It’s important to have a go-to dish—something delicious that you’ve practiced and know you can make with 100 percent success. So in this chapter, which looks beyond steak, I give some advice for understanding and selecting the right kind of meats from the other major meat groups and then offer a go-to recipe for that meat.
The first section is on lamb, an underrated meat that Americans don’t eat enough of. The go-to recipe regards a skill every cook should have—how to prepare a basic rack of lamb. It’s classic, delicious, and always makes an impressive presentation.
After lamb, I briefly discuss pork. Though for a time pork farmers liked to bill it as “the other white meat,” the best pork isn’t really that. It’s somewhere between white and red meat, with a flavor all its own. The go-to recipe for pork is a simple way to cook chops without drying them out and then pairing them with a beautiful preparation of apples, whose sweetness makes a fabulous accompaniment.
Poultry is a big part of every carnivore’s life, and it’s good to have a couple of killer recipes in your back pocket to get the most out of a bird, be it chicken, duck, quail, or turkey. In this section, I offer go-to recipes for the two most common birds we regularly see in stores today: chicken and duck. The chicken recipe is my version of one of America’s finest chicken preparations, whole roasted chicken; it’s a good one to have in your back pocket, as everyone who tastes it loves this dish. Duck confit is so tasty and so foolproof that I think every home chef should know how to make it. It takes some time to prepare, but it is otherwise as exceedingly simple in execution as it is big in flavor and satisfaction.
Next, I go back to the beloved cow, but not for steak. Rather, this recipe is for a slow-cooked piece of beef that renders exquisite flavor and texture. You can slow cook beef in a number of ways, from roasting to braising to stewing. But for this, I offer another, more modern technique that yields impressive results: sous vide. The sous vide technique allows you to cook what would otherwise be a tough piece of meat into a delicious, melt-in-your-mouth tender piece that can then be seared and served almost like a steak—an amazing hybrid of slow cooked and quick seared.
Finally, each of these go-to dishes requires no fancy skills to accomplish, and will reward cooking again and again. That’s the Complete Meat.
I have a real fondness for lamb, as there were a couple of years when I was a kid that it was all I wanted to eat. Lamb is also a great red-meat alternative to beef. It’s got a different and often much more intense flavor than beef. Just as a hunk of beef, a rack or leg of lamb makes an impressively rich, savory centerpiece to any table. Another great thing about lamb: It holds its own beautifully with any rich, red wine.
When it comes to lamb, there’s always the one basic choice: Foreign or domestic? Imported lamb tends to come from Australia and New Zealand, while the most commonly found domestic lamb is from Colorado or the high rangelands of other western states. My preference is always for Colorado lamb.
Aussie and Kiwi lamb can be tasty, but it tends to come from animals that are generally raised for wool (the merino breed). They also tend to be grass fed their entire lives and are slaughtered when quite young, at around six or seven months of age. The result is pungently grassy-flavored lamb, whose cuts are small and meat is lean. It can be delicious if you like very herbal, grassy lamb, but the size of the cuts and the toughness are the drawbacks. Funnily enough, the imported lamb is usually cheaper than domestic lamb. Both Southern Hemisphere countries have more sheep than people, leading to giant lamb and sheep industries, built for export. Our domestic lamb industry is relatively small.
Colorado lamb is very different from imported lamb. It comes from different breeds and is often grain finished before slaughter at an older age. The resulting meat is mellower tasting, marbled for a tender texture, and comes in more generously sized cuts, making for a fuller portion. For me, Colorado lamb is the quintessential balance of fat, true lamb flavor, and meatiness.*
