Rolled breast of lamb

A lamb’s breast is the same as a pork’s belly. Why the taxonomical difference I don’t know, but there it is. Call it lamb belly if you prefer. Ask for it off the bone and it will arrive looking like a flap of skin made predominantly of fat, cut through with sparse slivers of pinkish flesh. Don’t be fooled. There’s more meat on this boy than you give it credit for.

The trick, as with any fatty cut, is to cook it low and slow, rendering the fat and leaving meat that falls apart as soon as you look at it. And as with almost any fatty cut, lamb breast is incredibly good value, largely because it does look like a flap of fat, so no one will buy it, and into sausages / the bin, it generally goes.

Point of order – you do pay for this stuff, even if you don’t eat it. You pay for liver, and heart, and brains and kidneys, by not eating them. If the butcher is chucking away perfectly edible stock then he / she is going to have to make up the loss somewhere. Something to bear in mind.

This is easy as you like. We served it with romesco sauce, charred aubergine, yoghurt and warm lavash bread.