Slow roasted harissa lamb shoulder
Introducing my ABSOLUTELY STUNNING Slow roasted harissa lamb shoulder. These beautiful harissa spices give me flashbacks to a Moroccan holiday with my friends Jackie and Alex, although I can safely say the all-inclusive buffet of mostly chips and pasta didn’t inspire this recipe. A slow-roasted number, it will turn even hardened lamb-haters – the meat just tears apart. Put in the effort with the prep, serve it up for dinner and spend half the night convincing your friends you didn’t buy it ready-to-cook. Take the glory.
Enjoy this meaty baby over Easter or any day of the year to be honest, don’t limit yourself to only once a year.
For the easy flat breads mentioned below, you can find the recipe for these here.
This recipe is from my book, Poppy Cooks: The Food You Need
Photographs © Louise Hagger, 2021
Ingredients
The flat breads
- 2 recipe quantities of easy flat breads (8 flat breads; see the link above for this recipe)
For the lamb
- 2 tbsp rose harissa paste
- 3 tbsp ras el hanout
- zest and juice of 1 lemon
- 5 garlic cloves, peeled
- 1 tbsp light brown soft sugar
- 6 thyme sprigs, leaves picked
- 6 rosemary sprigs, leaves picked
- 2 tbsp almond butter
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1.4–1.5kg lamb shoulder on the bone
For the couscous
- 200g couscous
- seeds of 1 pomegranate
- a small bunch of mint, leaves picked and chopped
- a small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked and chopped
- 5–6 black or green olives, pitted and sliced
- 1 tbsp dried oregano
- juice of 1 lemon
- salt and black pepper, to season
Method
- Start this the night before you want to cook. Place all of the lamb ingredients apart from the meat itself into a blender and blitz to a smooth paste to make a marinade.
- With a knife, make some little incisions into the lamb shoulder to help the marinade get right into the meat. Rub and massage the marinade into the shoulder like it’s date night, until it’s completely covered.
- Transfer the lamb to a roasting tin, cover with foil and place it in the fridge overnight (or for a minimum of 6 hours).
- Put the couscous into a container big enough to allow it to double in size and pour in 400ml/about 11⁄2 cups of cold water. Cover the bowl and transfer it to the fridge. Leave this overnight, too.
- Remove the meat from the fridge 30 minutes before you intend to start cooking so that it can come up to room temperature, and preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan/375°F/Gas 5.
- When you’re ready to cook, roast the lamb, still covered with the foil, for 4 hours, until it is charred a little on the outside and the meat is tender and pulls apart.
- Drain the couscous through a fine sieve, so you don’t lose any of it. Mix all of the other couscous ingredients into it. Season with salt and pepper to taste and leave on the side to come up to room temperature.
- Towards the end of the lamb cooking time, heat a dry frying pan over a high heat until it’s smoking hot. Place the flat breads in the pan and warm through. (Or reheat them in a microwave.)
- Either serve your massive hunk of delicious lamb in the tin as it comes, or transfer it to a wooden board and pour all of the sauce that is left in the bottom of the roasting tin into a little jug.
- Just let people dig and tear into this huge, sharing-lamb deliciousness, with the warmed flat breads, the couscous and the sauce served alongside.