Sacrificial Lamb Rack

I wanted to create a dish that gave off a real death metal energy while tasting like something you’d eat at a flash restaurant. Jules and I filmed an episode featuring this recipe in the middle of Sydney’s lockdown. We went all-out and green-screened the whole kitchen to make it look like it was set in a fiery pit of doom. It was one of the biggest efforts I’d ever made for a video, and it took me the better part of two weeks to edit the f****n thing, too. Entirely worth it, and unlike the video production, the dish is as easy as all get out.

Serves: 2

Cooking time: 30 minutes prep, 30 minutes cooking

Hectometer rating: 6/10

Key: Impress the Judges

Ingredients

• 1 – 1.2 kg lamb rack
• 4 long red chillies
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• parsley, to serve

Sweet potato mash

• 2 medium sweet potatoes (800 g approx.)
• 1 whole bulb garlic
• 20 g butter
• salt and pepper
• splash of cream or full-cream milk

Jus

• 3 – 4 French shallots or 1 red onion
• 4 – 6 garlic cloves, peeled and diced
• 30 g butter
• 150 ml red wine
• 150 ml beef stock
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

Method

1. Straight out of hell’s gate, you’re gonna need to summon the heat in the oven to a brutal 200ºC fan-forced (220ºC conventional).
2. Proceed to wash any dirt and bulls**t off your sweet potatoes, then dry them. Prick a bunch of holes in them with a fork, but don’t fucken stab yourself, please! Wrap in foil and then drop kick them into the oven for 45 – 60 minutes. You’ll know when they’re done ’cause you should be able to easily stick a pitchfork or small trident through them.
3. Cut the top (not the furry bum end) off a whole bulb of unpeeled and intact garlic, drizzle a little olive oil into it and wrap in foil. Place your red chillies on a non-stick baking tray along with your foil-covered garlic and bung them in the oven with the sweet potatoes. They should all be cooked around or just before the sweet potatoes (35 – 45 minutes).
4. Now to deal with the lamb. A lamb rack commonly comes with a lot of fat on it. If you’re not bothered by it then leave that s**t on. If you are like me and want it to look flash as a rat with a gold tooth, then you can gently and slowly pull the fat off the meat. If you decide to use a knife, be careful not to cut the meat off with the fat.
5. If you wanna turn this s**t up to 11 on the fancy-pantometer, you can employ the brutal technique of ‘Frenching’ the bones, aka cleaning/scraping the bones with a knife to remove all fat and excess meat and only leaving the eye of the cutlet on the now-exposed bone. I’ll be honest, this process is a bit of f*****g around and not entirely necessary but it does look kinda cool.
6. To prep the jus ingredients, peel and chop/slice your shallots/red onion along with your garlic cloves, and chuck in a bowl of their own.
7. On the stove, get yourself a wide pan, bung in a dash of olive oil and get the s**t nice and hot. Now carefully and quickly sear the lamb rack on all sides, approx. 45–60 seconds each side. Transfer to an oven dish and throw it in the Pit of Doom with the sweet potatoes, chillies and garlic for about 10–15 minutes, depending on how you like your meat cooked. Don’t act tough, use a meat thermometer and spike it in the middle to check it if you’re swimming in a sea of question marks.
8. Internal lamb temperature chart to help you know where you’re at:
   • 55ºC rare
   • 55 – 60ºC medium rare
   • 60 – 65ºC medium
   • 65ºC medium well done
   • 65ºC+ onwards is pretty much gonna make it what I imagine to be similar to trying to chew the inner tube out of a BMX, but I get if seeing pink in the meat freaks you out, so by all means cook past that temp at your hellish leisure.
9. Using the same pan you just seared your lamb in, turn the heat down to medium-high and melt 30 g butter, then drop in the pre-chopped shallots/onion and garlic and sauté or sweat them for a few minutes until they soften and begin to turn brown. Add the red potion (wine) to the pan, being careful it doesn’t catch the lip of the pan and catch fire (unlike me, who intentionally did it on camera to look cool) and cook for 2 – 3 minutes.
10. Pour in your beef stock along with the brown sugar and simmer gently for 7 – 10 minutes until the liquid has reduced by about half. Then strain the whole lot through a sieve into a bowl to separate the liquid from the onion and garlic. Make sure to give these lumpy bits a good f****n push through the sieve to get all the good flavours out of them into that bowl. Then, would you believe it, we chuck the liquid part BACK in the pan and cook it down even more until it’s thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. The consistency should be kinda thinner than honey but thicker than wine, if that makes sense?
11. If we have timed it right, out of the oven should come everything (unless something looks or feels like it needs longer, in which case leave it in for a sec).
12. Rest the lamb in a warm place. You can cover it with foil if you like or don’t have anywhere you consider that warm.
13. Carefully peel the skins off the chillies to keep them whole. Set aside.
14. Unwrap the foil from the sweet potatoes and scrape out the orange s**t from inside the skins into a bowl. Remove the foil from the garlic bulb and squeeze the cooked garlic cloves into the sweet potato flesh with 20 g butter, a dash of cream or milk and a crack of salt and pepper.
15. Whisk together with a masher or even better . . . yep, a whisk!
16. Give that mash potato love until there are few to no lumps. Add more salt and pepper if ya want, and if it’s too thick add more milk (but slowly, or it will turn to soup).
17. Now for the Death Metal part: Make it look like horns!
    On a plate, blob on a few spoonfuls of the mash in the centre, then with a sharp knife separate the cutlets by cutting between the bones (I like to keep them as two bones to each serving) and place the bones criss-crossed and back-to-back on top of the mash. Or just plonk the f****n things on it.
    Gently lay two red chillies in front of the lamb in a cross and drizzle the meat with a teaspoon or so of jus. Finish it with a light pinch of chopped parsley if ya like, and marvel at that s**t-hot looking sacrifice you just made for dinner. Now go eat it, ya f****n legend!

See the uncensored recipe in the cookbook.