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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Mutton/lamb is the most delicious of all non-fish meats.

I don't particularly love beef/chicken/pork but a sunday lamb roast with crispy potatoes and gravy - yum.

BUT - cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting - and anticipate you won't really knock people out with it until you've practiced enough. Jamie Oliver has the best lamb roast recipes.

Lamb leg is extremely cheap at the moment in Australia - $10/KG - so I am practicing my lamb leg roasting skills.

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These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way. It's not as if the Middle Eastern restaurants or kebab joints are slow roasting the stuff. You can pressure cook it for certain meals (i.e lamb shanks) but it's not that necessary. Lamb chops can also be cooked much in the same way as beef steaks.

The most tender part is the backstrap (its marbled like wagyu) and incredibly easy to prepare and skewer. This is followed by the legs. You can even go one step further and skewer more fat inbetween.

Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine.

I grew up on it, and have probably cooked it about ~150 times for other people. It's always been a hit and I'm not exactly a chef ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>> Otherwise, pan frying it with basic seasoning is fine.

No, make it into a pilaf. In a ceramic oven vessel. If you're from the Middle East, or anywhere around the Mediterranean, that's what your heart yearns for, and your heart knows best.

Also, saturated fats but that's not why I brought up your heart :P

> These views are strange to me. You can most definitely cook it any old way

The thing that cracks me up are yuppies caring for their cast iron skillet like it’s a newborn baby. “You can’t use soap on it… You can’t treat it like that… To maintain it you must…”

I promise that generations of dirt poor Southerners had bigger things to worry about than following Alton Brown’s directions for cast iron maintenance.

I’ve ran mine through the dishwasher. It’s fine.

I have no dishwasher (or rather, that'll be me).

I inherited my pan 20 years ago; it ws in poor shape. I stripped it with caustic soda, and re-seasoned it, which took about a day elapsed. Ever since, it gets washed-up using detergent, and immediately dried. It's as good as when I first seasoned it. I've never had to repair the finish.

As someone who comes from "generations of dirt poor Southerners," I can assure you Alton Brown got his directions from people like my Grandma.

That is certainly a possibility.

IIRC he went to culinary school with the intent of becoming TV Chef. A lot of his early stuff was lifted right out of a culinary school program.

It's possible that your grandma has a lot more classical cooking skills than you think. A good bit of "southern cooking" is classical French cooking that's evolved over time and has been adapted for local ingredients.

To me the whole point is that it’s indestructible/recoverable. Things go really south you can steel wool / sand it and re-season. If it’s any coated pan it’s not usable for cooking after it takes some damage

In fairness, it's nice to know how best to avoid needing to sand/reseason more than necessary due to preventable mishaps. It's not a fun chore to have to add to your list.

Too much bloody work. Too heavy, and too bloody impractical.

I don't want to spend my life honing my cookware. I want to toss it in the dishwasher and get on with my precious leisure time.

Forever chemicals are pretty terrible.

The only soap you can't use on cast iron is lye soap. That does strip that polymer smooth black coating. Basically it turns the patina into more soap.

I use a chainmaille scrubber with dish soap. Works well.

I use soap every wash on well-seasoned cast iron too, no problem at all. You need to make sure to wash all the soap off, and dry it well -- or at least I believe it's important to do that, I guess since I always do it, I could be making assumptions too, maybe it's just fine if you don't?!

But yeah, the idea that you have to leave the cooking grease and fat on cast iron and aren't allowed to use soap to cut the grease and get it off.... is an odd one.

You are supposed to take your greasy cast iron pan, and put it in the blast furnace it the backyard to clean it!

Maybe I've been playing a bit too much GTNH.

My grandmother used to literally build a fire in the back yard and throw the skillets in whenever she thought they needed it (maybe every few years).

This was long, long before Alton Brown was a thing.

Best way to dry it is to throw back in the stove on high for a few minutes.

I blame the novel Silence of the Lambs. It has some weird aside where it mentions that soap never touches her cast iron pan. So the pretension has existed long before Alton Brown showed up.

This is a fantastic take. I’d never thought about this before but you’re right that this might be Patient 0 of the modern rich white person’s exposure to cast iron and associated care.

My mistake, it was Hannibal published in 1999.

“Mapp had inherited her grandmother’s skillet and used it often. It had a glassy black surface that no soap ever touched. Starling put it in front of her on the table.”

I read the series long after publication date and remembered going, “wait, the no soap thing has been around THAT long?”

Long before that. I heard that advice as a child in the 70's. Had the impression is was what my parents learned in the 40's.

Soaps had lye that would've washed away the seasoning on the pan. Today's common dish detergents do not, so this is just advice that used to be helpful, but it isn't anymore.

Some people are stuck in their ways, never really understood why they shouldn't use soap in the first place, or didn't notice that the soap they grew up with is different from today's dish detergents... I think there's a lesson to be learned here about re-evaluating our assumptions every so often and not doing things just because that's how they've always been done.

I use dish soap on my cast iron skillet fairly regularly, and it does ruin my ability to fry an egg, at least until I smoke off some oil again.

This red herring is presented with such delicious haste every single time cast iron cookware is mentioned. I think it's because of some pop-science cooking channel on the internet

While I will not pretend to know all the reasons in fact that this practice has reached such common use, washing your cast iron pan with soap won't strip the seasoning that is already set, but it will strip all of the unset oils left over from cooking that are on the surface. If you spend tons of time maintaining cast irons, you will find that the single most important practice to building a smooth surface that never sticks is leaving a thin (towel dry / buffed, leave too much and it turns sticky) film of oil on the surface of the pan after every use. If you need to or want to use soap to remove the (again, unset non-seasoning) layer of oil on the surface, you can dry off the pan, add some oil and buff it with a towel before storing. Using some heat during this process, but not smoking the oil is necessary to expand the pores of the pan (or make the oil more viscous and better fill the static surface of the pan, whichever mental model helps you sleep). This process takes extra time and effort to achieve the effect you already have with a well seasoned cast iron after cooking: Food debris washes right off with some light scrubbing and water, leaving a clean surface with a thin layer of oil on the top that has nicely filled all the cracks on the surface.

You can clean cast iron with soap of course, if you're using it often and well you don't have to. Most of the time all I need to do is wipe it clean with a paper towel and let it be like that until I use it again a few hours later.

I figure this is probably what those "dirt poor southerns" were doing too, since it's simple and effective.

Is it different for other types of cookware? If a wipe with a paper towel removes all traces of the food, is that good enough?

You're talking about a surface that gets hot enough to kill every possible pathogen on it every time you use it.

Scrape-and-wipe is about 90% of my cast iron "cleaning". I only take it to the sink occasionally.

I’m mostly wondering about why the “cast iron” part is relevant. If a wipe is enough for that type of pan, isn’t it good enough for all of your pans? If there’s food stuck on, you’re obviously going to do whatever it takes to remove that. But when that isn’t the case, is a simple wipe good enough?

Copper and stainless steel invariably get food adhered to them very well. (Try cooking eggs in stainless steel) A properly-seasoned cast iron pan is, in many ways, like a teflon-coated one. So, I suppose my comment would go for teflon-coated pans, as well.

If I still used stainless steel, you bet I'd be soaking them overnight then scrubbing the hell out of them in the sink the next morning.

I think it really depends on how often you use it. If you use it every day, then I think wiping it down (maybe with a bit of added oil depending on what you just cooked) is more than adequate most of the time. If you use it once a week then put it in a cupboard before using it again, then you'd want to clean it more thoroughly because you might get stuff growing on it otherwise.

If you can't use soap in it, you've got a dirty pan, not a seasoned one.

That's the point, the oil from the seasoning process (or rather, the residue it leaves behind) is not dirt, it's an actual layer of coating - and if you use soap on it you wash away the coating.

No, sorry, if it washes away you have not seasoned it properly - it should be carbonised and bonded (polymerised?) to the actual pan, not just a layer of grease sitting on top.

I have multiple cast iron items in my kitchen that I can wash with washing-up liquid, gently scour with wire wool even (sure, too much vigour would probably start to remove it, or at very least scratch up the surface and make it harder to clean/things stick more) with no problem or loss of seasoning.

Alton Brown literally says to use soap and water on your pan if it's very dirty, just dry it before storing:

https://altonbrown.com/how-to-care-for-cast-iron/

A product having once been ubiquitous, and it's maintenance therefore common knowledge that you'd pick up by habit, does not mean it's stupid to have to pay attention to this knowledge many decades later.

Some misconceptions do exist, for example dish soap not usually being a detergent that damages the patina nowadays. While other practices are a development, like our general food hygiene standards having changed significantly, and keeping a patina on cookware therefore requiring more deliberate attention.

My parents were certainly no yuppies but those were my moms rules 30+ years ago. I always thought "no soap" was common knowledge, not a fad.

Well if you want to cook mutton right then don't just roast it with potatoes in the oven. Make a nice pilaf with it, with a whole head of garlic in the center like they do in Uzbekistan:

https://youtu.be/tkCeL6Md0fg?si=q86eBrLRbJBJU4yi

Or stuff the leg with rice, as they do on the Greek island of Imvros:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFVLLIZsh8A&list=PLsmrGn_1E1...

(the meat in the video is goat, not mutton, but it's the same recipe).

Or, my favourite (and a recipe handed down by my grandfather, though it skipped a generation): Gioulbasi, a whole leg of mutton wrapped in wax paper, with vegetables and melty cheese, and roasted slow and sweet:

https://youtu.be/OZjAiqC3ws0?si=93pwB2DZDNBtgNyF&t=6

Though these days I prefer to be all posh and use a French oven to slow-roast mutton (and lamb, and goat).

It's curious to me that dish with a Turkish name (gölbaşı, meaning lakeside) should not exist in Turkey.

I think it comes from Smyrni and the old Greek cities in the coast of Asia Minor, who were for a while a part of Turkey (until the Greeks there were slaughtered like lambs).

Anyway we have lots of Turkish loan words in the Greek language. To the best of my ability to transliterate these examples in latin characters: ati, passoumi, briki (ibrik, I think), kazani, charatsi, tsoglani, bairaki, chatiri, dounias, giouroussi, boulouki, dragoumanos, doulapi, and derti, of course, etc. As you can probably tell, we always tend to add an "-i" at the end.

We also say "halali" and "harami", which we clearly took from the Turkish.

And of course, Tsantirimin Oustoune, and other all time greatest hits:

https://youtu.be/NE9sQGPhYbM?si=q-Sk4Yuo_bxjO10s - By Flery Dandonaki (a great Greek singer)

https://youtu.be/QDzXPLX8JdQ?si=nRx-Lv7GbIjmaeIG - By Rosa Eskenazi (a Jewish Greek singer)

https://youtu.be/GH7TffsisJc?si=l7sGSt5ZdAmug7jb - By Stelios Kazandzidis (a Pontiac Greek singer)

Greece is of the East :)

Uzbek is a language related to Turkish...

The Swedish way is better.

> cooking lamb well is an art and takes alot of practice. You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious. If you want to learn how to cook lamb well then focus on slow cooking and slow roasting

Hold on, are we talking about lamb or mutton?

Lamb is extremely forgiving. It's tender and has plenty of flavor. It's fine to cook lamb hot and fast like a steak, or low and slow like basically any meat. If you treat lamb like oddly shaped beef or pork you'll be fine.

Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you.

> Lamb is extremely forgiving

I'd argue it's more a matter of degrees. Chicken is more forgiving than beef, beef more than lamb, etc. Lamb is far from "extremely" forgiving - it's just moreso than mutton.

> Mutton is not forgiving, needs to be treated like its own unique thing, and braising it should be your first instinct. If that's what you meant and it was just a typo, I totally agree with you.

That's all true of lamb too, just not to anywhere near the same extent as mutton.

Lamb is extremely forgiving.

Is it possible you've simply never had good lamb?

Lamb is my favourite meat. I eat it weekly at least. I live (and was born and raised) in New Zealand, a country known for the best lamb in the world. So, no.

Chicken breast is absolutely not forgiving. It gets tough and dry almost instantly.

That's true for breast, but thigh and leg meat is extremely forgiving (as long as you don't undercook it). Once you get it to "shred with a fork" status, you basically can't ruin its texture until you char it into rubber.

For breast, the trick is to pound it to ~3/4 inch thickness and then dry brine for at least 30 minutes. So much easier to get it evenly cooked and tender all the way through:

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-juicy-grilled-boneless-...

I was going to say, Americans don't generally eat mutton but lamb isn't terribly uncommon. Lamb is already difficult to get right, which is why many go out to get it (Indian and Middle Eastern, most commonly); mutton is even more difficult, so people don't even bother either way.

In addition, goat isn't often eaten in Europe (outside of the Mediterranean, Italy primarily) and other affluent nations, but is fairly common (at least in the Southwest and New York+DC) via Latin American, Middle Eastern and African cuisine infusion.

You literally just put a seasoned lamb chop into a frying pan until it's the colour you like. There's absolutely no art to it.

I love lamb too but my love for it is heavily tempered by its extreme environmental impact :(

Lamb had the highest carbon footprint of all animals last I checked. Now I took another look and beef is back on top!

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

It probably depends highly on what you feed them...

Ruminants inherently have large methane output that drives up climate impact. There are only very early efforts to reduce methane output through diet change.

I think it depends on if you include shipping from Australia to North America in the footprint calculation.

It doesn't, because shipping 1 tonne of food by sea costs about 0.02kg of CO2, and it's already part of the calculation (under "transportation").

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emission-factors-food-tra...

... per kilometer ... and it's about 8000 km from Australia to New York

Sheep grazing also strips the land bare of deep and complex vegetation upending whole ecosystems. Perhaps in a futile or misguided gesture I try to keep my consumption of lamb to an occasional treat rather than a regular thing.

Wouldn't this depend on location and source? I used to live in Scotland, where sheep graze on grass in fields that don't really take away space for vegetables (unless you want to survive on potatoes and cabbage), and they're local. So I assumed they're not that bad.

Most of the sheep grazing land in the UK isn't natural - natural trees and vegetation were cleared to make way for more sheep. It's had a large impact on the biodiversity here.

https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2020/05/11/biodiversity-impact-...

From a cooking point of view mutton/lamb is a confusing term.

The reason for having two words for this is closely tied to the fact that cooking them is completely different.

Lamb doesn’t take a bunch of specialized skill.

Makes for a good Sunday gravy!

For leg, shank, or shoulder chop I would agree with you - a slow roast or braise is the right way to go. But the rack is incredibly tender and easy to cook. Throw some salt, pepper, garlic, and Italian seasoning on it and put it in the oven at 375F, it's perfect in about 25 mins. No cooking skills necessary.

At my local Costco, imported Aussie lamb racks are usually about $15/lb.

Wow, disagree - I find that the sweet spot with a rack is very small, maybe 2-3 minutes. Outside of that, it's either too pink or overdone. Maybe it's just me :(

For me, the easiest lamb cut to cook is shoulder - just throw it in a low oven for 3+ hours (with some white wine, rosemary, parsley, garlic and lemon), and it's the most delicious lamb you've ever had!

Surely this is a typo... after 2-3 minutes at 375F, you're serving lamb sushi

I believe they mean that the window of time in which it's delicious is narrow.

(Because a rack of lamb is fairly thin compared to many meats we roast)

To which I would say: meat thermometers are an amazing gift.

Yeah, the window of time when you need to pull it so that it's good. As in, pull it 2 minutes one way and it's not done, 2 minutes the other way and it's overdone.

Just use a meat thermometer. I guess that's a skill but it's an easy one. Pull it 5-10 degrees (F) before your target temp. I get consistent medium rare every time.

I love a braise too! But it takes some planning and it's more work. I can go from "hmmm, what dinner" to plated lamb rack in 45 mins - including defrost time.

I beg to differ. Difficulty depends upon the recipe.

Lamb/mutton tagines are incredibly easy to make. They’re basically “throw it into a slow cooker and come back eight hours later” dishes. You can improve the flavor by browning, but the simplest versions are still wonderfully delicious and basically idiot proof.

> You can't just go cook lamb any old way and think it will be delicious.

Maybe I'm just Italian, but if you just toss a lamb/mutton shank into your otherwise boring red sauce (which you were already cooking low and slow, right?) it goes a long way.

> You can't just go cook lamb any old way

lamb is very popular in Italy and there are no "no old ways" to cook it.

Not a fan of it, but it's probably one of the most untouched traditional food you can find here.

I did a boneless leg roast on Friday and it came out very tender. I spread softened butter with herbs all over the top, then put it in at 425F for 15 minutes, followed by a couple hours at 350F until it was ~140F in the center. Juicy, tender, and nicely pink inside. The leftovers made a couple great sandwiches and finally ended up as a stir fry last night.

Americans do ourselves a huge disservice by ignoring lamb (and mutton, and goat, and wild game, and...)

A tip from my grandpa who was a sheep farmer and roasted plenty of lamb legs: coat it in vegemite before putting it in the oven. Sounds weird and gross I know, but it creates a salty, crispy crust that keeps the juices in.

Lamb is very robust actually. It can be cooked rare or slow cooked and anywhere in between and still be delicious because it’s often fatty and marbled.

$10/Kg? In the US, I used to get the entire leg for ~$12-13(3.5/4kg) at African and Arab stores. The same in India would be around $30

Been getting shoulder on sale for under $7 a kg at Saccas in Melbourne

> Lamb leg is extremely cheap at the moment in Australia - $10/KG

In Fiji only lamb neck is that cheap.

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