Saturday Night: Lamb stew in a clay pot

Yesterday it was clear that I needed to make some kind of stew or braise or roast or something; we're running out of time for such things and the weather was suitably bad. Then at some point in the morning the idea of using a Römertopf (clay pot) got wedged in my head. From there on out things kind of took on their own momentum.

I started with a recipe for lamb shoulder with eggplant, saffron, and raisins from How to Cook Meat and then adopted things to the prep method.

700 g lamb shoulder, cut into 2cm pieces
2 Tbs chopped garlic
1 good pinch saffron
10 allspice berries, ground
freshly ground coriander (1 tsp?)
salt and black pepper
3 smallish onions, small dice
1/2 cup dark raisins
2 med. eggplants, cut into 1 cm slices
1 can diced tomatoes
~1/2 cup stock

Toss the lamb in a bowl with the garlic, saffron, spices, onion and raisins until everything is well integrated.
Put a bit of olive oil in the bottom of the soaked Römertopf, then add a layer of eggplant.
Alternate lamb and eggplant layers until there's only some eggplant remaining.
Spread on the tomatoes in a layer.
Add the last eggplant.
Put the top on the pot and put it in a cold oven. Set the oven to 190-200c.
Bake for 2.5 hours.


I had some mint to top the stew with when serving, but I managed to forget to do that. Maybe I'll give that a try tonight.



This ended up being a really spectactular dish. I'm going to have to quickly find more occasions to deploy the Römertopf before it gets too warm.

As a side, I made "Persian Rice", also from HowToCookMeat. This is pretty much identical to one of Bittman's Stuck Pot Rice recipes, except with onions on the bottom instead of potatoes. It's great.

We also had a green salad.

Wine: McLaren Vale 2001 Linchpin Shiraz, plushy fruity shiraz and lamb... enough said about that pairing.