Rosemary & Mustard Crusted Lamb Served

A rare free weekend at home meant I had the chance to roll out the Mac’s ProQ™ Excel 20 and give it the time it deserves with a lovely leg of lamb.

The Excel 20 is very versatile and in addition to being a grill and a smoker, it’s easy to replicate the cooking style of very expensive (and trendy) steam ovens which produce beautifully moist roasts of meat.

Here’s what I did…

• Take a whole leg of lamb, gave it a good rinse and pat dry – mine weighed in around 2.8kgs.
• With a sharp paring knife, stab the leg in several places and insert slivers of garlic so they sit in the meat.
• Next a light coating of olive oil rubbed all over the leg, followed by a generous rub over with flaked sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.
• The rosemary wet rub is one standard supermarket pack of rosemary (just the leaves (but keep the stalks for later) finely chopped and then mixed with 2-3 tablespoons of wholegrain mustard smeared generously all over the leg.
• I was looking for only a very subtle hint of smoke flavour so I set the Excel 20 up with a full load of charcoal that had turned white and added just one small lump of cherry to get it going followed by the rosemary stalks.

Rubbed and Ready

• Fill the water bowl and sit over the coals so as the meat is slow-roasting, the steam is keeping it lovely and moist.
• I wanted to cook at a slightly higher temperature than a normal smoking sessions so I kept all the bottom vents open – this leveled the temp out at around 280-300 degrees F and I kept it there for about 5 hrs

Lamb After 2 Hrs

• After a couple of hours, the lamb was looking superb, but a prod around (confirmed by a meat thermometer) indicated the inside was still very rare so I topped up the water bowl, lid back on and left it for another 3 hrs.

5hrs In and Ready To Rest - Photo by Kayleigh Adams

• Crucially, the leg was removed from the grill, loosely tented in tin foil and allowed to rest about 20 mins before slicing to allow the juices to redistribute.

Lamb Ready to Serve

With a starting weight of 2.8kgs, the leg comfortably fed 6 adults and a number of kids with generous portions, seconds and thirds for those that wanted it and enough leftover for lamb sarnies today. I served it up with a big bowl of roast potatoes, some salad and some fresh tomatoes. And a dish of fresh mint sauce of course.

In my view, this cooking method knocks the spots off oven-cooking lamb. My only initial concern was that too much moisture would mean the crust would fail to form properly, but as you can see from the photos – this was certainly NOT the case! The low temperature and slow roasting delivered superbly tender flesh whilst the steaming effect kept the whole joint moist and succulent with a superb crust.