hummus with lamb

If you are looking for traditional lamb and hummus then this page will not help you. If you are looking for the sorts of things that you can get away with and still come close or possibly exceed, then do, read on.

Garbanzo beans (chickpeas) and brown rice are ground to powder with peppercorn and sea salt in an electric coffee mill. The combined powder is seasoned further and cooked in double the volume of chicken broth along with miso paste and peanut butter to produce a wet mixture its viscosity verging on that of a sauce. 

A lamb patty of combined meat and seasoning is fried in a pan. 

An egg is fried in the same pan. 

Aerogarden lemon basil to top.

Now I ask you, where else are you going to see this? Nowhere! And I wonder, why not? This technique, a kitchen hack of my own invention, and if it has already been invented then excuuuUUUUUUUUUuuuse me, has seemingly infinite variations. Any legume or grain can be treated this way, seasoned by any means imaginable, and brought to a wide range of consistencies. The resulting paste can be poured into an oiled form or onto a flat surface, chilled, then cut and served directly or fried, deep fried, or baked or broiled. The powder can be used to make crackers, added to breads, thicken soup, included in meat-loafs for texture and to retain fat while contributing their own alimentary salubrious elements. The beauty is twofold: 1) the powder is instant. 2) the entire seed or grain or legume is used, so all of its nutrients retained and all of its fiber that is usually lost to processing.  

Ordinarily hummus will have lemon, garlic, onion, tahini, and olive oil. It will be limited to chickpeas. Hummus will also have cumin, one of my favorite spices, but I left it out here because -- what, do you think I'm insane? 

I just now read online several commenters state flatly that tahini tastes nothing at all like peanut butter. This does not comport with my experience, and I would like to box it out with those commenters until one of us falls down bloody, but what would be the point in reacting violently? I have tried three different brands, and by my assessment, all three brands tasted nearly exactly like peanut butter. Almost indistinguishable. In this I am disappointed because I hoped for it to taste like sesame seeds taste. I even made my own tahini twice, once using non-hulled seeds and the second time using hulled seeds. They both tasted nearly exactly like peanut butter. For the record, the non-hulled seeds, that is, seeds with their hulls still on, absorbed so much olive oil that it became mostly olive oil by weight. The seeds kept absorbing and absorbing and absorbing until eventually it was ridiculous so I switched to water then it absorbed that ridiculously too. So the moral of the story is ... ¿ Weirdly, the tahini made from non-hulled seeds was more fully nut tasting than the tahini processed from hulled seeds.

South River miso added here only because I haven't had any miso for awhile. It is almost as if my body suggested it and not my mind. There I was, tasting the brown sludge in the pot for possible adjustments and it seemed to be already perfectly fine. There was no addition whereby I could actually improve the taste. I considered all the customary hummus ingredients but rejected them one by one because either the element was already in the lamb or because I didn't feel like it, then BLAM! Just like that, the idea for peanut butter and miso appeared in my mind like a picture enhanced by an audio specialist. 

Now. I ask you again, where are you ever going to see miso mixed with hummus? In a miso recipe book? No, you will not see it there. 

lamb

A portion of a leg of lamb roast is ground using a meat grinding attachment to a kitchen mixer. The ground meat is seasoned, patties are formed. Vegetables are sauteed in the same pan that one of the lamb patties was fried. The pan is deglazed with sour red wine and the sauce finished with cold butter. Aerogarden mint is torn to top. Lettuce on the side drizzled with olive oil/rice vinegar. 

The lamb seems insufficiently fat. A few thick strips of bacon are ground along with the lamb to supplement. 

I don't know why I added lemon. I never heard of such a thing except that acid + fat = dressing. I figured this combination could go inside the meat patties as easily as on top.

I would have preferred fresh bread crumbs, but alas, for I am breadless, which is a very strange situation to be in considering how readily bread is produced around here. It's just that there isn't any bread on hand presently so Panko dry breadcrumbs were used instead. This is not recommended, but it worked. The dry breadcrumbs were soaked thoroughly with milk. The milk is to add moisture to the lamb the same way Italian meatballs are made and the breadcrumbs are to hold the lamb fat and the bacon fat that was added. Wouldn't do to have all the fat run out after having troubled to add it in. 

Jalapeños for no better reason than because I have them. We're on a use-what-you-have kick. Crushed garlic is included in the mixture along with Worcestershire for its tamarind essence. 

cannelloni

There are three components that are described separately: 

1) The stuffing can be anything at all. Allow your imagination free flight. Here lamb. Usually contains a mixture including ricotta cheese to lighten and often something vegetable, here spinach. 

2) Pasta can be purchased as preformed tubes -- but honestly, what's the fun in that? -- or they can be handmade. If homemade they can be hand rolled, as here, or rolled out by machine, which is probably a very good idea. 

3) Sauce can be absolutely anything your heart desires that you feel goes with the stuffing. It can be simple as olive oil with garlic, a cream sauce, a tomato-based sauce, a pesto of any sort at all, here the lamb was used to create a sauce along with commercial beef broth.

New Zealand boneless leg of lamb. Only a portion is used for this cannelloni, the rest reserved for something else later. Originally the intention was to grind it as burger but then on impulse the decision was made to process it by Cuisinart instead. Progress was carefully monitored proceeding in pulses to avoid over processing to mush. The meat was partially frozen which made it easier for the blades to slice through the meat rather than dragging it around the bowl. A greater portion is used for the filling, a lesser portion reserved to start the sauce. 

Spinach, the amazing shrinking leaf vegetable, was cooked before combining so that it can shrink no further once it is rolled inside the pasta, otherwise there would be unsightly gaps, and that wouldn't do. Same thing with the onions. The garlic was precooked along with the onion. So, those two things, spinach and onion are pre-shrunk. In the end, this ratio of spinach plus ricotta to lamb  turned out to be incorrect. If you can believe it, too much lamb combined with ricotta and spinach. The cooked mixture turned out too dense to suit me rather than light and fluffy as was the aim and the whole point of including ricotta and vegetable. Live and learn, wot? 

Semolina flour as found in the bulk bins at Whole Foods. Incidentally, the WF a few blocks from my home doesn't carry semolina in their bulk bins but they do have it prepackaged on the shelves, although the two other WFs a few miles off both do carry it in their bulk bins and that makes me wonder, "What is up with that?" 

I do not recommend hand rolling the dough. This turned out slightly too thick. The thing is, the Atlas machine must be clamped onto the work surface and I broke the handle so pliers must be used to clamp it down and then it must be taken down, and I'm sort of over it. I'm basically too lazy to drag it out and attach it. Plus I like rolling things. Plus plus the Atlas determines the width of the rolled dough and I wanted to control that this time. Next time I'll trade size-control for perfection. 

There's gotta be a better way to do this ↑. Actually I have no idea how to cook this cannelloni. Maybe the pasta doesn't even have to be precooked. I do not know. At any rate, I precooked this pasta because I saw it on the teevee. Two of the pasta sheets tore causing no small amount of distress, but after a little swearing I recovered from that.  

But I do love it when I feel a plan coming together. Don't you? 

raw lamb ↑, cooked lamb ↓

A small amount of water was added to create steam, the baking dish was covered with aluminum foil and the cannelloni baked until a probe thermometer showed 200℉ / 90℃

The cannelloni was trimmed on both sides because I wanted nice flat edges. Waste, I know, but what the heck. Notice the diagonal cut on the cannelloni on the bottom. I'm imitating what I saw at Bittersweet restaurant. 

My sauce wasn't nearly as good as the demi glaze I had at Bittersweet, but it's not altogether bad either. The lamb bits were fried in a stick-able pan purposefully so that it would stick. I aimed to create fond in the pan that would be lifted off with wine and broth and contribute its flavor. Commercial beef stock was added then reduced. The liquid was processed further to mush then strained. The liquid returned to the pan and reduced. The commercial broth condensed to a thick consistency but it also concentrated the salt. This sauce was too salty. Cold unsalted butter added in small chunks to thicken and silk-ify the sauce improved it greatly. I should have used more wine.

Conclusion: Not ready for prime time. Good but not great. Use Atlas to roll pasta to thinner sheets. Use less lamb and more ricotta and spinach for the filling. Look for low-sodium beef broth. Use more wine in sauce. 

lamb meat loaf, ersatz gyros

The problem with the gyros here, not really much of a problem, was texture and insufficient fat. That and the fact it wasn't roasted on a spit. Online instruction direct the cook towards more of a meat loaf which at first I resisted.

There sure was a lot of that lamb. Still have some left frozen. And the pork too. This is ground lamb, pork, and beef. All very low in fat, and that will not do. Added olive oil, and to retain whatever fat those meats contain and the oil supplemented, I added my own sourdough breadcrumbs, along with a few eggs and some milk. Plus Worcestershire sauce s/p. Instead of shrinking, the meat actually puffed up like a loaf of bread. It's utterly delicious, but it's hardly gyros. Therefore, it must be considered a meatloaf -- the best meatloaf I've ever tasted. No brag. Just fact.

The sauce here is catsup and Worcestershire and I'm not going to do that again. I still have my own tzatziki so there is no point in using this second-rate red menace.

If you have never tried meatloaf made predominantly with lamb then pork then beef, I urge you to try it. Do consider breadcrumbs, just enough to adjust the texture and to help retain fat and moisture. Forget about catsup, that's for children.

This batch produced two of these meatloaves. It was totally worth the effort of grinding and mixing the meat. If I would have added diced onion, I'd sweat them first to cause them to shrink before being packed into the loaf.