Norwegian & Icelandic · Main
Pinnekjøtt
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 2.5 kg lamb rib racks, breast on the bone, in 2 slabs
- 400 g coarse sea salt
- 8 peeled birch sticks, about 20 cm each
- 300 ml water, for the pot
- 800 g swede, peeled and in chunks
- 300 g floury potatoes, peeled
- 40 g butter
- 2 g ground white pepper
- 1 g grated nutmeg
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Brining & curingSteaming: basket, leaf and lidSoaking dried goods back to lifeMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
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
- Rub the racks all over with the coarse salt, pack them into a non metal tub with the rest of the salt between the layers, and leave them at 4C (39F) for 3 days, pouring off the brine that gathers each morning.
- Rinse the salt off, pat the racks dry, and hang them in a cold, dry, airy place at 0C to 4C (32F to 39F) for 3 weeks, until they are stiff, dark and about a third lighter than they started. The surface must be dry to the touch within 48 hours; a sour or ammoniacal smell, or slime under the ribs, and the batch goes in the bin. Saw them down into single ribs. 600 min
- Soak the ribs in plenty of cold water in the fridge or a cold room below 5C (41F) for 30 hours, changing the water three times; boil a scrap in fresh water and taste it to judge when the salt has come back down to seasoning. 600 min
- Lay the birch sticks in a criss cross raft in the base of a heavy pot, pour the water in beneath them, pile the ribs on top, cover tightly and steam over low heat for 2.5 hours to 3 hours, adding hot water whenever the pot runs dry, until the meat slips off the bone. 300 min
- Boil the swede and potatoes soft, mash them with the butter, pepper, nutmeg and a ladle of the salty pot liquid, and serve the ribs on top with the rest of that liquid poured over.
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.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
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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