Lazy Bear entered the Lamb Takedown this Sunday, a competition pitting 20 professional and amateur chefs against each other with dishes made from various cuts of lamb. I made two kinds of "McNuggets" (please don't sue, McDonald's, thanks): sweetbread nuggets, and lamb shoulder nuggets. And I accompanied them with three sauces: hot sauce (which I called "Angry Bear Hot Sauce"), ranch dressing aioli, and a nuoc mam barbecue sauce. All of the sauces were delicious, but my favorite is the combo of ranch dressing and hot sauce (borrowed from the soft shell crab dish at the last Lazy Bear dinner.

There were a lot of great entries. My favorites were a Tunisian saffron-braised lamb shank, and a lamb rillette croquette from the boys at Restaurant Marche. Sadly, neither of those entries got as much love as they deserved.

With the lamb shoulder nuggets, I went for maximum visual and textural similarity to McDonald's chicken McNuggets. I hit it spot on (recipe below). Still, with a few exceptions, everyone's favorite seemed to be the sweetbread nuggets. They were tender and flavorful, but with a super crispy outside. Importantly, we fried everything a la minute, so everything was warm and crunchy.

And, in what might have been the crushing blow to our competitors, we presented our McNuggets in the appropriate containers: McDonald's-style to-go containers. They looked pretty damn sweet, though they take FOREVER to make since we do them by hand (that means printed at home, cut with an x-acto knife or scissors, hand-folded, and hot-glued). I often serve mignardises in this style container, so we have to make twenty or thirty at a pass. In this case we had to make 250 of them! Pretty ridiculous. Still, it was worth it for the glory.

One of the judges, Amy from Cooking With Amy, articulated the conceit behind my dish better than I ever have: it's a highbrow, luxury ingredient (sweetbreads), but presented in the most democratic, lowbrow way possible.

The hot sauce started out very traditional: pickled red fresno chiles, aged at room temperature for a couple weeks to allow some natural lacto-fermentation, which adds a lot of complexity to the flavor. It's like kimchi made of hot peppers. Then the peppers get pureed and the puree gets passed through a tamis. Then, in this case, I made the puree more rich and mild by adding cream, seasoned with salt and a bit of worcestershire and soy sauce, and thickened it with xanthan gum and Ultratex-3.

The nuoc mam barbecue sauce was a homemade barbecue sauce spiked with lots of fresh lime juice and fish sauce.

Here are some of the recipes:

McNugget-style Tempura Batter
75g corn starch
100g rice flour
100g AP flour
20g sugar
25g Trisol
2 eggs
275g flat water

Mix all ingredients together until uniform (unlike normal tempura batter). Dip flour-coated items briefly into batter until fully covered, let drip for a second, then dip directly into 375F frying oil.

For this competition, I needed to put out 250 portions (two nuggets each) in an hour and a half, so I pre-fried all of the nuggets. Frying a la minute wouldn't have been that bad, but battering would have been very messy and time-consuming. Anyway, each McDonald's gets all their nuggets pre-fried, so I feel that my method was authentic. So, after frying the nuggets (which Jeanette pitched in to help with), I let them cool to room temperature, then refrigerated them. I re-fried them at the competition for about one minute to get them hot and crispy again.

Sweetbread McNuggets

Sweetbreads are like little sponges. When you buy them, they are basically full of, unfortunately, blood. I soak them for 24 hours in cold water, changing out the water every few hours. That will gradually get the blood (and the iron-like taste it has) out of the sweetbreads. Then I brine the sweetbreads in a 10% brine for about an hour. It doesn't take long because, again, they are like sponges. Then I seal them up in vacuum bags. Don't worry about crowding them or adding any extra liquid--they'll expel lots of liquid and shrink once they get heated. I cook them sous vide for 1.5 hours at 67C, then chill them down. Once they are fully chilled (overnight, preferably), remove them from the bags and clean off all of the obvious membranes and sinew. In the case of lamb sweetbreads, you don't have to be quite as careful as you do with veal sweetbreads since the membranes are thinner and less noticeable when you eat them. Then just chill the cleaned sweetbreads until you're ready to fry them. At that time, toss them in rice flour, then into tempura batter, then fry.

Lamb Shoulder McNuggets

15 pounds lamb shoulder, lean only
7 pounds lamb shoulder, boneless, lean and fat
100g Activa RM transglutaminase ("meat glue")
200g kosher salt
800g lamb stock

To get 15 pounds of lean lamb shoulder, start with about 25 pounds of boneless lamb shoulder. Trim it very well, removing all of the fat, connective tissues, and sinew. Dice all of the lean lamb shoulder into 1/4 inch dice. Slice the 7 pounds of whole lamb into strips suitable for grinding, then toss them with the salt. Chill it very well in the freezer for maybe half an hour, then grind as per the usual procedure. Chill the ground mix again. Mix all of the ground lamb with the diced, lean lamb. Working in batches, mix in a proportional quantity of the Activa and the stock, then roll up the mix in roulades in plastic wrap, about one pound per roll (they should be about two inches in diameter), then chill the rolls overnight. Cook the rolls sous vide for 6.5 hours at 75C. More time will yield a slightly better, more tender product, but it'll be less like McDonald's McNuggets. Chill the rolls completely. Finally, unwrap the rolls and cut about 1/4-inch off two sides to yield a cylinder sort of shape but with two flat sides. Then slice into 1/3-inch slices, about 16 per roulade, and just under an ounce each. Toss these nuggets in rice flour, then batter and fry.

Posted by Barzelay on 2010/08/13 @ 1:17 | Comments (2) | Food Politics and Culture, Lazy Bear, Meat, Sauces, Condiments

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