Slow Roasted Shoulder Of Lamb

Yum
Something my local farm shop sells at a really good price is bone in lamb shoulder so i called in on my way past and picked one up for the family dinner on sunday

It was a nice piece of meat but eyeballing it in the store looked like it was a little big for the roasting pan i use in the bbq so i asked the butcher to cut it in two for me and he quickly obliged.

Lamb Shoulder

I didn't want to trim the fat on this as i wanted to keep it on to hopefully melt away and help flavour the the lamb and keep it moist while cooking, so i scored the fat with a very sharp knife in a criss-cross pattern about two centimeters apart (and unfortunately i forgot to take a picture of this but its pretty straight forward)

Next step was to make up the marinade.
First i minced an entire bulb of garlic into a bowl, to which i added 2 heaped tablespoons each of dried thyme, parsley and marjoram then mixed in 4 tablespoons of lemon juice and half a bottle of lager and gave it a good stir to incorporate it all together

The marinade

I set this aside and then gently crushed all the cloves of yet another bulb of garlic with the palm of my hand (yup its a lot of garlic but its worth it!) and spread them out in the bottom of my roasting pan then placed my lamb shoulder on top of the garlic.

Next was to rub the marinade i made earlier all over the shoulder and push it into the cuts in the fat i'd made earlier the remainder was poured into the bottom of the roasting pan along with the rest of the bottle of lager.

Marinade rubbed on the shoulder 

When its all done you should have something resembling the above picture (and you can also see the cuts in the fat i mentioned earlier).

And as you can see there was no need for me to get the shoulder cut in half as its like my pan was made for it, but its not going to hurt anything and to be honest id rather be safe than sorry as if i was right id have struggled to cut the bones at home!

This was put in my fridge for around an hour while i topped up the charcoal in the kamado and got it going, id usually leave it longer than this but i was pressed for time to have everything ready by the time we were to eat.

For this cook i was mostly going to be roasting at around 180c (approx 350f) so the heat deflector was put in the high position with the grill on top.

Once the grill had got to 110c (approx 225f) i put the pan in the grill and shut the lid.

On The Grill

I left it like this and let the temp of the grill slowly rise over the course of about an hour to the temp of  180c (approx 350f).

Once the grill had got to the main cooking temp the lamb was looking good already.

One Hour In And Looking Good

 At this stage the fats were melting into the marinade and beer in the pan and the garlic was literally melting into it all, the smell of the garlic down the garden was amazing and any of my neighbours that got a smell of it would be nothing short of envious i'm sure!

Now was the time to cover with foil.

Covered the pan with foil

The pan stayed like this for 2 1/2 hours at 180c (approx 350f).
After this time i removed the foil and stabbed the meat with a wooden skewer and it went in to the bone with literally no pressure

Done!

Now i removed the pan from the grill and took it inside, where i removed the meat to a plate and tented with foil to rest while the rest for atleast 15 mins of the meal was finished of.

Once the shoulder had rested and the rest of the meal had been plated up i used a fork to just pull chunks of meat of and put on the plate, the meat was so tender it was effortless to do and was by far the best option as the bone makes carving this joint of meat a little difficult.

I served it all up with some roasted vegetables, boiled vegetables and some and some dijon mustard mashed potatoes for what came together to make a delicious family sunday meal.

All Plated up!