There's a Reason My Hands Smell Like Lamb...

Friday is the shortest school day of my week and I had somehow mistaken that to mean it would also be the least busy. Wrongsies. The day started off with arriving in the kitchen to see a side of lamb laid out on the table over two cutting boards. I knew from the schedule of our week that we were breaking down lamb, but for some reason the idea had been abstract in my mind until I spent a moment staring at basically the entire left side of an animal. It had been slaughtered, skinned, cleaned and frozen Wednesday for us, our Chef said, and it wasn't specifically a lamb. With no lambing actually going on at this time of the year, the carcass in front of us was a one year old female sheep. Still relatively young, but much larger than what I'd been expecting to see.

Chef Karen spent the better part of an hour demonstrating how to break down the lamb and showing us where each cut of meat comes from. Logically I know a flank steak comes from the flank and I know where the tenderloin is located, but actually taking it off the animal was such an enlightening process. It isn't just a black and white outline of a sheep on paper labelling where each cut is located. It was maneuvering my knife through bone, cartilage and fat to carve out what would eventually end up being served to our customers.

After the demo and a quick break to grab lunch, we headed back into the kitchen to do our own cuts on the remaining three sides. We each had a chance to work on extracting a specific primal cut from the sheep which we would then take back to our station, clean and further break down. My cut was the leg, which I removed very cleanly, according to Chef.

Another small revelation: the reason some lamb tastes gamier than others is once again all in the way it has been handled. There are three reasons behind the way lamb smells. The first is the fell. Fell is the thin later underneath the lamb's hide that basically encases everything. If you've ever had salami that still had the casing on it and you had to peel it off, this is exactly how the fell works. The fell smells strongly of whatever odors the animal absorbs into it's skin and consequently if it isn't removed, you're going to have a more "lamb-y" taste which turns many people off from eating it.

The second and third reasons are that sheep have scent glands basically everywhere humans have them. On their "wrists", elbows, armpits, neck, between their legs and so on. These glands are usually encased in a lot of fat and not always exactly in the same location which makes them very easy to cut into. If the person fabricating the lamb cuts into a gland and doesn't realize it, the scent is going to be spread to every piece of meat their knife then cuts into until they wash it. The other way is if they don't hit the gland but it remains entombed in the fat on a cut of meat that is going to be cooked, the gland will basically render down along with the rest of the fat and flavor the meat that it is cooking with.

Let me add that there is absolutely no harm in ingesting it, it simply imparts that distinctly lamb-y scent to the meat. So if you've ever wondered why some lamb smells very strongly and some doesn't, now you (and I!) know!

In other news, I'm reading Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck. He first captured my interest with his show Heston's Feasts and In Search of Perfection on the Beeb where he would recreate historical feasts as accurately as possible on the former and use molecular gastronomy and science to create culinary perfection (or not) on the latter. He is one of the food world's brightest stars and his book is not only a cookbook, but he does us the service of telling a story throughout as well; much more interesting than just a book of recipes, although I'd gladly read one of those written by him as well.

I leave you all with my personal favorite bit of Heston's culinary alchemy... Alice in Wonderland's Drink Me .

Cheers!