Aotearoa & Maori · Main
Colonial Goose
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 1 leg of lamb, 2.2 kg, tunnel-boned with the cavity left whole
- 200 ml dry red wine
- 60 ml red wine vinegar
- 30 g soft brown sugar
- 30 ml vegetable oil
- 150 g dried apricots, chopped
- 120 g coarse fresh breadcrumbs
- 150 g onion, chopped fine
- 50 g butter
- 10 g thyme leaves
- zest of 1 lemon
- 6 g fine salt
- 3 g black pepper
- 200 ml lamb or chicken stock
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenMarinating: acid, salt and time
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the wine, vinegar, sugar and oil, and marinate the boned leg in it for 12 hours in the fridge, turning it twice. 600 min
- Cook the onion in the butter until soft, cool it, then work in the apricots, breadcrumbs, thyme, zest, salt and pepper.
- Pack the stuffing into the cavity without forcing it, and tie the leg at 3 cm intervals into an even cylinder.
- Pour the marinade into a pan and boil it for a full minute before it goes anywhere near the roast, because it held raw lamb for 12 hours. Roast at 160C (325F), basting with the boiled marinade every 20 minutes, until the centre of the stuffing reads 74C (165F), 2 hours to 2.5 hours. 600 min
- Rest it 20 minutes, then boil the roasting juices with the stock and whatever baste is left down to a light gravy. 20 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Marinating: acid, salt and time 70 recipes
- Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
- The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
- It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
- The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
- Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.
Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet or Rioja Reserva
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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