Adventures in BBQ

With predicted temperatures into the high 70’s F today in our bit of Southern California, winter seems to be over so why not get the BBQ out of the shed and fire it up ? If even more of excuse were needed, this weekend is the Superbowl and all across the country people will be firing up grills and smokers and cooking barbecue. Today we will be doing a somewhat less common meat for this country (it is far more popular in my original home country of Britain) and cooking lamb shoulder.

Lamb shoulder after the application of the rub paste

• Setup: Weber kettle with Smokenator for 2-zone/indirect cooking. Weber foil pan with hot water as a water bath under the meat side.
• Meat: Lamb shoulder from Lazy Acres. This was about 4.5lb uncooked weight and included the shoulder blade bone, 3 ribs and a bit of back bone (It was certainly an interesting lesson in sheep anatomy).
• Fuel: Kingsford Blue Bag briquettes with red oak chunks.
• Prep:
  1. Trimmed the fat and silverskin off both sides of the lamb shoulder.
  2. Coated it all over with the Dolly’s Lamb Rub and Paste.
• Rub/paste recipe:

Lamb shoulder prior to trimming

Lamb shoulder after trimming and brining with kosher salt.

Cooking Diary

• 8pm previous night: Trimmed meat, added salt brine
  

  Graph of temperatures on the grate and internal temperature during the lamb shoulder cook.

• 6am: Coffee on, made up rub. Underestimated the amount of time it would take to peel and crush 10 (11 in my case as some of the cloves were a bit small and runty…) cloves of garlic.
• 6:40am: Applied rub paste to meat.
• 6:50am: Filled Smokenator to the brim with briquettes and then transferred 15 into 1 corner of the chimney. Put 2 Weber lighter cubes on the grill and put the chimney over the top.
• 7:00am: These cubes really do the business ! Transferred lit briquettes into the Smokenator and filled a Weber foil pan on the bottom grate with hot water to use as water bath.
• 7:27am: Up to our target temperature of 250F and put the lamb shoulder on, with the bone/ribs end towards the heat. Added a red oak wood chunk.
• 8:00am: Added large wood chunk.
• 8:50am: Stirred coals, added another red oak wood chunk.
• 9:55am: Added some more briquettes as we were beginning to run down.
• 11:35am: Added yet more briquettes and a few small chips of wood (my bag of red oak which has lasted most of the year is running out so I’m down to a few really large chunks (which I will probably need to saw up) and chips and flakes).
• 12:25pm: We seem to have hit “the stall”; internal temperature has been at 180F for a while now.
• 2:30pm: Added more briquettes.
• 2:45pm: We seem to have come out of the stall and the temperature is rising again. Pulled off, tightly wrapped the shoulder in foil and put it back on the cooker. I didn’t put any liquid in with the foil, this may have been a mistake…
• 4:06pm: After over eight and half hours, we seem to have hit our internal temperature of 203F and I pull it off to rest.

To go with the lamb shoulder, I made up the Kentucky Black Barbecue Sauce and Dip while I was waiting for the meat to rest. The recipe for the sauce is below:

Results

Completed lamb shoulder after the cooking and resting

This was one of the longest cooks that I’ve done and without a good idea of what the final product should look like. The instructions and recipe gave the impression that it could be treated like pork shoulder which is basically a case of cook until done, remove the blade bone and pull or chop the rest. Obviously lamb is a much smaller animal but this one was much more difficult to get the meat off.

Plate of cut and pulled lamb shoulder along with the Kentucky black sauce

The meat, once cut off, was very tasty with a good smoky lamb flavor. The bark on the outside ended up quite chewy, possibly as a result of the length of the cook. In future I think I would either wrap much earlier before it had taken on as much color, spritz it with water during the cook or add some liquid in to the foil “crutch” once it had been wrapped.

Verdict on the lamb shoulder: C+

This was a good experience of maintaining a long cook and also for a type of meat that is much less common here in the US. Unfortunately given the rarity of lamb here and its corresponding high price here (this was a $50+ piece of meat), the small amount of usable meat I got off this one means it is not something I’m going to be able to try and repeat very often.