How to make slow-cooked lamb shoulder with ras el hanout, a spiced North African dish with big flavours and tender meat
- This slow -cooked lamb dish uses ras el hanout, a blend of fresh spices that add a flavour punch to the meat
- If you have time, salt the lamb and rest it for a day, rub in the spices for the second day, and cook on the third
When it comes to dinner parties, I often cook lamb. It is available year-round (except for the extra-tender, pale-pink spring lamb) and has so much flavour that it is hard to ruin. I usually roast a lamb leg to medium-rare, but with lamb shoulder, which has more fat and connective tissue, I use a moist heat and cook it slowly for a long time, so it’s tender but not dry.
Slow-cooked lamb shoulder with ras el hanout, preserved lemon and peas
If you have time to plan in advance, salt the lamb two days before cooking it and refrigerate the meat. The next day, rub it with the ras el hanout spice mixture before refrigerating it again. The lamb needs about five hours to cook to make it very tender.
If the lamb shoulder you buy has the neck and ribs still attached, have the butcher trim them off as close to the bones as possible (save the bones to make soup).
Ras el hanout means “head of the shop” in Arabic and uses a selection of the best spices available. In Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, every household, shop and cook has their own version. The mixture I give is adapted from a recipe in Paula Wolfert’s book Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco (1973).
She calls for whole spices that you grind yourself in a spice grinder (mine is a burr-type one for coffee beans). Some of the dried spices, such as mace, galangal and ginger, don’t grind that well in the coffee grinder, so for these I buy the pre-ground stuff.
It’s essential that all the spices – whole or ground – are fresh; open the jar and take a sniff – if the scent has faded, so has the flavour; throw it away and buy more. All the spices in the recipe are whole and dried, unless indicated otherwise.
It takes a while to assemble all these spices – I had to search in three shops, including one that specialises in Indian products. You won’t need all of the ras el hanout; keep the remainder in a tightly sealed glass jar and try to use it within three months.
