Butchering a Lamb with El Colmado's Seamus Mullen

(stomping beat)

I'm Seamus Mullen from El Colmado Butchery,

and today we're gonna be butchering one of my

favorite animals, the lamb.

I grew up on a small farm in Vermont.

We raised our own lamb, we butchered our own lamb,

we made our own lamb sausage.

Cooking with whole animals has been a part of my life

since I was a kid.

Most people are familiar with leg of lamb, or lamb chops,

but there're all these great off cuts of lamb

that actually have more flavor than the principal cuts.

So this is about a 55 pound lamb, and I'm just gonna

jump in and start taking it apart.

Whenever you're butchering, the most important thing

is to look for joints within the bone,

and I'm gonna start by taking the neck out.

The neck is a great

cut for braising.

The next section here, this is sort of the rib section.

And now we're gonna get into the chops and the ribs.

(banging)

OK, so now we have the ribs on one side,

and the breast on the other side.

So you can either cook the whole thing together,

you can cure it overnight, and that's great

if you're doing barbecue, if you wanna smoke something.

You've probably heard of Denver ribs,

that's what people talk about

when they talk about lamb ribs.

Or you can take the ribs off and then cook

the breast on its own.

I love it, it's very fatty.

And if you wanna do something really cool,

you can take the breast all the way down

pretty much to the end like that.

Just season it up with a little pepper mix like that,

some salt.

Whatever you have lying around in terms of herbs,

I mean rosemary obviously goes really well with lamb.

A little bit of lemon zest.

And add some grated garlic in there like that.

Roll it up like that, take some string.

We're gonna cook it low and slow so all that stuff's

just gonna come apart.

Season it up on the outside.

I think now you're seeing a lot of different

cuts on restaurant menus that have a tremendous amount

of flavor and it's very inexpensive.

For recipes using some of my favorite cuts of lamb,

go to bonappetit.com/lamb.