Food Matters - Lamb

In Episode 31 of Food Matters well-renowned Chef, TV Cook, and Food Media Broadcaster Aisling Larkin will give us examples of some recipes for Lamb dishes Food Matters is brought to you thanks to Jack Molloy & Son Craft Butchers, Barrack Street, Waterford.

Recipes to Discuss Lamb Massaman Curry Creamy Tomato Lamb Ragu Pasta Lamb Flatbreads with Creamy Yogurt

Seasonality and Religious Tradition

• The tradition of eating lamb at Easter comes from Judaism. For the Jews, Easter was a feast to celebrate the freedom from slavery. • The Jewish tradition of eating lamb recalled the lamb blood used to mark the doorjambs of Jewish families that were prisoners in Egypt, and which protected the firstborns from the coming of the ‘exterminator lamb’. • The Jewish Festival of Passover is traditionally a spring festival – and this is when the Passover Lamb is killed. • For Christians, the lamb is more a representation of Jesus sacrificing himself and dying on the cross – Jesus being “the lamb of God”. It’s most likely that Christians eat lamb at Easter to remember this sacrifice. • The association of Jesus as "the lamb of God" also may have helped tie the consumption of this meat to Easter. Furthermore, lamb's availability as an accessible meat after winter months with no livestock to slaughter would also encourage our ancestors to serve up a few lamb legs to celebrate.

Nutritional Value Very similar to beef What we want to be watching out for - from an over-analysed perspective that is regardless to most - grass fed lamb v grain-fed lamb. • Similar protein as beef and fat content • The iron is haem iron - haem and non haem - haem great to circulate blood around the body. • Full of B vitamins, 100g of lamb can provide around three quarters of your daily requirements. These clever vitamins (B12, niacin, pyridoxine, riboflavin and panthothenic acid) are like a superhero squad which help your body run smoothly. Some B vitamins help with energy levels and some help with skin, brain, blood and eye health, so there’s something for nearly every body department • It's high in zinc Zinc, a nutrient found throughout your body, helps your immune system and metabolism function. Zinc is also important to wound healing and your sense of taste and smell.

Fatty / Gamey Flavour

Lamb comes from sheep under 14 months old, while meat from older animals is called mutton.

The younger the lamb, the more tender the meat. • Why? The tenderness of cooked lamb is directly related to the number of chemical cross-links holding the collagen proteins together. • The number of cross-links increases with the age of the animal, and as the number increases, the process of breaking down the collagen to soluble gelatin becomes more difficult, requiring longer cooking times or higher temperature. • Lamb's unique flavour comes, for the most part, from its fat. • Beef and lamb each contain both saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. But lamb also has smaller, branched-chain fatty acids, produced by bacteria in their rumen. • These medium-length branched-chain fatty acids make up a small percentage of the total fat, but because they are fairly volatile and have a very low odour threshold, humans can detect them at low concentrations. They give lamb its particular "gamy" flavour. This is in part because lamb has a strong and distinctive flavour. It's a flavour that comes mainly from its fat—in particular, branched-chain fatty acids (BCFAs) produced by bacteria in the lamb's rumen. (Research published in the journal Meat Science in 1997 proved that these BCFAs, which are found in a far higher concentration in lamb meat than any other meat, are responsible for this characteristic “gamy” flavuor.) The concentration and resulting pungency of these BCFAs depend in part on the breed of lamb, but mainly on the lambs' diet. Lambs raised on a diet of grass tend to have a more intense flavour than those raised on a diet of grain. The grassy, gamy flavors, known as “pastoral flav