Achari-spiced lamb and red pepper stew

This post is about how I build recipes.(There's now a more thorough and updated achari recipe here.)

On Thursday, I was running short of ideas for what to cook, and asked the internet.This proved to be a mistake in several ways. What follows is a little long-form,and you may well wish to just skip to the recipe itself.

(You should also pick up a copy of this. It's a great curry reference)

Thanks, internet

First, from Twitter, there was the mass exhortation to go for a kebab:

And then, well, I had to summarize the rest of the discussion using a simple diagram:

Logic fail: not all dead cats are a subset of kebabs. I hope.

None of this got me any closer to working out what to cook. I set to thinking.

Building a recipe

Now, Allegra McEvedy’s recipe for Tagliatelle with slow-cooked lamb, mint and broadbeans is something I’ve mentioned before. It’s not revolutionary, but as a way ofhandling lamb it’s just stuck in my mind, and I’ve been meaning to use the techniqueas a basis for experimentation. The core of the recipe is slow cooking lamb shoulderin white wine and stock, with handfuls of fresh thyme, then shredding it back intoa reduced sauce. It’s reasonably easy and hands-off, save for the messy shreddingstage in the middle, and produces a fantastically flavoursome base sauce. So it’snot a bad place to start.

That’s the first problem solved. It’s to be slow-cooked lamb. But Allegra’s recipeturns into a pasta dish, and with quite a wet sauce. I wasn’t in the mood for eitherof those things, feeling something drier, more texturally like an old-school well-reducedragùwasappropriate.

Here’s where it gets a bit globetrotting fusion-wank.

Lamb Achari, (often aachar gosht) is one of my favourite curry-house Indiandishes. The sourness of the pickling spices goes beautifully with the slight crumblydryness of slow-cooked lamb. There’s a great recipe on p82 of Camelia Panjabi’sbook 50 Great Curries of India (the small-format paperback edition). Itworks, and you should make it. Also, it’s a lamb dish, with a fairly portable spiceflavour, and not a million miles from my starting point. So I’m stealing that.

The next stop is the chachouka recipe on p20 of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’sRiver Cottage: Veg Everyday. It’s a North-African pepper stew, similarto pepperonata, finished by cracking eggs over the top to fry/bake in theoven as the stew finishes. It’s very simple – tomatoes, peppers, garlic, onion,cumin, paprika, and saffron. Although I never quite cared for the eggs, the textureswork well, and it has a lot of richness to it.

So there’s three things that fit the bill. All rich, in broadly the right colourspectrum, amenable to plugging into other big flavours, and probably quite happyto sit side by side. That’s dinner, then – Italian Afro-Indian fusion lamb stew.In for penny and pound alike, I served it with wilted, stir fried spring greenswith lashings of garlic and a dash of soy. Because why the fuck not.

Ingredients:

• Lamb shoulder
• A tin of tomatoes
• A couple of glasses of white wine
• Plenty of veg (or chicken) stock
• Fresh thyme
• Onions
• Red peppers
• Garlic
• Cumin seeds
• Mustard seeds
• Coriander seeds
• Fennel seeds
• Plenty of black pepper

Method:

1. Sear the lamb in a hot pan. A heavy, lidded casserole pan is ideal for this, asyou can do it all largely in one pot.
2. Once it’s browned, add the wine, stock, thyme, garlic, and half the can of tomatoes.
3. Put it in a medium oven (say 160 or something) for one and a half to two hours.Check it periodically. It should reduce, but not dry out. You can use this timeto fuck about with peppers and spices.
4. Quarter the peppers, and slice the onions.
5. Gently fry the onions for a few minutes until they start to soften and colour.
6. Add the peppers, and continue frying until they’ve softened. This will probablytake something like 15 minutes.
7. Add the spices, and fry them off for a couple of minutes, stirring reasonably constantlyso they don’t burn.
8. Add the tomatoes, and maybe a little water, season with plenty of black pepper,and allow the whole thing to cook together on a low heat for a few minutes. Meanwhile,the lamb should have done it’s thing.
9. Once the lamb is tender enough to flake and shred, remove it from the sauce andput it to one side.
10. Add the spiced pepper mixture to the sauce.
11. Return the sauce to the oven with the lid off to reduce and come together. If it’sstill very liquid, reduce it on the hob.
12. Once the lamb has cooled enough to handle a little flake or shred it. I used a coupleof forks.
13. Add the lamb back into the sauce, and let the whole thing reduce further until it’sgot that jam-like consistency of a ragù, then serve.

I used too much liquid at the outset, so the final reduction was quite savage onthe hob. I always worry this damages the final flavour. Certainly it would be betterif it had all just happened quietly in the oven. Removing the lid earlier in thecooking process may go some way to addressing this, provided the lamb doesn't dryout.

It has the sour piquancy of the achari, which the peppers complement well. There’sthe wonderful texture of the shredded lamb, and just enough juice, too.

One thing I’d consider is adding butterbeans to make amore of a hearty one-pot dealout of it all.

A final note on spices.

The achari recipe mandates: 1 ½ tsp fennel seeds, 1 tsp cumin seeds, ¾ tsp mustardseeds, 1 tsp kalonji seeds (sometimes called black onion, or nigella seeds), and¾ tsp fenugreek seeds.

They’re pounded a little in a pestle and mortar. I was making it up as I went along,and had run out of kalonji. So it ended up with around a teaspoon each way of cumin,mustard, and coriander seeds, with a pinch of fennel seeds as an afterthought. However,I’d definitely repeat this with the full mix.

As an aside: 50 Great Curries is rather good. There’s a thoroughoverview section at the beginning that walks you through how the flavour combinationswork, the correct frying of spices, and the mechanics of the base sauces. It’s thebest introductory curry book I’ve used.