This is one of those recipes, that while the execution might not have been exactly what was intended, the results still turned out pretty dang good.
Being that it was near St. Patricks Day (you probably just realized I'm a bit behind on posting...taking a month or so off of blogging means lots of catching up) I wanted to cook with some Guinness. I originally saw this on various Pinterest boards and found that it came from Epicurious.com. I figured lamb with a Guinness glaze would be a prefect dish to serve pre holiday.
We bought a non-frenched
small rack of lamb. Mr. L and I like having a little meat on the bone to
chew on since that little bit of meat has such great flavor*. We've found we'd rather get the rack and
cut it up ourselves than buy individual lamb chops (of course your butcher can do that for you). We usually have to ask the guy behind the counter for the non-frenched rack of lamb as it's not always out on display.
As I mentioned, this ended up having great flavor...but somewhere along the line I had problems. You see my nice "glaze" that was supposed to be brushed on the lamb before cooking and then drizzled on after? Didn't happen. Instead I had nice solid round discs of what seemed like candy. My glaze seized up on me and became a solid mass and I had no idea how to fix it. We microwaved our little solid discs a bit and tried pouring it on the chops but the glaze immediately became hard again. It looked like we had a disc of caramel candy on each chop! The good thing is that once the lamb was cooked, the disc became a sauce and coated the chops nicely. We ended up just cooking the lamb chops with the little discs on top and not worrying about having sauce to drizzle over after cooking.
Really good flavor. This was super simple to put together and gave the lamb a nice finish even if our sauce was a paste (or not even a paste really...caramel disc is what I'd call it). This recipe is also a great way to use up some leftover Guinness (if there is such a thing) or you can be like me...specifically buy Guinness to cook with so you have leftover to drink. And if you think about it, candy discs of Guinness might not be all that bad.
GUINNESS-GLAZED LAMB CHOPS
(Epicurious)
2 cups (16 ounces) Guinness stout
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons coriander seeds, crushed
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns, crushed
16 rib lamb chops (buy separately or buy two 8-rib racks of lamb and cut them yourself into individual chops)
Bring stout, sugar, coriander seeds, peppercorns, and 1/4 teaspoon salt to a boil in a 2-quart nonreactive saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved, then continue boiling (keep an eye on it and reduce heat to keep it from boiling over) until glaze is syrupy and reduced to about 1/2 cup, 20 to 30 minutes.
Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and discard solids.
Preheat broiler.
Pat chops dry and sprinkle with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper.
Divide glaze between 2 small bowls and set aside for use later. Brush both sides of chops with glaze (from remaining bowl) and arrange on rack of a broiler pan.
Broil 5 inches from heat, 4 to 5 minutes on each side for medium rare. (Don't hesitate to cut and peek to check on doneness of the meat.)
Transfer chops to a platter and drizzle with reserved glaze.
Note: We cut the recipe in half.
Note: We ended up having much more glaze since it seized before we got down to th 1/2 a cup syrup it says to reduce to. But we liked having lots of the "candy" on each chop.
Note: Obviously we didn't strain our glaze as it's hard to strain a solid mass of candy-type sauce!
Note: We actually did have a bit of Guinness leftover (no worries, many bottles were opened) and Mr. L heated that up, added some butter and such and sauteed some mushrooms that we ate with the chops. Great combo. Just in case you open too many bottles and accidentally really do have a bit of Guinness left.
*Some of you may think that getting non-frenched racks of lamb means lamb bones for the dogs once dinner is over. But we don't have dogs. So we have to gnaw on the bones ourselves because it would really just be wrong to let those little tidbits go to waste. But if you are so inclined, get the non-frenched version and give the bones to your dogs. They will love you. Trust me.
