Mutton doesn't fit much our western traditional cooking esthetics where we want tasty but subtle. Lamb and mutton are for different types of recipes. As a french guy selling and importing high end food in South East Asia, I've tasted quite a wide array of lambs.
The best lamb is young, but not too young. I'm not a fan of milk-fed lamb where I feel there is quite no taste. The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old. Agneau de Sisteron is a gem. You don't need to be highly skilled to cook it. For cutlets, just pan sear until pink inside. For roast and leg, oven, basted with salt olive oil, some garlic cloves inserted inside the meat. It's truly magnificent.
The older the animal, the bolder the recipes it needs. The best lamb/mutton I've ever had was in Marocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds. So tender it was served from the bone with a spoon. You'll notice that mutton is always cooked in a way to counter balance the strong muttony flavour and sublime it with contrasts. Mutton curries are also delicious for the same reason.
When I was working construction in Singapore, I used to get mutton biryanis with my field guys. The rice and mutton came wrapped in waxed paper along with a bag of pappadams and a separate bag of "gravy." Insanely delicious and cheap. The only problem was being comatose after such a heavy lunch.
Yes! Mutton biryani and mutton steak (for the uninitiated, that's not what you think it is) are my go-to orders. At any hawker centre I usually make a beeline for the Indian Muslim stall. Of course, as you say, office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems.
> office workers eating food designed for labourers has its own problems.
Reminds me of traditional food in Innsbruck, Austria. It's great if you, say, work in the snowy forests 12 hours a day doing hard labor, but those calories are not real healthy if you're sedentary.
Both are eaten in Singapore. Unhelpfully, the Malay term "kambing" can refer to either, and consequently so can "mutton". Generally speaking, locally sourced kambing will be goat (it's too hot for sheep in the tropics), but from NZ etc it will be sheep.
as a Hyderabadi, I fully approve of mutton biryani posts in HN. :D
Probably, my current favorite dish. Have been eating it multiple time every week for decades now and its charm has never faded. That said, it does play havoc with your triglycerides.
In South Asia/diaspora/influenced cuisines, mutton = goat. This is a good tip to keep in mind for South Asian halal butchers too. Mine in the US proudly sells mutton which is goat.
Some of the best mutton I ever head were curries in India, fresh from a farm in NZ, Ireland or Iceland and from those road side bbq places in Tunesia.
Since we love it, we have it quite often at home, either as minced meat (sometimes mixed with beef) for all kinds of stuff or from tje bbq. Since mutton is not such a common thing for Germans, if you want good one, you have to get from Turkish butchers.
The honey and almond thing is something to try for sure!
It depends on which part of India you're in. The parts where sheep are reared will serve sheep. The others will sell goat (but will label it as `lamb')
> Australia and New Zealand have Western traditional aesthetics, Lamb and mutton are common here. What changed here ?
In my personal experience, mutton is not common in contemporary Australia. My local supermarkets (Woolworths and Coles) stock lamb, but I don’t remember either of them ever selling mutton. Maybe some specialty butchers might stock it, I don’t know, there isn’t much culture of eating it among the younger generations. That said, I imagine if I went back in a time machine to the 1950s or earlier, it would be much easier to find mutton in Australia.
Only time - that I can recall - ever eating “mutton” was in India - and I’ve been told that a lot of Indian “mutton” isn’t actually mutton, it is goat. You can buy goat meat here, most supermarkets don’t, but I’ve seen it in specialty butchers
I grew up in Australia with mutton making up 90% of my meat intake, as we slaughtered our own merino wethers (so not the breeds of lamb raised for eating).
The local butchers would also have a decent stock of different cuts, particularly things like neck chops for stews. Numbers of sheep around are lower now, so that may have limited things a little.
I also think hogget is equally as or more common than lamb in city butchers. Some of those chops are huge and have a nice tang.
OMG, every time we visit Grandma we hear the stories about the difference between Lamb and Mutton and that that, actually, everything we buy these days in Mutton and they stopped labeling it mutton because Lamb is more expensive. And nothing is as good at it used to be.
Agreed, I remember growing up in country WA and we would have mutton as it was a cheaper option afaik, but it’s almost impossible to get these days - all lamb.
UK too, TFA accurately scoped it to America, GP's just generalising it further (incorrectly) or perhaps means 'American' not 'Western'.
And on the Asia point, I'm pretty sure in India at least 'mutton' can refer to goat or 'lamb' of any age, typically goat, it's not making a rigid (regulated) distinction based on the age of the animal.
Same in Germany (well, lamb (regulated as max age 1 year), I haven’t actually seen mutton anywhere. Even the middle eastern butcher only sells lamb), though we mostly tend to import it from NZ for some reason.
NZ has insane economies of scale and other efficiencies that mean it makes the cheapest lamb in the world. NZ lamb is usually cheaper than Welsh even in UK supermarkets.
Sorry, let me pause here for a minute and highlight the fact that this article talks about Mutton in the US which is not traditionally known for "tasty but subtle".
I. think that the "tasty but subtle" cooking esthetic is not necessarily "western" or western is to broad a term. It's the cooking esthetic of Cantonese cuisine (eastern), Japanese food (specifically Kaiseki), French food and Teo Chew cuisine to a lesser extent (more seasoned than Cantonese cuisine). It's also seen in other countries in Europe but less so (more often as part of the fine dining which has been influenced by the legacy of French cuisine)
Note that while I, personally, mostly tend to like "tasty but subtle", it doesn't mean that I criticize or dislike other cuisine which have their own advantages.
And, lastly, as a kid living in a French rural area, I had my share of mutton (which I absolutely detested back then but now can appreciate)...
It has a changed quite drastically but I (n=1) was raised on Julia Child cookbooks, so tasty (and rich!) but subtle could probably still describe my palette. Traveling France, everything I ate out seemed so familiar and wholesome but it took a lunch of duck to realize why in a lightbulb moment. Child was so influential I doubt I’m alone.
I’d eat mutton in a heartbeat (now and as a child) though maybe more because the Hobbit and dwarves did too!
That's interesting. After watching the movie based on Julia Child's life I was always interested to know how much it had an impact on cooking in the US.
I didn't say anything about goat, but mutton is common/popular enough to be available in supermarkets (nevermind actual butchers, as you might have to go to for some game or a particular cut or something). The comment I replied to claimed that Americans don't eat mutton because it's unsuited to 'Western cuisine'. Lamb and mutton are no stranger to British roasts, pies, stews, etc. - we don't even have to introduce 'curry'.
While I do agree that mutton requires more hardy recipes I strongly disagree about the subtle esthetics of western cusine as such.
If that was the case we would all crave goat. A young goat is very tender and delicate.
It can probably be found but I have personally never seen it in a shop. I only tried it because a family member keeps them as pets.
Another case could be made for the horse. It used to be a working animal and we would happily eat it. But today it is very hard to come by even though it is really tasty. And many would today look at you as if you suggested eating a dog. And let us not even go there :-)
In the UK there is also "hogget" [1] which is a halfway house between lamb and mutton. Our neighbour raises mountain sheep (mainly because they are hardier and don't need as much help to give birth) that are smaller than commercial sheep. As a result, they weren't really big enough to eat as lamb but were very tasty as hogget.
Etymologically, English uses different words for animals than the meat, and the food word comes from the french (cow/beef/boeuf, pig/pork/porc, sheep/mutton/mouton). Looking at goat in french, Chèvre, that is used quite regularly to describe goat's milk cheeses, but I've never heard it or a derivative to refer to goat meat. Typical dishes I've seen are things like "curried goat". Wikipedia has some more info, but notably, the article title is "goat meat".
The original meaning of mutton is an adult sheep. In English I don't believe there is a proper name for goat meat other than "goat meat". In some areas of the Anglosphere mutton is used to refer to goat meat.
Some local curry restaurants in the Bay Area use goat for recipes that call for mutton, and sell it as mutton curry – but I assume that's because mutton is not an option...
If you visit areas with less domesticated animals that forage semi wild with shepards that check in now and again you might struggle to tell the difference between a sheep and a goat - the varieties of each are broader than many people realise and there is a considerable degree of visual overlap in the full spectrum of Sheep Vs. Goat.
Sheep and goats are so skeletally similar that archaeologists can't easily tell the difference. I just googled and there are signs like the third cusp of the third molar etc but I remember an archaeologist telling me that they just refer to them as sheepgoats, as though there was some mystical single type in antiquity.
Great, you get goat meat when you order mutton in the Bay Area? Here where I live, people sell mutton (sheep/lamb) even when asked for goat meat. I don't know why but people here always prefer goat meat to mutton.
Goat has too much of a satanic connotation perhaps. There was a marketing term from 1922 "chevon", doesn't that sound a lot like se7en to you? (Seven sins etc).
As a North European from a country where sheep are raised for wool and the meat is near-inedible, I can absolutely attest that there are huge differences in the texture and taste of lamb and mutton.
The problem is not that it's mutton, the problem is that sheep bred for wool are not the same as sheep bred for meat. Plus said country doesn't really have a tradition for cooking mutton, other than "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours".
Are you saying New Zealand ("said country") doesn't have a tradition for cooking mutton? You are dead wrong on that. It may be a little out of fashion today but mutton has been a kiwi staple for generations. You can still reliably find mutton in any given supermarket and mutton cookery goes well beyond "drop it in a pot with cabbage and boil for hours". Your post is incredibly ignorant.
As far as I know, for any type of meat it will go from soft to hard and then back to soft as you go from short to long cooking times. So lamb cooked to pink is quite delicious. But if you want it cooked all the way through, you have to go for a very long time to get back to a nice texture.
And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.
Here in Scandinavia our traditional dishes involving lamb are also based on boiling or steaming the meat for many hours. If you had offered my late grandfather a piece of lamb that was pink inside, he would have refused to eat it.
That's also because the primary function of sheep in Scandinavia was to provide wool, so they would be deep in mutton territory by the time they were slaughtered and require low & slow cooking to make the meat edible.
> And of course eating meat that is pink is a luxury of having very high level of hygiene from the farm all the way to the table. This is difficult and expensive, so even in the highest income countries it has only become common in the last few decades.
Is this true? People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever. Maybe it was more a cultural thing in Scandinavia to boil or steam. I certainly know people who order New Zealand grass bed beef steak well done (while the waiter cringes).
On the other hand if you offered me pink chicken I would be revolted.
> People have been eating rare or medium-rare meat since forever.
It's not safe, one thing are the bacteries that you can catch from raw/undercooked meat that was not stored correctly, another thing is the parasites, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinella_spiralis
Depends on the part of the sheep and the age. Generally chops and a few other parts are great pink. But mutton chops are still quite tough sometimes like this. Leg and shoulder usually need slow cooking.
You just have to trust you won't get any infection from that, so the whole 'manufacturing' chain has to be properly set up and supervised. Once you have that, you can eat raw meat. It's quite common in many places, here (in Europe) we eat steak tartare which is raw beef.
germany has a big tradition of eating raw minced pork (mettbrötchen - bread roll with raw minced pork, diced onions salt and pepper). and its perfectly safe because the food safety laws are so strict. its so safe that even gas station variations of this are very popular
I don't have a problem with most undercooked or even raw meats as long as I trust the supply chain (I can imagine how this would be problematic in India). The latest trend of medium-rare pork is a bit too daring for me, though.
That's because there is a difference between trichinosis from undercooked pork and E. coli from the unhygenic handling of cut meat in general. E. coli mostly infects just the surface of cut meat so as long as it's cooked well on the outside, the insides can still be quivering and ready for action. Trichinella, on the other hand, can be found throughout pork and thorough cooking is the only way to render it harmless.
This entire article is based on a false understanding of US labeling
> "It’s true that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find mutton"
This is false. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find something LABELED as mutton. However, US labeling allows "lamb" to actually be mostly mutton.
> With respect to the Code of Federal Regulations published Standard of Identity, USDA-FSIS does not have a specific definition for lamb, nor explicitly identify boundaries for age of animal in product labeling originating from ovine species. The only age-specific labeling claim includes the term “spring lamb” or “genuine spring lamb,” applicable only to carcasses of new-crop lambs slaughtered during the period of March and the first week of October. - https://www.sheepusa.org/blog/newsmedia-sheepindustrynews-pa...
and unsurprisingly it's more cost effective to let the animal get bigger before slaughtering it.
Yup! As I was reading the article, I was pretty surprised as it continued to not mention the vastly different labeling laws in the U.S. vs the rest of the Anglophone world. In the U.K., for example, meat labeled "lamb" legally must come from a sheep that is less than a year old. Meanwhile, U.S. "lamb" is typically 12-14 months old [1], since the U.S. has no standards on sheep meat labeling, and permits all sheep meat to be labeled as lamb. Much of the sheep meat sold in the U.S. wouldn't be legally considered "lamb" in the U.K., Australia, or New Zealand.
Meanwhile India has its own, wildly different meaning for mutton: it means goat meat. If you get an Indian "mutton curry," it'll taste really different from U.S. "lamb," but that's not because of the age of the animal — it's an entirely different species!
From the article:
'“Mutton is not an accessible protein option in the US,” says Megan Wortman, executive director of the American Lamb Board, an industry group aimed at expanding the market for domestic sheep products.'
You would think she would know it actual mutton is widely available, no? Maybe it's legal to label mutton as lamb, but not done often, so finding actual mutton, labeled however, is still hard?
Mutton/lamb is the most delicious of all non-fish meats.
I don't particularly love beef/chicken/pork but a sunday lamb roast with crispy potatoes and gravy - yum.
BUT - cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting - and anticipate you won't really knock people out with it until you've practiced enough. Jamie Oliver has the best lamb roast recipes.
Lamb leg is extremely cheap at the moment in Australia - $10/KG - so I am practicing my lamb leg roasting skills.
These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way. It's not as if the Middle Eastern restaurants or kebab joints are slow roasting the stuff. You can pressure cook it for certain meals (i.e lamb shanks) but it's not that necessary. Lamb chops can also be cooked much in the same way as beef steaks.
The most tender part is the backstrap (its marbled like wagyu) and incredibly easy to prepare and skewer. This is followed by the legs. You can even go one step further and skewer more fat inbetween.
Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine.
I grew up on it, and have probably cooked it about ~150 times for other people. It's always been a hit and I'm not exactly a chef ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>> Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine.
No, make it into a pilaf. In a ceramic oven vessel. If you're from the Middle East, or anywhere around the Mediterranean, that's what your heart yearns for, and your heart knows best.
Also, saturated fats but that's not why I brought up your heart :P
> These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way
The thing that cracks me up are yuppies caring for their cast iron skillet like it’s a newborn baby. “You can’t use soap on it… You can’t treat it like that… To maintain it you must…”
I promise that generations of dirt poor Southerners had bigger things to worry about than following Alton Brown’s directions for cast iron maintenance.
IIRC he went to culinary school with the intent of becoming TV Chef. A lot of his early stuff was lifted right out of a culinary school program.
It's possible that your grandma has a lot more classical cooking skills than you think. A good bit of "southern cooking" is classical French cooking that's evolved over time and has been adapted for local ingredients.
To me the whole point is that it’s indestructible/recoverable. Things go really south you can steel wool / sand it and re-season. If it’s any coated pan it’s not usable for cooking after it takes some damage
In fairness, it's nice to know how best to avoid needing to sand/reseason more than necessary due to preventable mishaps. It's not a fun chore to have to add to your list.
I use soap every wash on well-seasoned cast iron too, no problem at all. You need to make sure to wash all the soap off, and dry it well -- or at least I believe it's important to do that, I guess since I always do it, I could be making assumptions too, maybe it's just fine if you don't?!
But yeah, the idea that you have to leave the cooking grease and fat on cast iron and aren't allowed to use soap to cut the grease and get it off.... is an odd one.
That's the point, the oil from the seasoning process (or rather, the residue it leaves behind) is not dirt, it's an actual layer of coating - and if you use soap on it you wash away the coating.
No, sorry, if it washes away you have not seasoned it properly - it should be carbonised and bonded (polymerised?) to the actual pan, not just a layer of grease sitting on top.
I have multiple cast iron items in my kitchen that I can wash with washing-up liquid, gently scour with wire wool even (sure, too much vigour would probably start to remove it, or at very least scratch up the surface and make it harder to clean/things stick more) with no problem or loss of seasoning.
A product having once been ubiquitous, and it's maintenance therefore common knowledge that you'd pick up by habit, does not mean it's stupid to have to pay attention to this knowledge many decades later.
Some misconceptions do exist, for example dish soap not usually being a detergent that damages the patina nowadays. While other practices are a development, like our general food hygiene standards having changed significantly, and keeping a patina on cookware therefore requiring more deliberate attention.
You can clean cast iron with soap of course, if you're using it often and well you don't have to. Most of the time all I need to do is wipe it clean with a paper towel and let it be like that until I use it again a few hours later.
I figure this is probably what those "dirt poor southerns" were doing too, since it's simple and effective.
I’m mostly wondering about why the “cast iron” part is relevant. If a wipe is enough for that type of pan, isn’t it good enough for all of your pans? If there’s food stuck on, you’re obviously going to do whatever it takes to remove that. But when that isn’t the case, is a simple wipe good enough?
Copper and stainless steel invariably get food adhered to them very well. (Try cooking eggs in stainless steel) A properly-seasoned cast iron pan is, in many ways, like a teflon-coated one. So, I suppose my comment would go for teflon-coated pans, as well.
If I still used stainless steel, you bet I'd be soaking them overnight then scrubbing the hell out of them in the sink the next morning.
I think it really depends on how often you use it. If you use it every day, then I think wiping it down (maybe with a bit of added oil depending on what you just cooked) is more than adequate most of the time. If you use it once a week then put it in a cupboard before using it again, then you'd want to clean it more thoroughly because you might get stuff growing on it otherwise.
I inherited my pan 20 years ago; it ws in poor shape. I stripped it with caustic soda, and re-seasoned it, which took about a day elapsed. Ever since, it gets washed-up using detergent, and immediately dried. It's as good as when I first seasoned it. I've never had to repair the finish.
I blame the novel Silence of the Lambs. It has some weird aside where it mentions that soap never touches her cast iron pan. So the pretension has existed long before Alton Brown showed up.
Soaps had lye that would've washed away the seasoning on the pan. Today's common dish detergents do not, so this is just advice that used to be helpful, but it isn't anymore.
Some people are stuck in their ways, never really understood why they shouldn't use soap in the first place, or didn't notice that the soap they grew up with is different from today's dish detergents... I think there's a lesson to be learned here about re-evaluating our assumptions every so often and not doing things just because that's how they've always been done.
This red herring is presented with such delicious haste every single time cast iron cookware is mentioned. I think it's because of some pop-science cooking channel on the internet
While I will not pretend to know all the reasons in fact that this practice has reached such common use, washing your cast iron pan with soap won't strip the seasoning that is already set, but it will strip all of the unset oils left over from cooking that are on the surface. If you spend tons of time maintaining cast irons, you will find that the single most important practice to building a smooth surface that never sticks is leaving a thin (towel dry / buffed, leave too much and it turns sticky) film of oil on the surface of the pan after every use. If you need to or want to use soap to remove the (again, unset non-seasoning) layer of oil on the surface, you can dry off the pan, add some oil and buff it with a towel before storing. Using some heat during this process, but not smoking the oil is necessary to expand the pores of the pan (or make the oil more viscous and better fill the static surface of the pan, whichever mental model helps you sleep). This process takes extra time and effort to achieve the effect you already have with a well seasoned cast iron after cooking: Food debris washes right off with some light scrubbing and water, leaving a clean surface with a thin layer of oil on the top that has nicely filled all the cracks on the surface.
This is a fantastic take. I’d never thought about this before but you’re right that this might be Patient 0 of the modern rich white person’s exposure to cast iron and associated care.
“Mapp had inherited her grandmother’s skillet and used it often. It had a glassy black surface that no soap ever touched. Starling put it in front of her on the table.”
I read the series long after publication date and remembered going, “wait, the no soap thing has been around THAT long?”
Well if you want to cook mutton right then don't just roast it with potatoes in the oven. Make a nice pilaf with it, with a whole head of garlic in the center like they do in Uzbekistan:
(the meat in the video is goat, not mutton, but it's the same recipe).
Or, my favourite (and a recipe handed down by my grandfather, though it skipped a generation): Gioulbasi, a whole leg of mutton wrapped in wax paper, with vegetables and melty cheese, and roasted slow and sweet:
I think it comes from Smyrni and the old Greek cities in the coast of Asia Minor, who were for a while a part of Turkey (until the Greeks there were slaughtered like lambs).
Anyway we have lots of Turkish loan words in the Greek language. To the best of my ability to transliterate these examples in latin characters: ati, passoumi, briki (ibrik, I think), kazani, charatsi, tsoglani, bairaki, chatiri, dounias, giouroussi, boulouki, dragoumanos, doulapi, and derti, of course, etc. As you can probably tell, we always tend to add an "-i" at the end.
We also say "halali" and "harami", which we clearly took from the Turkish.
And of course, Tsantirimin Oustoune, and other all time greatest hits:
> cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting
Hold on, are we talking about lamb or mutton?
Lamb is extremely forgiving. It's tender and has plenty of flavor. It's fine to cook lamb hot and fast like a steak, or low and slow like basically any meat. If you treat lamb like oddly shaped beef or pork you'll be fine.
Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you.
I'd argue it's more a matter of degrees. Chicken is more forgiving than beef, beef more than lamb, etc. Lamb is far from "extremely" forgiving - it's just moreso than mutton.
> Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you.
That's all true of lamb too, just not to anywhere near the same extent as mutton.
That's true for breast, but thigh and leg meat is extremely forgiving (as long as you don't undercook it). Once you get it to "shred with a fork" status, you basically can't ruin its texture until you char it into rubber.
For breast, the trick is to pound it to ~3/4 inch thickness and then dry brine for at least 30 minutes. So much easier to get it evenly cooked and tender all the way through:
Lamb is my favourite meat. I eat it weekly at least. I live (and was born and raised) in New Zealand, a country known for the best lamb in the world. So, no.
I was going to say, Americans don't generally eat mutton but lamb isn't terribly uncommon. Lamb is already difficult to get right, which is why many go out to get it (Indian and Middle Eastern, most commonly); mutton is even more difficult, so people don't even bother either way.
In addition, goat isn't often eaten in Europe (outside of the Mediterranean, Italy primarily) and other affluent nations, but is fairly common (at least in the Southwest and New York+DC) via Latin American, Middle Eastern and African cuisine infusion.
Wouldn't this depend on location and source? I used to live in Scotland, where sheep graze on grass in fields that don't really take away space for vegetables (unless you want to survive on potatoes and cabbage), and they're local. So I assumed they're not that bad.
Most of the sheep grazing land in the UK isn't natural - natural trees and vegetation were cleared to make way for more sheep. It's had a large impact on the biodiversity here.
Sheep grazing also strips the land bare of deep and complex vegetation upending whole ecosystems. Perhaps in a futile or misguided gesture I try to keep my consumption of lamb to an occasional treat rather than a regular thing.
Ruminants inherently have large methane output that drives up climate impact. There are only very early efforts to reduce methane output through diet change.
For leg, shank, or shoulder chop I would agree with you - a slow roast or braise is the right way to go. But the rack is incredibly tender and easy to cook. Throw some salt, pepper, garlic, and Italian seasoning on it and put it in the oven at 375F, it's perfect in about 25 mins. No cooking skills necessary.
At my local Costco, imported Aussie lamb racks are usually about $15/lb.
Wow, disagree - I find that the sweet spot with a rack is very small, maybe 2-3 minutes. Outside of that, it's either too pink or overdone. Maybe it's just me :(
For me, the easiest lamb cut to cook is shoulder - just throw it in a low oven for 3+ hours (with some white wine, rosemary, parsley, garlic and lemon), and it's the most delicious lamb you've ever had!
Yeah, the window of time when you need to pull it so that it's good. As in, pull it 2 minutes one way and it's not done, 2 minutes the other way and it's overdone.
Just use a meat thermometer. I guess that's a skill but it's an easy one. Pull it 5-10 degrees (F) before your target temp. I get consistent medium rare every time.
I love a braise too! But it takes some planning and it's more work. I can go from "hmmm, what dinner" to plated lamb rack in 45 mins - including defrost time.
I beg to differ. Difficulty depends upon the recipe.
Lamb/mutton tagines are incredibly easy to make. They’re basically “throw it into a slow cooker and come back eight hours later” dishes. You can improve the flavor by browning, but the simplest versions are still wonderfully delicious and basically idiot proof.
> You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious.
Maybe I'm just Italian, but if you just toss a lamb/mutton shank into your otherwise boring red sauce (which you were already cooking low and slow, right?) it goes a long way.
I did a boneless leg roast on Friday and it came out very tender. I spread softened butter with herbs all over the top, then put it in at 425F for 15 minutes, followed by a couple hours at 350F until it was ~140F in the center. Juicy, tender, and nicely pink inside. The leftovers made a couple great sandwiches and finally ended up as a stir fry last night.
Americans do ourselves a huge disservice by ignoring lamb (and mutton, and goat, and wild game, and...)
A tip from my grandpa who was a sheep farmer and roasted plenty of lamb legs: coat it in vegemite before putting it in the oven. Sounds weird and gross I know, but it creates a salty, crispy crust that keeps the juices in.
Lamb is very robust actually. It can be cooked rare or slow cooked and anywhere in between and still be delicious because it’s often fatty and marbled.
I'm the cook in our household and for me the article doesn't quite capture my observations... maybe it's because of my location, but it isn't easy to find lamb in my local grocery stores and it is at a super premium relative to other options. The lamb available is so flavorful that I can't imagine something even stronger. Having checked with butcher shops, anything they can get that would be local (rather than from NZ or AUS) is even more expensive, and generally only ground or chops. So... I'm seeing a catch-22 here where it's not really available, therefore people don't eat it. And if the cost is x2+ of other choices, people are going to think carefully about their budget.
Finally, it really is a unique flavor that even for all my culinary explorations, I see it as an occasional change-of-pace rather than a regular part of our menu. Great as doner / gyro, individual kebabs, in stews, but beyond that I continue to be at a loss of what to do with it.
Sometimes I forget what a privilege it is to drive past cows and goats and lambs and chickens, etc. every day. It's hard to imagine a lifestyle where you don't have any interaction with anybody who could connect you to a locally-grown lamb.
Have you asked a search engine for locally grown lambs in your area?
I typed in "locally grown lambs orlando" and "locally grown lambs san diego" and both brought up https://localharvest.org. I have no idea what prices you might find that way.
I live in rural America, but agrarian does not always mean abundant or diverse. The lamb at the butcher shop comes from about 2 hours away, as does the cream line milk. My beef comes from a family friend 2 hours the other direction. Could I buy a whole lamb from the FFA kids at the fair? Sure, but I don't need a whole lamb and it is more of a charity "for the kids" situation than a good value. Talking with ranchers in both this country and others, I suspect that some urban markets may actually have better access than we do - because they are targeting sales to specific groups (areas with large Muslim communities come to mind...) that they know want the product.
30 minutes to work, 30 minutes back home, 4 days a week! Not a bit of traffic, aside from school buses or tractors! It's relaxing, and a great time to catch up on podcasts, lectures, or just do some karaoke! And the views are gorgeous!
Just earlier today I stopped in the middle of the road on my way home just to stare in awe at the sunset beaming across the sky onto a huge, billowing, fluffy cloud that was kissing the horizon, rolling green pastures dotted with cows basking in the fading sunlight. I really do underappreciate the beauty of rural living!
I recently had the experience of moving to a rural area, where I didn't know anyone for 2+hours away. I worked from home.
Within a month I knew a few people to ask if I wanted to buy 1/4 cow or more. It wouldn't have been hard to find lamb or goat either, but would probably need to call a person that knows a person that knows the farmer. By the second hunting season I had two people bring me jerky from their hunt, and offer bargain prices for game meat. Buying rural meat is about having a deep freeze in the garage and buying in bulk.
Aside from the meat, there are several people near me that have egg stands. They put out eggs by the road and have a jar to collect cash. Similar situation for veggie harvest time.
Once a year some coworkers and I split a cow direct from a farm. The butcher arranges all the logistics. Great way to bring down your yearly food budget and you don't have to think about Tyson's questionable bs.
In the UK, lamb is one of the "big 4". If you have a roast dinner it will be chicken, lamb, pork or beef (probably in that order of likelyhood). It's just another meat that you'd roast and slice and eat with gravy and veg.
I probably know more people who dislike pork than dislike lamb. I don't think many people really regard it as an especially strong flavour.
Here in Michigan mutton is not overly difficult to get (lots of middle eastern and african immigrants) but it's a hard sell to anyone that didn't grow up eating it.
Lamb (as you said) have a strong but not unpleasant flavor. Mutton takes that flavor dial and turns it way up.
in my lifetime, Americans have been steadily losing their taste for not just gamy but other strong flavors as well. Endives used to be just plain bitter, for people who liked bitter, now you can safely put them in a kid's salad. It's sad. And I think other cultures are and will keep losing their tastes too; I've noticed for instance, that not all Chinese like chowing down on all the weird parts of animals, and Europe has plenty of the same "supermarket cheese" that Americans have.
On the plus side, worldwide people have expanded their palates a lot in a way that increases the range and diversity of what they eat, but in terms of the globalized ingredients we can lay our hands on there is still a general regression toward a very mean mean.
I'd say it's a strange umami flavor. Tasting something gamey triggers something in my head that says, "oh this is animal scent". Maybe it's more olfactory than flavor?
tastes are pretty much all olfactory, except ... what is it, salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and the "fifth taste", umami? and if i'm not mistaken that means just "sourness", not "sour flavor like lemon vs lime" which is olfactory
It's sad, I think there's a negative feedback loop of, supermarkets only selling the most common produce, and people only learning recipes that use the produce supermarkets sell.
The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.
Here's something that might rile you up: I enjoy spicy food, but sometimes I'll buy mild salsa because I don't always want cry my way through an appetizer or snack. I must be uncultured, huh?
Finally, and this might come as a shock, but maybe your tastebuds have changed as you've gotten older. Endives might not be as bitter to you now due to this change, but they still might be pungent to other people who don't eat them as frequently.
(I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)
> The only sad thing here is how you're trying to generalize a few billion people with high-brow "I like it and if you don't, the you're wrong" assertions.
He does have a point though. Many people, especially older generations, keep complaining that everything has gone bland / tastes the same... the problem at its core is that, thanks to market consolidation and efficiency, there aren't that many different varieties of produce and animals grown any more at scale.
Producers select for predictable amount of weight, fast growth, low variance in taste and especially long shelf life, and so we end up with 30-ish varieties of seeds producing 95% of our food, where 10 companies dominate 74% of the world market [1]. In animals, it's the same - out of 80 domestic breeds of farm animals in Germany, for example, 56 are threatened [2], and even back in 2000 the problem was already recognized for other continents [3].
> (I really wish HN had a downvote/dislike button. Maybe I need to level-up first before I get that option...)
because I still every so often get served some lamb that is gamy and I can taste it just fine, I feel that I still know what it tastes like. And I can tell the difference between beef, more aged beef, and lamb, and I while I like flavorful beef (don't serve me filet), and lamb and gamy lamb, I don't actually like the flavor of more extreme-aged beef; so since my tasting of things hits some subtle difference buttons, and all the scale buttons I used to, I feel like it's still reliable.
Chicory lettuce (which is now hard to find) and dandelion greens are bitter, and they used to be bitter and I used to and still like them. It is true that children (little boys) don't like bitter and grown men do (more than do women), so yes, taste buds shift, but I showed awareness and acknowledged that by saying "now you can serve endive to children"
The TAM (Texas A&M) and NuMex Primavera (New Mexico State U) varieties were selected/hybridized to be milder for consistency for mass food production - eg use by companies like Old El Paso.
When you buy supermarket Jalapeños you aren’t getting to choose the variety (be grateful you’re at least being told that - in the UK they’re just sold as ‘green chilies’ which could be anything) - so depending on the supplier, and whether they are offloading leftovers from a Taco Bell order, it’s going to be pot luck what you get.
It’s not a new thing - TAM peppers date back to the 1980s. Possibly changes in the supply chains during the pandemic are causing more of the milder varieties to end up in supermarkets than before?
I eat a lot of chillies - from milder Serrano up to the superhots like bhut jalokia. Jalapenos, in my experience, seem to have the biggest variance in capsaicin per specimen. Sometimes you'll get one that tastes basically like a bell pepper, and sometimes you'll get one that surprises you. Colour doesn't seem to have that much of an impact either. Could be you just got a duff pepper
Yeah, where I live lamb comes in tiny shrinkwrapped imported packages and sells for about $40/lb. You can also get similar small frozen packets of camel and ostrich meat in the freezer section. You can not buy mutton anywhere (unless you know a guy). We eat beef, chicken, pork, and turkey all usually in the form of ground beef or grilling steaks, boneless skinless chicken breasts, pork sausages or chops, and whole turkey. Everything else is, as one grocery store clerk put it to my wife, "a little exotic for this continent."
I've only eaten mutton in heavily spiced dishes and it does go very well in those settings - you need other strong flavors to stand up to the gaminess of the mutton, which might be why it hasn't caught on in American cuisine which tends to focus less on heavy spice profiles and more on just cooking ingredients to present their natural flavors.
Yeah - sounds a lot like the various dishes across a range from the Mediterranean to the "-stans" that I've made with lamb. No reason I couldn't use mutton - if it were available. I've had some lamb that was absolutely overpowering, so having a hard time imaging something more than that.
> anything they can get that would be local (rather than from NZ or AUS) is even more expensive
This might be key. It might be that your juridiction has trade agreements with other countries and impose that local lamb has cannot be sold cheaper, and if that is the case it would explain why local products are more expensive and lamb/mutton not marketed at all. Talk to local producers to confirm. I don't know about today, but this used to be an issue for lamb manu markets.
I'm cooking a leg of lamb now from my local Safeway. It costs $7/lb, which is the same as chuck roast. But it's maybe 1/4 more expensive due to that big leg bone (which my dog values highly). Still that feels like the price is comparable to beef, but a nice alternative flavor.
In my location, lamb is closer to $10/lb (at grocery stores - higher at butcher), while I can get (grass fed, super high quality) beef straight from the rancher at less than $4/lb.
You have to put a multi-year old sheep through a 6 month gestation period (and most will only go into heat during certain times of year), out of which you are likely to get only one or two lambs, each of which when slaughtered provides at best 10kg of marketable meat, if that.
Compare with chickens (massive egg output, so you get infants practically continually, or cows which while they have many of the same drawbacks, are far more productive, hundreds of kilos of meat from one animal isn't unusual.
The meat used to be much cheaper (at least local to NZ) when sheep were farmed primarily for their wool rather than meat. Basically each ewe could give you 5 or 6 rounds of lambs that were surplus to keeping the population stable and they'd mostly be timed for spring when pasture was productive enough for the extra livestock.
I was raised vegetarian and married into Yorkshire, and I've tried to expand my palate over the years. Lamb is the one thing that just utterly defeats me. I can get through most roast dinners by slathering the meat in various sauces, and while I don't really see the attraction, I can survive family meals. But lamb is unlike any vegetarian food in that it just sticks around like bubblegum. I'm chewing and chewing and hoping it'll dissolve and it never goes anywhere, so you're left having to just force this stuff down against your gag reflex. Genuinely horrifying every time I've tried it. My wife claims slower cooked stuff like lamb shank is different but I'm completely off it at this point.
I was raised vegetarian too and have that gag reflex, so bad.
I cannot work that feeling out - there's no way I can get used to it.
Meat fat texture == my food antithesis.
Lamb I just cannot. That feeling, so soft and ... something totally foreign - it "shouldn't be in my mouth" feeling. Both times I tried it's just, no thanks. edit The flavor is too strong and not something I like at all either edit
I near projectile vomit fat. I cut off all I see. If it's bacon fat that's totally cooked, maybe. If it's soft, it's coming off.
Once at a wedding I caught a large piece of steak fat, it coming up immediately & I stealthed it into my napkin; like jerry & the mutton.
I hoped no one had noticed but the groom saw. Just bad timing he glanced right at the same time.
I had reserved for a well done steak. It came to me full rare.
I just rolled with it to not fuss - I'd nearly rather not eating. I dissected that steak for fat like a surgeon.
Tuna, salmon I cannot force myself to eat.
Silverside|rump roast yuck.
I've come to accept my mouth has uncompromising takes of tastes & textures. Why fight it.
My dog (including past dogs) never mind! So there's that.
The textures are one thing, the taste is definitely also difficult. I suspect for many vegetarians you're raised with less umami - the taste highlights for me were sweet things like onions, garlic, tomatoes, salty things like cheese, or just really nicely spiced food like Indian/Mexican etc. Being presented with even the world's finest cut of meat, cooked to perfection by the greatest chef in the world, isn't going to chime with that upbringing. This is part of the reason I've been so disappointed with the rise of vegan menus at the expense of vegetarian stuff in restaurants. You get meat replacement items which are for late converts or part-timers who still crave meat taste, or bland stuff for lifestyle vegans, and meanwhile everyone's dropped the cheese dishes.
Meat tenderness varies by animal, cut, and prep method. Generally the 'working muscles' like legs tend to be the toughest and have the most connective tissue. However, in long-duration low-temp cooking methods the connective tissue breaks down and provides great flavor and mouth-feel.
If you're in a hurry, the lamb rack is great. For pretty much any other cut, you want a minimum two hour cook. A pressure cooker helps but it's not magic. The main thing is that you can't just put it in for X minutes and call it done, no matter what the recipe says. Just keep cooking until you achieve fork-tenderness.
If you struggle with the flavor of lamb, avoid the fat, which has most of the "lambyness". But then you might as well just eat something else.
It isn't really the flavour of lamb (I will smother it in any and all condiments available to me), it's that it doesn't turn to liquid as I chew it, and slowly all the actual tasty stuff dissolves away and you're left having to force yourself to swallow. I understand that you and others in this thread will say it's been cooked incorrectly, but we seem as a nation committed to having it this way. My point is that it's not always easy to demand vegetarian options in every social setting, so I've had to train myself to force it down.
With apologies to your spouse, but if you wanted to find out why people enjoy any kind of food, Yorkshire cuisine is probably not your best option. For mutton (and lamb) I recommend trying out a Moroccan restaurant, or Lebanese maybe (and I don't mean a kebab shop!).
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the rich food heritage of other cultures both within and without the UK, and their use of esoteric things like flavours and spices. But Sunday roast is what it is.
Er, what? Yorkshire is famous for its lamb. Especially the Dales. And seafood - Yorkshire has some of the most bountiful coastline in the UK (e.g. crab).
> My wife claims slower cooked stuff like lamb shank is different but I'm completely off it at this point.
Oh missing out I reckon, slow cooked lamb shanks or slow oven roast with heaps of rosemary and garlic is divine, maybe a drizzle of red wine/stock.
Personally I go with about 3 hours at 150 degs Celcius (depending on size) with foil covering the baking pan, and then it should fall off the bone when you look at it. Getting crispy spuds in there is a bit trickier, either a separate dish and drain some of the lamb fat in there, or take the foil off an hour or so before and get the spuds in there.
You represent a conundrum for me. I'd love to connect with somebody like you and try out dozens of different approaches. But, of course, that wouldn't be a very nice thing to do.
There's always the promise that there are some handful of techniques that would produce results that you actually like. But how do you ask somebody to suffer through the misery of all the techniques that don't in the hope of finding the treasures?
I love your attitude, but I think your mental model is wrong. I think many people don't like lamb (and can't stand mutton) simply because of the way it tastes. My one-time fiancee grew up on a (meat) sheep farm in Manitoba. With her, I've toured sheep stations in Australia and New Zealand. I've been offered and eaten it as a local specialty all around the world---I just don't like the flavor.
Sure, a preparation can make it taste less like lamb, but (for me) I don't think it can make it taste good. I'll always prefer beef. The closest I've come to liking it is Gyro meat, and that's usually half beef, and even then, I'm sure I'd like it more without the lamb. Just last month I had to force myself to finish some homemade golubki (cabbage rolls) made with half lamb and half pork that I otherwise would have found fantastic.
One theory is that it depends on what you grew up with, but I don't think that's true either. I grew up eating primarily (deer) venison, and never came to like it either. Later in life I've tried a whole lot of other big game meats, and haven't really liked them either. The major exception was (black) bear, which I first had as an adult and thought would be terrible, but it turned out to be incredibly delicious. Whale can be pretty good too, but I don't feel right eating it.
I personally think the correct theory is that some people are sensitive to the flavors of different proteins, and that those who are most sensitive are least likely to like lamb. A competing theory is that everyone tastes it but some simply like that flavor. It would be interesting to arrange a dilution test to see which of these hypotheses is closer to true. I don't think the "just haven't had it prepared right" hypothesis has much going for it.
There definitely are meat dishes I enjoy, and I feel like I've given it a good try, not just to survive domineering aunts-in-law. When my wife and I went on our honeymoon I threw myself in at the deep end, had some wonderful veal with a red wine sauce that was spectacular. And I'm sure there are lamb dishes I could come around to (if and only if you promise the lamb liquifies completely as I chew it). We're never forced to cook the same sauce for two different proteins at dinner time (and we're not raising our kids vegetarian, except during the brief periods where they think about it and protest). The issue is I can't conjure up these dishes on major religious holidays.
The mutton industry needs influencers, then. Or maybe a name change. In 1959, a packing company in Auckland came up with the name "kiwi fruit" for Chinese gooseberry.[1] That turned the market around.
Several of the grocery stores in my area carry rabbit in their specialty meat section. If you can't source it locally, there are a good number of suppliers from which you can order it online.
Yeah, I always assumed their relative rarity in grocery stores was because they're labor-intensive to prep and butcher. Same as with small fowl like quail and squab.
Not if you are a coyote. The other day I went out to my kids treehouse and found a fresh rabbit head with nothing else just lying on the bench at the top of the stairs. I have to assume a coyote decided that was the right place to eat a meal.
Here is a fun experiment that seems to perpetually blow people's minds no matter the country they live in. Which latitude (in terms of km) is New York City closer to? London or Algiers? The answer is Algiers -- take a look on Google Earth with Gridline turned on [1].
Second, while most of the U.S. is on the level of North Africa, the East Coast, where most people are, is significantly wetter. In the South East, where it's humid and hot (at least in the absolutely miserable summers) and where cotton grows well, there's no point in trying to grow wool and wool adjacent animals. Cotton grew so well it was a secondary cash crop for plantations that used enslaved people to pick giving rise to several regrettable idioms.
Third, when you get into parts of the U.S. where mutton makes more sense, it's definitely eaten quite a bit. I spent a little bit of time on the Navajo nation for example, and mutton stew is probably the second or third most common dish -- because of the wool and wool adjacent industries in the Navajo nation (and surrounding nations).
Finally, back on the East Coast, where I'm from, the population is highly diverse. Everything from lamb chops, goat stew, and mutton kabobs are honestly very common and available. The local Costco sells whole hallal lamb and sheep it's so common.
Huh, I literally cannot find mutton in the Bay Area, only lamb - hilariously almost always from my homeland of NZ which doesn't export mutton because it's a cheap meat that isn't worth enough for anyone to want to import.
In the western US there were some pretty violent confrontations between sheep and cattle ranchers, with the cattle folks seemingly coming out ahead in a lot of cases.
I’m of Cuban/American descent. Consequently, I grew up primarily on a diet of BBQ and roasted pig. However, after moving to Spain, I developed a penchant for the tender piglets from Segovia. Initially, mutton and other lamb dishes were a challenging taste for me due to their robust flavor. However, with time, I’ve come to appreciate and even relish it.
Currently, we own a small flock of sheep, which we mainly keep to graze on our property’s grass. This not only ensures a well-maintained lawn but also provides us with financial benefits. We offset the cost of their upkeep by selling the yearlings. Moreover, a local resident benefits from their milk in exchange for assisting in their care.
Having said that, over the years, lamb has grown on me significantly. Now, whenever I host a BBQ, mutton is the star of the show. Guests never stop singing praises and eagerly anticipate the next gathering. However, one aspect of cooking mutton that I find challenging is the lingering smell. It necessitates thorough personal hygiene measures, especially for my children and dogs. Cleaning the BBQ after use is essential to prevent the overpowering aroma from lingering. For those with beards, the scent of mutton can stick around for days. My solution? I opt for a clean shave post-event.
Breed really matters, as is said in the article. My wife and I raise Katahdins, a meat breed (one of the few sheep that shed instead of having a fleece that needs to be sheared off).
We've eaten three year old ewes, which is pretty solidly mutton. They taste, to my palate, exactly like lamb does.
It's my understanding that the taste comes from lanolin, which is of course the thing that makes wool so awesome. If you have a wool breed on your hands, lanolin will be higher.
Lamb is one of those industries that the USA "sacrifices" in trade negotiations in order to keep tariffs on other agriculture products low, such as beef. As a result, most of the lamb you're likely to find is imported, and so is quite expensive compared to beef.
If lamb/mutton were cheaper and more widely available, I think Americans would eat it more. I like lamb and mutton, but I generally don't cook with it because the price is high. There was a time during covid where we switched to ground lamb because it was cheaper than beef per pound.
There are lots of flavorful cuts of meat that become popular when they are cheap, only to turn into luxury cuts over time. Think brisket. Mutton could go the same way, but it needs to be cheap first, and I don't see that ever happening in the USA due to tariffs/beef industry protectionism.
I remember the first time I had mutton curry in the Middle East. I thought it was going to be gross, turns out it's delicious. It does seem a shame its not more common in the west.
Never had mutton myself but other meats I like that are uncommon to find in US grocers are duck, quail, and goat. Duck has gotten easier to find I suppose, the whole foods near me will sell both whole and breasts. I don't remember this being the case 3 years ago.
But finding goat is very hard. I don't tend to go to butchers since there are none near me within walking distance.
When I lived in Florida I'd routinely eat at Caribbean or Dominican or other tropical cuisine restaurants that would all serve goat. Some of my favorite meals I've ever had were in those small hole-in-the-wall places.
I honestly can't believe duck isn't more popular in the US. Yes, it's more expensive than chicken but part of that (I suspect) is its rarity. But unlike lamb (which I love) being something of an acquired taste, duck is unambiguously delicious.
My only real guess is that both duck and lamb–to me–seem more sensitive in general to preparation. Beef, chicken, and pork are less enjoyable when they're not cooked well but they're still alright. Duck and lamb seem significantly less enjoyable when they're prepared badly.
> Beef, chicken, and pork are less enjoyable when they're not cooked well but they're still alright.
I get that you don't really mean "well" in the steak sense, but I still can't help but to think of how I love medium rare. I will tolerate rare and up to medium well (to a point), but actual well is a hard no.
I grew up thinking I hate steak because my family think the slightest hint of pink is poison. Even my younger brothers, so it's not a generational thing. It gets weird when we meet up and one of them wants to grill the meat, I have to snatch my meat off the grill like a cat burglar because nobody else will respect my preference and try to chase me away (they're completely convinced I'm reckless for this.)
Duck is absolutely great, there's a Thai restaurant near me that makes a great tasting fried duck breast with a peanut sauce. Incredibly crispy, incredibly delicious. Highly underrated meat as you said.
To me the surprise is the popularity of turkey over duck and goose. Turkey is cheaper, but needs to be prepared really well in order to be mediocre. A badly cooked duck or goose is much better than a perfect turkey. The ceiling for goose is high and even higher for duck, but the floor is already pretty high.
Turkey is much much cheaper to raise in quantity than duck or goose. In my family it would be rare to use a turkey for an occasion, its just not interesting.
I posted this above, but its because its much much cheaper and turkey can be farmed on a scale which is very difficult to do with duck or geese.
Its not banned from our table, but it would get the same reception from my family as if I had heated up some microwave meals. But we grew up on farms and had good access to better alternatives.
BTW, if you like duck, try Goose for thanksgiving, and make sure you use the fat if making roasted potatoes.
I think it falls in the same trap as lamb, mutton and goat. Americans don't like food with a lot of flavor. That's also why there are fairly few fermented foods that are commonly eaten and why Tilapia is a popular fish.
I really despise duck. It has an irredeemably off flavor that overwhelms whatever it’s served with. The preferred way to address this in Western cuisine seems to be sickly-sweet glazes and jellies, which are no better.
Love lamb though. Different strokes for different folks?
My local costco sells large boxes of frozen cubed goat meat, and maybe entire goats. (Theres occasionally something large wrapped in burlap next to where the goat cubes are stored in the freezer).
I don't have a need for a 15 pound box much less whole animal, so haven't bought it. Will get a duck from them later this fall though.
I'm surprised you guys don't eat much duck, it's also really good. Do you eat goose? We often have that instead of Turkey, although it's a lot smaller.
"mutton" in the middle east might well have been goat rather than sheep (common usage in indian english, and it's spread to bits of the middle east too)
Preparation is probably a big factor. Some meat houses ('churrascarias') serve grilled mutton here but I can't stand the taste, it immediately remembers me of a smelly rain-soaked lamb. But I ate mutton in a dinner in England, decided to eat it quietly out of politeness to the host, but it didn't taste bad at all.
I've eaten mutton in the US, in China, in India, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, in Greece… I think your theory doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
I don't eat mutton regularly, but when I do I can notice the difference between mutton and lamb.
Last time I've eaten, like a month ago, we asked the waiter what was the difference between two plates and she told us basically that, one was more tender with a light flavour, the other one was stronger.
Actually, in the UK, mutton tends mainly to be eaten by members of Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean communities. It's not widely sold in supermarkets all over the country, unlike, say, lamb. And where it is sold in a supermarket it tends to be one product line where there might be several for more common types of meat like beef, pork and lamb.
Yes. Mutton is the meat of the adult sheep, lamb is the meat of a juvenile sheep. The flavor is different, but in a volume-ish way. If you think of the flavor of lamb as being a 4, the strength of the mutton flavor is like a 7-8. It's the same flavor, there's just way more of it.
Mutton is really goat. Lamb is just lamb meat. IMO, lamb is sometimes harder to cook because of the smell - you need the right spices to get rid of the smell. Easy to get mutton in most urban areas in the west - just look for a Halal meat shop.
All of the nicer grocery stores in my area (Whole Foods, any of the better stocked small chain grocers, but not Kroger/Meijer) stock a wide variety of frozen 'game' meats. Rabbit, boar, venison, etc. Rarely fresh, but always available frozen.
It's all raised specifically for meat though, none of the animals are wild harvested.
I'm not sure about the USA but here in Canada there are legal restrictions on game. In Ontario, you can't sell meat from game. (You can't even give it away, technically, unless it was inspected and butchered by a licensed butcher.)
So any venison in the store will have come from farm-raised deer. And deer are relatively difficult and expensive compared to chickens or cattle.
I can find mutton and venison, and also horse meat, in upscale grocery stores here in Ontario. It's all terribly expensive, except lamb/mutton from NZ when it's in season.
Why would it be impossible? You shoot the deer, you butcher it, you sell it in the store.
Here in Germany we have „game season“ and you can pre-order it at a lot of butcher shops or even certain supermarket chains. The orders are then basically fulfilled by local hunters and foresters, the meat is inspected like any other meat.
There are a few farms which raise venison, elk, etc. but I think due to chronic wasting disease and other issues they're rare... also your average American just isn't that eager to eat game (unless they're hunters).
Note that "wild boars", being feral hogs, are usually exempt from the meat sale laws.
> In the US it's illegal to sell wild game meat, even between private individuals.
Because I'm a pedantic sort, I'll point out that this isn't completely true. The act you link to governs interstate commerce. Individual states can set different rules that apply for sales that do not cross state lines. I live in Vermont, so I'll use that as an example I know:
Big Game:The only time it is legal to buy or sell big game or the meat of big game within the state is during the open season and for 20 days after the season ends.
The whole feral vs wild animal thing is kind of interesting once you know about it. Until a few years ago, I had no idea that most of the deer in my country are an invasive japanese species that were introduced a few hundred years ago by one guy who thought they looked cool. (as a result, hunting is pretty straightforward. Both permits and stalking wise.)
I've been wondering for a while about doves that people hunt/eat, and the much more common type of dove (rock dove/domestic pigeon) which I presume nobody wants to consume due to its diet and the whole "flying rat" taboo.
Lamb is also sheep's flesh, but it's not the same as mutton. Lamb is indeed very commonly available, though usually still in fairly limited selection, but I can't even remember the last time I saw actual mutton for sale.
I make an absolutely tidy mutton saag with mature spinach leaf and lots of cardamom and mustard. Make sure you get a really good colour on the mutton before you stew it.
I love curry but can't help feeling that meat as delicious as good lamb or fish is wasted in the strong flavor of the curry - better to have a vegetarian curry and enjoy the curry flavors on their own, cook the lamb separately.
Well cooked lamb is so delicious it - in my opinion should be eaten only with gravy or a tiny dab of mustard or tiny dab of mint sauce.
There’s an assumption that ingredients taste good on their own in the west. Most Asian cuisine relies heavily on creating a fantastic spice mix that the meat provides a background flavor to. Texture also matters a lot. The background flavor is not interchangeable.
For instance I love fish curries but can’t stand regular roasted/steamed fish lightly flavored with salt, dill, butter etc.
The main point I got from the OP was that mutton (meat from sheep over 2 years old) and lamb (meat from sheep younger than 1 year) have pretty different taste and other culinary qualities as meat. In particular, that mutton is much stronger flavored and tougher, lamb more tender and delicately flavored.
Yet the comments section is full of people treating them interchangeably, replying to someone who talked about mutton by talking about lamb, or vice versa, or talking about "lamb/mutton". I'm not sure if the commentors disagree with the OP and think it's over-stating the difference? Or just aren't really paying attention.
I (who live in the USA) have had plenty of lamb, but have never had mutton. So I can't say from personal experience.
But this is one of those HN articles where the comments section seems entirely divorced from the article.
Please try Rogan ghosht if you have not. That recipe when done right is the perfect mutton curry ever made. This is a recipe from North India, then there's South Indian mutton curries that tastes quite good, particularly the ones in South of Tamilnadu.
I was about to post the same thing here. BBQ mutton from Moonlite in Owensboro, KY is one of my favorite foods, second only to their burgoo made with mutton. Long, long ago, Owensboro was a major wool production center and river port and there was often a surplus of sheep, so they ate mutton.
It's not just Moonlite and Owensboro; it's common further downriver too. I end up in Paducah at least once a year, and I always try to make it to Kountry Kastle for a mutton sandwich.
I'd say that mutton and burgoo are the defining elements of Kentucky BBQ.
I searched "Kentucky" in the comments here precisely because of thinking of my time in Owensboro, where my uncle moved to many years ago. That barbecue mutton was utterly fantastic when I had it :)
Answer: the American industrial food market decided not to invest in it. Literally everything that Americans eat today is a byproduct of the marketing of industrial food producers. If they don't want you to eat it, you won't see it. If they do want you to eat it, it'll be inescapable, visually appealing, and flavor-and-nutrition-bankrupt.
correct answer. boggles my mind how much nutrient lobbying goes on in the world....from demonising certain nutrients, to pumping others up. I grew up eating everything, trying everything, in a multicultural area...its quite odd for me not to have tasted something.
It's not like that in a lot of places, and it's easy to forget that!
Blows my mind when people say "oh wow i've never tried a [insert fresh food ingredient here]. You'd think people get curious about all the cool options you have to cook with...nope...a small percentage do.
Grew up eating goat meat in India, but can't handle sheep - it has a strong flavor which I can't handle.
Even goat needs spices to make it palatable and flavorful - hence it's a big part of Middle-eastern, Carribean and Indian cuisines which use a lot of spices.
The breed, age, sex and method of slaughter makes a difference for both sheep and goats
In South Africa lamb is part of our culture and often the most sought after meat, if you can afford it. It's used in pie, various stews, curry, samoosas, roast, braai(BBQ), grilled, fried, etc.
Goat meat in India comes from castrated goats. You get the stress hormones especially when the goat is slaughtered in the West. Hence you might find Halal meat perhaps more palatable
Can confirm. The best goat I ever ate was driven to the slaughter in a normal car with the people it grow up with to get stress near to zero. (Not halal, Demeter) and this meat was honestly on another level.
I've never seen it sold at the grocery store. This might be a chicken and egg thing. The grocery stores don't stock it because people don't buy it, but people don't buy it because the grocery stores don't stock it.
I would also imagine the cost would be quite high. I almost never see sheep farms around, but I see cattle and chickens and pigs everywhere. They would probably have to import it from another country.
My ordinary grocery store has it (Kroger affiliate in the US near Seattle). I'm usually buying stew meat for saag or ground for keema or kofta, but I've cooked shanks and rack before. (I also get it from the farmer's market.)
If you want it, a normal grocery store near a university might be a good bet. They tend to have more diverse foods, because of their customer base. Otherwise look for a halal or kosher butcher, I think they carry stuff like lamb and goat and there probably is one somewhere in most cities.
Now Squab has been hard to find since I moved here from San Francisco. Uwajimaya did have it frozen last time I went, but I've never seen fresh squab here.
Most grocery store butcher counters would be able to order some for you if you ask, but they're unlikely to have any on hand if customers aren't already buying it off the shelves. In a lot of the US, people who would want mutton are already going to specialty shops to pick up meat and imports; where I live (in northern Virginia), there are a couple of halal butcher shops within walking distance that always stock lamb and mutton, and the grocery stores in the same area might stock lamb (usually French cuts) but never carry mutton or goat.
If you’re in NYC area (or visiting), go try mutton chops at Keens. It is one of the best I’ve had in the US. Of course, nothing beats Patagonian lamb on the spit. They just taste different down there.
I wish I could find mutton easier! I've always loved "Gamey" meats. I've mostly only found mutton at Halal butchers, and only some times. Rarely at extremely "high-end", bougie butchers, and very expensive.
I (American) think the gamey taste is exactly what most American's do not like at this point. Any time lamb, elk, bison, etc. are an option (usually at a restaurant), people voice complaints about gaminess and order beef (in my experience/social groups). It doesn't explain why it wasn't part of our food options we grew up with as this article is trying to explain, but I think it's why it's a hard sell today.
I will get lamb occasionally at a restaurant and about half the time it's too gamey for me (and I then regret my ordering decision). We also don't eat a ton of curry dishes where the seasoning and spices can maybe mask or enhance that flavor (I don't know what it does but assuming more flavors results in less noticeable gaminess).
It seems that it's difficult to introduce new meat sources to the market. Bison has been trying hard the past 10-20 years and it's a really good beef-like meat for burgers/steaks but still quite rare to see at a restaurant much less a grocery store.
There is still a big difference from grass fed beef and bison and the leaner meats like elk and venison have a much different flavor and they seem more difficult for me to cook right. I love venison, for example, but I don't always nail it. And it usually helps to spice it or sauce it.
I think bison has become a lot easier to find recently in grocery stores, especially the higher end ones. I enjoy the flavor and I would like to see more pastureland in the U.S. return to bison ranching.
Move to Michigan! Our large Middle Eastern and African population ensures you'll always be able to get it from any stand alone butcher and very often at your normal grocery store.
I guess what is left unspoken is that the bovine oriented culinary monoculture is the worst from an energy and sustainability perspective and there is a strong incentive to make more rational choices around meet consumption.
I am afraid, though, that people are trapped in identity and habbits. Can you imagine somebody waking up 5am and standing for hours in a queue to try mutton?
It will take generations for matters of taste to evolve.
Mutton has a very strong flavour (much much stronger than lamb) and can often be very fatty, and few people eat it here: although I do have friends between 50 and 70 that like it, but they don't get it easily and maybe wouldn't buy it.
I remember eating mutton last century as a child - because it was a very cheap meat. Now it isn't sold in supermarkets in NZ - and I don't recall seeing it in any butchers lately. It is very uncommon. I absolutely loved mutton ham - but that is a very uncommon specialty item.
I have a mutton roast and mutton chops in the freezer - but they were from a local farmer.
The only regular mutton I can think of you might see is in the South Island - Jimmy's mutton pies (Roxburgh). Or maybe at a Hangi.
I saw a 20kg bucket of some very fatty meat at pak'n'save aimed at polynesians a year ago - but search came up with nothing so might not have been mutton. A quick search of mad butcher showed zero results for mutton.
My guess is that the processing costs are higher than what people would buy it for so it is uneconomical. Lamb is often reasonably cheap here in NZ.
This is a Harold McGee thing, originally, and skatole is a determinant of the gamey or barnyardy flavor of lamb as well; further, it's probably more prevalent/dominant in higher-end heritage lamb than in factory lamb.
As a New Zealander I remember there was a whole thing in the mid-1980s where our Trade Minister (Mike Moore) was trying to promote "Lamb Burgers" to be sold in the US.
At the time NZ sheep farmers were having a slump in sales and the theory was if every America ate one Lamb Burger a year...
Not sure how serious it all was but Moore was closely identified with it, it's mentioned in several of his obituaries
>>The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old
Will we as an enlightened species ever realize that killing and eating a tender young life of another species is a morally reprehensible act!
Just because we happened to be chanced into an evolutionary advantage over other species does not mean we can exalt and relish in our cruel and inhumane attitude towards the defenseless
You're not wrong but it's worth considering that life wouldn't exist otherwise. The choices are not kill or let live, the choices are kill or do not breed at all. They breed these animals specifically to kill them.
You're reasoning isn't sound here. Same logic can be applied to other things: breeding dogs to dog fight, breeding humans for organ harvest, etc. And presumably you wouldn't think those justify things.
I would also ask you to consider if you'd like to be born as a creature that will be mutilated, abused and ultimately painfully killed and if you would consider that preferable to never existing.
In Boston area supermarkets I see limited displays of lamb chops and other cuts of lamb regularly priced around the same as lower-mid cuts of beef, roughly $8-$10 per pound, sometimes less on sale. Legs are usually imported from New Zealand, which considering it's halfway around the world the price is quite impressive. We usually make stew or curry. My dad roasts it. I have a feeling a lot of local non-immigrants don't know how to cook lamb, let alone goat or mutton.
Goat shows up at some of the Caribbean and South Asian markets and take-out places.
Costco sells New Zealand Lamb for $6.99 lb. It's Grass Fed and cheaper than their Steak. I don't know if I'm making it correctly but I put like 4 of those little chops on the Barbecue for a few minutes and OMG they are delicious. Took me a little to acquire a taste but now it's my favorite meat.
My uncle was a Marine in the Pacific in WWII and he was one of those subjected to the canned mutton mentioned in the article. I've had it when in Ireland and a couple of places in the US and it was fine. I'm sure if I'd had the same mutton my uncle had my opinion would be different.
Others have pointed out, and I agree: supermarkets are a large factor here. The transition of American food shopping from a "market" pattern to a "supermarket" one has taken a heavy toll on food items that aren't true luxuries, but are effectively made into luxuries by failing to fit cleanly into supermarket-scaled supply chains.
We now spend less than (nearly) ever on food at home[1], in large part because we've eliminated the foodstuffs that can't be produced at the smallest possible margins.
With all the comments and complicated insights I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the simple:
- price
- availability
- ease
Around here the price order is pork, chicken, beef, lamb, venison. Actual mutton and goat are hard to come by.
The lamb in the supermarket is usually frozen from NZ. It is easy to find locally sourced lamb at the butchers but at even higher cost.
Nothing really beats a crown roast of lamb but many/most would consider a cheaper ribeye first. Habits, picky eaters, non-adventurous, lack of exposure etc.
I love pork but would not use it for a curry. It is much better braised. But many curries works very well with chicken or beef.
So even though we eat much more internationally the local market segmentation still has an origin.
Interesting article, wasn't familiar with the history of Spaniards bringing the animals over to the americas. I grew up eating lamb on special occasions and it makes more sense as my grandma is from Madrid.
Have always found lamb to be "gamey" and have raised sheep as well which were particularly so. I would previously prefer to eat goat whenever possible but don't have any good reason for it - it does have a more neutral flavor.
I think many Americans are probably robbed of food breadth and just default to "boneless skinless".
My good friend from South Africa tells me how she and her husband miss cooking with mutton, which they find more flavorful and satisfying than lamb. What happens to the mutton-aged sheep here?”
Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.
The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.
It's not "easy" to find mutton in the UK either. My definition of easy (as for the vast majority of the population) is "is it in the supermarket". I don't think I've _ever_ seen mutton in a major UK supermarket. It's somewhat of a catch-22, but the supermarkets don't stock it because there is no demand (modern palates prefer less "gamey" flavours), and there's no demand because it isn't stocked.
I thought that was a good question that unfortunately the article didn't appear to answer. Similarly to how leather is essentially a byproduct of the beef industry, I'd expect that at least the reverse would be true with sheep, that mutton would be a byproduct of the wool industry. So what happens with older sheep once their shearing days are over?
Dogfood, mostly. And other products where you need protein but taste either doesn't matter, or can be completely overwhelmed by spices.
There isn't very much of a wool industry in the United States. Australia and New Zealand have such large economies of scale that in the US, you literally lose money just by paying someone to shear your sheep. The wool is worth less than the shearer's per-fleece fee. So the problem of "where do all the old sheep go" isn't a very big one.
I expect that either they eat quite a lot of mutton in Australia, or they sell that mutton on markets where it is desirable. But I don't have any data or experience to back that up.
I will posit a simple and maybe frivolous reason --
"Mutton" just doesn't sound like an appealing name for a meat. There's something offputting about the sound of it. Or maybe it has just become so, given that it's associated in all our experience with "old" animal meat. Although, by that logic, maybe "haggis" also just has a branding problem.
My father used to deplore the absence of mutton from butchers, and its replacement with lamb. He used to eat mutton as a child. For myself, I don't believe I've ever eaten mutton.
My father was born in 1914, and died 5 years ago. For me to have never eaten it, it must have disappeared from the UK at least 50 years ago.
...anymore? Growing up on american media in the 80s and 90s I clearly remember "we're having lamb chops" uttered many times. Even on that famous vegan episode of the simpsons.
Sorry but all I knew about American culture growing up came from TV.
I'd assume it's more expensive than the farmed to death chicken and beef.
The article is talking about mutton as different than lamb. A thing that most of the discussion thread seems to have missed, presumably having a pre-existing notion that lamb and mutton are synonyms and not making it past the title?
> Mutton has less tender flesh and a stronger flavor than lamb, which comes from sheep that are less than a year old. (Meat from sheep aged one to two years is generally called “yearling” in the US, and “hogget” elsewhere around the world.) That stronger flavor lends itself to curries, stews and “value-added” products such as spiced sausages, says Wortman, “so most of our mutton goes into value-added products or into specialty ethnic markets at this point.
But also, no, lamb I think lamb was not as popular in the USA in the 1990s as American sitcoms apparently gave you the idea of, although it wasn't unheard of. It's probably less popular now than it was then.
Mutton has been pretty unheard of in the USA since the 1950s, as discussed in teh article.
It's not very common in the UK to be honest even though it's mentioned as a country where it's eaten. You'd likely have to go to a butcher here too, I don't think I've seen it in supermarkets apart from maybe upmarket ones and perhaps the odd regional chain.
IDK, do we not? Half the bougie gastropub places here in the DC area seem to have it. We cook it ourselves into Shepherds Pie or chops on a pretty regular basis. It's not substantially more expensive than the other meats, but then we aren't ever buying the absolute cheapest cuts.
I’ve been a meat eater most of my life, but since I met my wife, who objects to eating lamb and other young animals, I too have grown to find it objectionable. No judgement to those who enjoy it, but something about it doesn’t sit well with me any longer.
Because of the linguistic effect of Norman French on English. The ruling Normans used French names for the meals they ate. The peasant Anglo-Saxons, who could not afford to eat such meats, used English names for the animals they took care of:
English English French
Animal Food Animal
------ ------- ------
cow beef bœuf (adulte mâle castré)
calf veal veau ou velle (f.) (jeune jusqu'à 6 mois)
pig pork porc
sheep mutton mouton
deer venison Norman French venaison ("to hunt"; once included boars, hares, ...)
The Normans knew nothing about turkeys or bison, so we have no Norman French words for those meats. (We use "buffalo" for bison due to Samuel de Champlain use in 1616 of the French name "buffle" for the distantly related members of the Bubalina subfamily.)
I do not know why we use "frog legs" instead of a French word. I can only guess that Britain did not have edible frogs or the Normans did not want to eat them.
On the subject of meat uncommon to some countries, I personnally don't understand why it is so hard to find horse meat in Spain, Argentina, Mexico and english speaking countries while they export so much of it to other countries.
I've heard it explained a different way: Americans stopped eating mutton when plastic became widespread. Mutton was largely a side effect of wool production, and with the invention of nylon, far less wool was produced.
The Costco near my house sells a large box of frozen mutton cubes, which is the only mutton product I've ever seen at a store in America, and I believe it's mostly purchased by South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrant customers.
What city? The Costcos I've visited in the SF Bay Area usually carry lamb rack and lamb chops (both of which are delicious!), but I've never seen mutton. I'd love to find it.
In places where mutton is consumed, I'm curious: is there a distinction between "sheep raised for mutton" and "sheep raised for wool", or is it always both? Do all wool sheep eventually become mutton?
In Greece where we regularly consume sheep it's mostly both, mainly because we don't have specialized breeds for wool. They do exist, but they're rare.
Just to add to the mutton pool, you also have old female sheeps that are no longer able to give birth.
There's a chap in Cornwall adding value to these old ladies by giving them a bit of a retirement, getting them fit and healthy before slaughtering and dry aging them for some top UK restaurants. Check out The Cornwall Project - Matt Chatfield.
Bit more about it here - https://www.scottgrummett.com/blog/the-cornwall-project.
I am not affiliated, but would like to try it someday.
I can't speak to sheep specifically, but we use different species of goats and cattle and chickens when raised for meat vs for dairy or eggs.
Still, dairy cows do eventually become beef. If you ever see a cut of beef that's normally bone-in but the butcher chose to debone this one, then there's a good chance it was from a dairy cow whose bones were too calcified to saw through.
I was under the impression that lamb was from young sheep raised explicitly for meat, while mutton was from old sheep after their wool career was over, but I can't say I've investigated it deeply.
Crowded with people? I have to drive 3 hours north to get to another urban area, 6 hours to the east to get to another urban area, and 9 hours south to get to another urban area (there is nothing to the west). Everything in between the urban areas is mostly empty. Just forests and meadows and mountains and such.
Exactly. And they will browse right down to the dirt without regular moisture for the grass. Maybe the Carolinas near the coast, but I figure that’s all occupied, or marsh.
Scottish and New Zealand weather are perfect for sheep.
Something to consider, In some Asian countries, Goat meat is called as Mutton. In western context, Mutton means meat of an adult Sheep. So you might be eating Goat meat instead of Mutton.
Exactly, the same reason we don't eat goat either.
Goat BBQ is absolutely delicious. But it is a strong flavor that lingers for a long time. It's just not palatable for the average American consumer to eat on a regular basis.
On the one hand I absolutely wish we had a wider variety of meats available. But on the other hand I totally understand why there isn't enough demand for it to be economically viable.
yea but I wonder if folks would still care about "gameyness" if they ate it from birth
one thing that you often notice moving from abroad is that the pork in North America (raw) smells and tastes like piss. but if you're used to it you just don't question it
I haven't noticed that but it's been quite a while since I cooked unprocessed raw pork. I wonder if the intense ammonia smell that builds up in pig factories had anything to do with the smell you experienced.
my favorite food, spiedies, were originally marinade for lamb. remember reading years ago about how it was invented to dummy up meat that was going bad back in the day, but cant seem to find anything...ive never tried the lamb version. think they have that at lupos. ive only ever gone to ribpit for the chicken.
reading posts saying how cheap mutton is in their area makes me lowkey jealous. growing up, it used to be ~3x the cost of chicken and it meant relegating it for only special ocaissions.
i am not competent enough to cook lamb well but it can be made accessible by slow cooking over a long time. texture wise, it is more chewy in specific bits for sure and can put off most people. but personally it is the only red meat i'd ever like to eat.
Not really to me. The standard ones tick some pretty convenient boxes:
- herbivores
- relatively quick to raise from birth to useful slaughtering
- high volume of usable meat from the animal (though husbandry undoubtedly guides this)
- produce useful secondary products (leather, milk, wool, eggs, garbage disposal, mechanical effort) - IMO probably the primary driver the further back you look, towards subsistence farming times
Yeh, other animals can hit some of these to some degree, but when you look at the main livestock choices it's fairly obvious to me why sheep, pigs and cows were chosen (in western Europe). If you're some family living on a farm back in the middle ages, you're only going to have capacity to raise a couple of animals and these give you the best return on your effort/resources.
Look at the central Asian Steppe region, where horses were absolute cornerstones of society for millennia due to the roaming structure of their living. Horse and horse products such as mare's milk are still products consumed there today, and it makes absolute sense that their ancestors found multiple uses for the animals their scarce resources went into keeping alive.
CGP Grey has a great video [0] that goes into why some animals are better to farm/breed/eat than others. The top selection criteria are animals that are:
Lamb chops with mint jelly was a fairly regular dinner item when I was growing up (1970s). Seems like my mom might have prepared mutton occasionally but I don't specificially remember it.
In the UK, lamb is pretty much an everyday meat (well - every week...) but goat is regarded as pretty exotic - common mainly in Afro-caribbean takeaways or restaurants. (I'm from the South-East so this might not be true in other regions).
Mutton - I don't recall seeing very often at all in butcher shops. As the meat in takeway - it's more common but sometimes the terminology isn't precise. Some Indian takeaways use the word "meat" when they mean something sheep-based. And "mutton" sometimes means "goat" (and vice-versa). And "mutton" sometimes is just lamb...
Same in South Africa...."mutton" usually refers to lamb. almost no one has a "lamb curry" or "lamb bunny" (Google it). It's "mutton curry" or a "mutton bunny".
I heard this sentiment from co-workers and friends who didnt grow up eating goat. I think it boils down to two different things:
1. "meat musk" (lack of a better word, lol): People dont realize how pungent beef can be, its just that most Americans are accustomed to it. You can really smell this with grass-fed beef. I think goat/lamb meat is "musky" for the same reasons, as they eat mainly from foraging/hay.
2. preparation/cooking: If you plan on cooking goat like a steak, its not a gonna taste good. Generally, most dishes require that the goat is simmered or slow-cooked to make the meat more tender. Spices also make a big difference here with the dish.
I used to get lamb chops at Albertson's in college (it must not have been expensive since I was dirt poor) and it tasted really great. Like kind of a spicier tasting steak. It definitely wasn't gamey at all.
This seems like a discussion that could benefit from a reminder: animal agriculture is highly polluting (16.5% of all emissions) and destructive (the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss).
Lamb and mutton are nearly as environmentally damaging as beef (116m2 vs. 119m2 for beef).
There are Iberian preparations for older cattle that are absolutely delicious, FYI. They’re premium priced, however, so I imagine there is care in what they’re fed and how they live.
They are probably referring to Veal, which is the meat from a calf or young animal. Note there are a number of controversies the other way also, where people oppose eating young cow because of the practices surrounding raising veal.
No, the beef you buy at Whole Foods or Safeway has generally been harvested from steers slaughtered at 1-2 years old --- it's all young. Specialty purveyors will sell you beef from much older cows, which is less tender and has a much deeper flavor (there's also a high-end thing right now about eating beef from dairy cows).
This seems extremely unlikely, given the relatively small percentage of beef that comes from culled dairy cows, the absolutely vast amount of beef used as an input for fast food, and the named suppliers companies like McDonalds use.
I think they just mixed up their heuristic; fast food vendors always do the cheapest thing at scale, this is often sacrifices quality, but clearly the more economical thing to do is to kill and butcher the cattle ASAP. I mean why would they feed an adult cow for an extra year if they could avoid it?
The common practice is that you butcher bulls at young age, but you keep cows for milk - you actually make much more money on milk than on meat.
With chickens it's even worse: males are killed immediately after hatching, because their meat is worth next to nothing. Females are kept for both eggs and meat.
My understanding is that chickens are bred either for eggs or for meat. Egg farmers cull males as soon as they can (which depends on an interesting technical problem called sexing). Hens that can't lay anymore are called "spent hens", and the meat is not generally liked by Americans at least, so it's probably not what you're buying at the grocery store.
Poultry farmers raise both sexes and slaughter as soon as the bird is large enough.
What? Cow meat is about 25% of the ground beef supply, with half being dairy culls and the other half being beef cows that fail to get pregnant. It ends up at McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Beef hotdogs.
You can also go to specific chains and look up their sourcing; Wendys sources from "steers and heifers", but all much younger than the average dairy cow cull age.
It's not that I have a high opinion of fast food beef. I just think it's unlikely that they could come close to meeting demand by sourcing from culled cows.
Your 9% number is impossible as at least 10% comes from purely beef production. 25% of ground beef is old cow meat, and it isn’t sold at grocery store meat sections. It ends up in processed foods and fast food. It is legally beef, but that is about all you can say about it.
Look, I honestly don't care --- I actually think it's laudable to put less commercially desirable meat to use, in the same way I think it's a good thing to use transglutaminase to stitch trim and offcuts into chicken nuggets --- but I can't find a single source that suggests culled dairy cows are a significant input to fast food. I can find direct statements from chains that preclude it. I've concluded that it's just not the case. We don't have to agree, but if you've got a source, I'll read it.
The best lamb is young, but not too young. I'm not a fan of milk-fed lamb where I feel there is quite no taste. The right balance is slaughtered at around 90 to 150 days old. Agneau de Sisteron is a gem. You don't need to be highly skilled to cook it. For cutlets, just pan sear until pink inside. For roast and leg, oven, basted with salt olive oil, some garlic cloves inserted inside the meat. It's truly magnificent.
The older the animal, the bolder the recipes it needs. The best lamb/mutton I've ever had was in Marocco, a slow roasted lamb in honey and almonds. So tender it was served from the bone with a spoon. You'll notice that mutton is always cooked in a way to counter balance the strong muttony flavour and sublime it with contrasts. Mutton curries are also delicious for the same reason.