It’s the West’s local meat—and tastier than ever. These show-stopper recipes show how deliciously far it’s come
Fennel seeds and rosemary perfume every bite of this tenderest of cuts.
Mint jelly is traditional with lamb, but not everyone loves its cloying sweetness or garish color. This fresh mint pesto takes a more savory direction, and is rolled up in the lamb to flavor it as it roasts.
Hours of cooking on very low heat makes this lamb fall-off-the-bone tender, and a blast of high heat at the end crisps the surface. All you need to round out the dinner are mashed potatoes and a salad.
Ground lamb gets an Indian spin in this easy one-pot meal. It’s great when served with a few pieces of warmed naan.
Anyone can have a simple hamburger, but with a recipe like this one, the question is why? Grilled bread and a pea and mint relish enhance the juicy lamb.
Quick-to-cook lamb chops served with a fresh summer salsa are all that’s needed for a simple weeknight dinner. We serve it with a salad loaded with good-quality feta for a complete meal.
Recipe: Lamb Chops with Roasted Salsa
Bite-sized and full of flavor, these meatballs are an easy way to get out of the meatloaf rut.
Recipe: Moroccan Spiced Lamb Meatballs
Coffee and lamb? You’ll be amazed at how well they compliment each other. The result is a luxurious meal that’s fairly easy to start and then ignore until ready with fall-off-the-bone results.
Recipe: Coffee-Braised Spoon Lamb
We love how the sweet and tangy flavor from the apricots compliments the rich and tender leg of lamb.
The lamb is great, but it’s the toasty garlic sauce that gets drizzled over the top that makes this dish a winner. If you like lamb, but you love garlic, then this is the recipe for you.
Super quick, and plenty flavorful, the harissa marinade does double duty as a spicy sauce once the lamb is cooked.
It may look simple, but these spiced-rubbed lamp chops are so flavorful; the first bite will be a shockingly delicious surprise.
The lamb cubes are the perfect size for eating with bites of the warm and salty halloumi cheese and juicy tomatoes.
Recipe: Grilled Lamb and Halloumi Kebabs
From Harrison Ford’s son, L.A. chef Ben Ford, comes a fabulous leg of wood-fired lamb, marinated in a heady mix of herbs and spices for a full day before it’s cooked over fire. What’s not to like?
Recipe: Rosemary Grilled Leg of Lamb
This soup is a fun play on avgolemono, the classic Greek lemon and rice soup. Ours is better, of course, because of the mini-meatballs that swim in the creamy broth.
These truly are amazingly, amazingly delicious and easy to make for crowd. Serve with a bunch of Mediterranean sides, such as hummus and couscous, for a fun spread that will please the group.
Recipe: So Amazing Armenian Lula Kebabs
Using leftover kebabs, or any other spiced ground lamb, as a part of a morning-on-the-go item, is a smart way to get two meals from one.
Recipe: Bulgur Kebab Burritos
We doubled this recipe so it could serve as a main course. Lamb loins are amazingly tender and flavorful but also expensive; we found that cheaper lamb shoulder roast (although tougher) works too. Just cook it a little longer—about 10 minutes more.
Rich, warm, and spicy, this lamb stew is one of our favorites. We love to serve it as the main course to a spread of hearty red wines and warm crusty bread.
Arabic spices meet the Persian touch of pistachios in the kefta (skewered ground meat) at Mamnoon in Seattle, where the food combines the owners’ Syrian, Lebanese, and Persian heritage with chef Garrett Melkonian’s Armenian background. We opted for an easier version: burgers.
The sweet spices in this dish make it the perfect stew for autumn.
Merguez, an aromatic North African sausage usually made from lamb, takes practically no time to grill. Spicy and smooth, the accompanying chickpea purée can stand in for hummus any old time. To make the eggplant jam especially silky, peel and seed the tomatoes. You could use skin-on seeded tomatoes in a pinch, or even good-quality canned.
An aromatic, unusual salsa makes these kebabs—and their accompanying white-bean salad—extraordinary.
For a tasty twist on a lamb burger, try stacking it with crispy potato chive cakes and Idaho mustard spread. We used Idaho's Lava Lake lamb (lavalakelamb.com) and Lark's Meadow Farms Dulcinea, a Basque-style raw sheep's-milk cheese, also from Idaho (larksmeadowfarms.com).
Recipe: Idaho Lamb Burgers
Chef Burak Epir of Pilita Grill restaurant in San Carlos, CA, serves this Turkish-style sauce over lamb meatballs skewered with chunks of eggplant. We’ve grilled lamb chops instead, for a faster but equally delicious version.
Jeff Smedstad, chef-owner of Elote Cafe ($$; closed Sun; elotecafe.com) in Sedona, Arizona, learned the secrets to great adobos (a type of chile-rich sauce) in the markets of central Mexico. This lamb dish is adapted from one in his book, Elote Cafe Cookbook (Elote Cafe Publishing; $30).
Recipe: Lamb Shanks Adobo
The spices in this dish is what really makes the flavor pop. It's great with the couscous, but you could also serve it over a Mediterranean salad, too.
Recipe: Lamb Shawarma with Couscous
These are great for cocktail parties since you can eat them one-handed.
Cabernet Franc is a great foil for the Moroccan flavors of this pungent lamb dish.
A good, rosy cut of lamb, succulent and earthy-sweet, is as purely delicious as any other meat you can eat. A lot of people might be skeptical, though. That’s because, only a few decades ago, American lamb was seriously gamy and tough.
But American lamb is a whole different animal now. Sheep in this country used to be raised mainly for wool, their meat an afterthought. Then synthetic fibers came along, wool production waned, and the industry started to breed for flavor and tenderness. No matter how you feel about polyester, it sure has given us better lamb.
There’s another reason to celebrate American lamb here in the West: It’s our local meat. Most comes from small Western family ranches (more than 75,000 of them) rather than factory farms. Some ranchers custom-sell lamb directly to consumers, right off the pasture, at any age desired, bypassing the usual six weeks or so of “finishing” the animals on grain in a feedlot. And though a well-raised lamb can taste fine finished on grain, lamb fed entirely from the range can be incredible.
With grain prices climbing, we’ll probably be seeing more 100 percent grass-fed lamb, particularly at farmers’ markets. Delicate, mild, and seasoned with the flavors of the pasture, it’s Easter worthy.
Choose a lighter hue of red. A younger animal will be milder, but size isn’t necessarily a clue, since American lamb is bred to be meaty. The biggest tip is the color: Pink or cherry red means it’s young (less than a year); if it’s dark purplish red, it’s older.
Go for grass-fed when you can. Find 100 percent grass-fed lamb at eatwild.com and well-stocked grocery stores. GrassRoots Meats (grassrootsmeats.com), Lava Lake Lamb (lavalakelamb.com), and Willow Spring Ranch Montana (montanaorganiclamb.com) are three of our favorite ranches that sell online.