Pistachio Crusted Lamb

A showstopper meal that will impress any guest.

You were thinking about what restaurant you two should go to tonight for a special meal. With this recipe, we bring the restaurant quality meal to your home. And what's more fun than making it together. So grab a bottle of wine, the best ingredients, and your favourite person and lets get cooking!

Tips and Tricks

What's so great about this recipe is that it is a one pot meal. This dish comes together best in a dutch oven where the meat can stay moist and the flavours can melt together. To start, sear a seasoned lamb rack on all sides in olive oil for about 3 minutes a side. This will ensure the juices are trapped inside the meat and the meat remains tender. Remove the lamb on a plate and set aside. Then in the same dutch oven, caramelise shallots in butter. The same pan method not only is great for clean up but it allows for the next addition, in this case the shallots, to soak up all of those yummy seared meat juices. Once caramelised, add in the fingerling potatoes. Cook the veggies over the stove for 5-10 minutes. Then add in the carrots afterwards as they need less cooking time than the potatoes.

While Chef 1 sears the meat and fries the potatoes, the other cook can prep the lamb crust mixture. To a bowl, combine chopped pistachios, olive oil, melted butter, herbs de Provence, breadcrumbs, fresh tarragon, salt and pepper. To the seared rack, add a layer of dijon mustard which will act as the glue for the crust mixture. To ensure maximum flavour and optimal coating of the rack, grab a handful of the mixture and press into the dijon. This way, the most amount of the mixture sticks to the outside of the lamb. The lamb can then sit on top of the potatoes with the lid on. The dutch oven should go into the oven for about 25 minutes or until the internal temperature of the lamb reaches 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

High quality ingredients turn this dish from good to spectacular. This is especially true for the meat. We recommend going to a butcher and getting a good quality rack of lamb, frenched. For those of you who don't know, a frenched lamb rack is when the fat connecting the rib bones is removed. If the rack is not already cut this way, you can ask your butcher to clean it up for you. It makes for a more elegant looking lamb rack.

Once the lamb has reached the perfect medium rare, let the meat rest for 5-10 minutes and then slice! The lamb will be very tender, juicy and full of flavour. Don't worry if some of the crust falls off during slicing. When you plate the dish, add these crumbs over the lamb and potatoes for that extra crunch and garnish.

The Recipe

How this works?

Seeing as this is our first blog post, our recipe structure deserves a little explanation. The idea behind twotocook was to design recipes for a fun game-like experience. The idea is you and your partner decide who will be chef 1 and who will be chef 2. Following your selection you will be brought to your individual instructions. We will start with a split grocery list for those that maybe want to split the shopping and come together for the meal. Then you will find the recipe steps are written per person rather than chronologically. For example, one person can chop vegetables while the other is sautéing onion. The idea is for the recipes to be structured so working together in the kitchen is a seamless experience (and fun too!). We have game-ified cooking from start to finish (including clean up duty!).

If you guys try out this activity please let us know in the comments your experience doing it! We would love to hear from our twotocook community.

For those of you that prefer a pdf of the recipe click the link below:

Step 1: Pick your role!

Alright it's time to start. Between the two of you decide who will be chef 1 and chef 2. It will be a surprise what tasks you will have to do and which lucky (or unlucky haha) winner will be on dishes tonight. Its all part of the fun!

Step 2: Grocery List

Step 3: Cooking

Thanks for making this recipe! We hope you enjoyed it and would love to hear your thoughts on our game-ified cooking adventure. Let us know in the comments.

Until next recipe!

- twotocook