and black olives. Lydia Shire is a Niman Ranch lamb devotee. Always a chef with strong opinions, Shire thinks New Zealand lamb has a “gamy, stinky flavor that can’t compare” with the lamb she buys from Niman. “People love lamb if it’s well-cooked and carefully raised,” she says. “At one of my restaurants, if we did 200 covers on Saturday night, 65 of them reliably ordered the lamb dish. The problem is that the cheap lamb on the market is ruining the market. I can buy a whole rack — eight chops, two portions — for $30 from Niman Ranch. But to sell it at an appropriate food cost for a restaurant meal, I have to charge $45 for the entrée. That’s high for most people.”
One of the great lamb cooks in Boston is Oleana’s Ana Sortun, who’s a pro at presenting lamb dishes featuring cuts that go well beyond chops and racks. Not only is lamb moussaka a staple on her menu, but her “spoon lamb” — a dish braised in beer and cumin, wrapped in Lebanese bread like a beggar’s purse, and glazed with pomegranate molasses — is one of the best dishes in town. Sortun buys her lamb from Tom Biggs of Vermont Quality Meats, a sheep farmer and wholesaler. When Sortun was asked to cook a huge ceremonial dinner for Prince Charles — a sustainable-food and lamb freak — she and Biggs went from sheep farm to sheep farm in Vermont, clearing out their freezers for her spoon lamb.
Sortun’s skill (and the kind of cuisine her restaurant serves) means that she’s very sophisticated about using all cuts of lamb inventively and efficiently. But many other local chefs don’t have the interested clientele nor the culinary training to be as fluid and experienced with lamb dishes. Everyone clamors for the few prime cuts, but farmers don’t have a ready market for the other cuts that require what Bissonette calls “nuanced cooking. Slow braises, long marinades, and allowing enough time — optimal is a half-hour — for the meat to rest. [That’s] very hard to manage in a high-volume restaurant kitchen.” Another limitation, says Tremont 647’s Andy Husbands, is that we think of lamb as a special-occasion dish, the “classic springtime leg of baby lamb at Easter, which everyone eats once a year. People don’t know how to cut it or cook it, and look at it and think, ‘What am I going to do with that?’ ” he says. “It’s too bad that we don’t do more with lamb. It’s has a big flavor, it’s low-fat, [it’s] reasonably priced.”
Tom Biggs is passionate about expanding sustainable lamb farming in New England and convincing young Vermont farmers to raise lamb. It’s his ninth year in business and he sells only to chefs in Boston, Providence, and New York (locally, he works with Radius, No. 9 Park, Craigie Street Bistrot, Casablanca, T.W. Food, and Oleana, among others). He’s a one-man crusader working hard to get chefs to use whole lambs efficiently. Unlike most lamb producers, Biggs is as likely to sell out of his non-prime cuts — the meat that works for shanks, braises, roasts, and sausages — as he is to roar through his supply of racks and saddles. But he agrees that delivering quality lamb in New England is an expensive proposition, what with our short five-month grass-growing season and the very high cost of corn east of the Mississippi. “The good news for us is that as the dollar goes down abroad, New Zealand lamb is closer to our sustainable costs — just a dollar less per pound than ours,” Biggs says. “That might be just enough to encourage young local farmers to give it a try.” @
[Photo by Joel Veak]
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