Slow Cooker Lamb Recipes

Guide to Slow Cooking Lamb

Lamb’s naturally rich flavour can be intensified by slow cooking. Before you begin, though, it helps to pick a quality cut of meat. Lamb meat comes from young animals less than one year old. Due to its young age, lamb meat is relatively light in colour with firm, smooth fat. The best tasting pieces of lamb meat will be slightly pink in colour and fairly firm. For slow cooking, the most popular cuts of lamb include the legs and neck.

One of the most popular ways to prepare lamb in a slow cooker is to create a pot roast from a leg piece. Some recipes call for you to leave the lamb shank on the bone while cooking. This helps the meat absorb additional flavour from the bone marrow. However, you can also remove the leg bone and use the remaining cavity to create a delicious stuffed roast.

Chopped lamb meat is great for creating slow cooked stews and casseroles. While leg pieces can be cut off the bone for this, it is more popular to use neck meat for stews. Since the neck is the toughest part of a lamb, these cuts of meat are relatively cheap. However, after a long simmer in the slow cooker they become tender and succulent. While there are a wide variety of flavours that can be used in stews and casseroles, certain herbs work best when paired with lamb. These include rosemary, thyme, and mint. As for the vegetable component of lamb stews, you should look to add potatoes, beans, and carrots.

Try our slow cooker lamb recipes

Slow Cooker Tip - Cooking Meats

• For best results, ground meats must be cooked in a skillet before cooking in the slow cooker.
• Large pieces of meat can be browned before cooking in the slow cooker, but this step isn't necessary. Browning adds colour and helps in flavour development.
• Most meats require 8 hours of cooking on LOW. Use cheaper cuts of meat - not only do you save money, but these meats work better in the slow cooker. Cheaper cuts of meat have less fat, which makes them more suited to slow cooker cooking. Moist, long cooking times result in very tender meats.

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