Do you know your lamb chump from your lamb shank, or how to make your own easy-carve lamb roast?
A new video produced by the Cooperative Research Centre for Sheep Industry Innovation (Sheep CRC) aims to unlock the secrets of the lamb leg so consumers can understand its versatility and the many cuts it can yield beyond a traditional roast.
Professor Dave Pethick, Meat Quality Program Leader with Sheep CRC, and specialist butcher Rafael Ramirez, feature in the YouTube video ‘Lamb leg secrets with the Butcher and the Doc’, demonstrating how to identify cuts including the chump or rump, silverside, round, shank, topside and how to debone a lamb leg to produce an easy-carve roast.
“When you start working with lamb and breaking it down into all these cuts, it becomes quite exciting for consumers to maybe buy a whole piece like a leg and start doing a bit of their own butchery using these simple steps,” Mr Ramirez said.
The video also explains how various cuts are rated in the Meat Standards Australia (MSA) consumer testing scores, and the best cooking methods to use for each cut.
MSA was developed by the Australian red meat industry to improve the eating quality consistency of beef and sheepmeat. The system is based on almost 700,000 consumer taste tests by over 100,000 consumers from nine countries and takes into account all factors that affect eating quality from the paddock to the plate.
Prof. Pethick is leading a Sheep CRC research program aimed at implementing a cuts-based MSA grading system for the Australian lamb industry, with consumer testing currently underway in China, the United States and Australia to assess consumer taste differences, perceptions of various cuts and ages of sheepmeats, and the impacts of different cooking styles such as Asian hot pot methods.
-Sheep CRC