Beef or lamb?

Sounds like something you’d be asked on a flight somewhere, and with the grey skies and drizzle of Saturday I would probably rather have been on one. But it wasn’t to be, so instead, with a newly acquired copy of Raichlen’s BBQ USA I set about selecting a couple of recipes – it would have been rude not to. I’d got a small beef rib rack and lamb shoulder from Sentry on Friday, so the main ingredients were sorted, with just the embellishments to determine. For the beef I decided on a pepper garlic rub and with the slightly less than optimum weather conditions I went gas (I’m sorry, I promise a hundred “Hail Joe-be-wan’s” before I next light my chimney), but I wasn’t too worried as the recipe called for no smoke. The meat was rubbed with the garlic and pepper and left at room temperature while the grill heated up. Once ready it was indirectly grilled for about 2 hours, turning halfway through; and that was it, nothing too fancy, nice and simple. We left the meat to rest for 10-15mins and then served it with Yorkshire puddings – a delicious accompaniment that the whole of America is missing out on!! This will no doubt cause confusion as they are savoury (and so not a pudding as some may think of it) and they don’t contain suet (the other thing savoury puddings are made from in England) which is only to be found in bird food here! See, I warned you, anyway, back to the meat..... Whilst I forgot to reduce the cooking time for the smaller cut I had than the recipe called for, the meat turned out really tasty. The rub gave just enough flavour without overpowering the beefiness and it was still plenty moist enough. Even Raichlen approved:

Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day, which was fortunate as I was planning on using smoke and charcoal for the lamb. We chose a Pacific Rim recipe for lamb shanks and decided that there was probably little difference between shanks and shoulders... The meat was rubbed in the morning, refrigerated for about 6 hours and then brought up to room temperature before grilling. I tried a slightly different grill set up this time, I put about 2/3 of a chimney of unlit lump in the grill and filled my chimney just with briquettes to be lit. This worked marvelously; I managed to keep the grill at a constant 300F for over two hours. The meat was smoked with red wine staves for an hour and then wrapped in foil and kept on the grill for another 45mins. By this time the temperature had reached 140-150ish – according to the recipe (for shanks) I should have been aiming for 180. A quick check of another book suggested a good target for lamb shoulders was 130-140, so we considered it done. The shoulder was painted with some of the accompanying sauce (sorry I forgot to mention we’d made this too), grilled for another 10 mins and then rested. This was probably one of my grilling highlights to date, the lamb was lovely and moist with delicate hints of flavours, yet not enough to mask the lamb. The sauce added yet another dimension and was a perfect accompaniment. I really recommend this recipe.