- Today on Prime Time, we will be making a crown roast
of lamb. (angelic singing)
So today, we're going to do a crown roast.
But a crown roast that we've never done before.
- So normally we would cut between the fifth and sixth rib
and that's how you kind of tell the shoulder
from where the rib section would be.
So we're then gonna take the entire rib section,
turn in inward on itself,
tie it together and roast it like that.
But with all the frenched ribs,
it looks like a crown that you would set on your head.
- It's as fancy-dan as you get.
But we had the idea, what if we tried to French
the entire rib section?
The shoulder is meatier, it's fattier.
I think it's a little bit more delicious.
So we're gonna take a new approach to butchering this lamb
and see if we can make a bigger crown roast.
- First I'm going to remove
the kidneys and the kidney fat.
We kind of wanna just free up the belly from the legs.
- So the same musculature exists for lamb
as it does for beef, as it does for pork.
So again comes down to a question of,
what muscles are you prioritizing
and what's your final product?
So we're gonna trim that and put it aside,
because that is going to actually just be grind.
- All I've done here,
to find where I want to pull the legs apart
is drag my knife until I found a good spot,
I'm just gonna make a line there.
Make a line here.
Here are our two legs.
I love butterflying them and grilling them.
- Great for grilling.
They're fantastic,
but that's not what we're talking about today.
- Nope. - Get 'em to the side.
- Get 'em outta here.
- Next up is to take the neck and the head off.
I love a neck. - Underrated.
- I feel like it's a great convert cut
when people say, "I don't like lamb that much."
Again, not a crown roast, (saw slicing)
Take the neck off.
We're gonna separate the neck,
we'll put this in the case.
Head, getting kicked to the curb.
- [Ben] This is where we're gonna start looking at things
a little bit differently than we've done them before.
- We're gonna take this entire thing off,
which will just give us a little bit more room
so see exactly what we're doing.
All we're doing is just finding that seam
and letting the natural separation guide us.
So, you can take basically our arm chuck off.
Doing the same exact thing, just the mirror.
Taking off the whole arm chuck.
Got our two arms, you can cut these shanks off,
you could braise those,
you could bone out these shoulders, make a stew.
We're gonna set 'em aside.
- And so now we can focus on taking off this saddle.
And we're just gonna do that
by bumping up against that last rib.
And then we really have the part
that we're gonna focus on today.
(jazzy instrumental music)
(saw slicing)
So these are all of the ribs
going from the loin end all the way to the neck end.
So we're just going to drag our knife along that
to kind of loosen up that connection
and then we're just gonna try and split it open.
Three, two, one.
(bones cracking)
As you can see, there's clear separation on this side
I kind of gave Brent the side
where it wasn't maybe scored as nicely.
- Usually we would just split it down the middle.
And then take the chine bone off separately.
This allows us to actually cut between every single rib.
We're doing it backwards
so that we can take the whole thing out
to keep this whole thing intact
and keep these ribs really long.
(knife scraping)
- We have our first in tact set of ribs.
So Brent, you wanna try, you wanna do the other ones?
- Great.
(knife scraping)
The difference in approach here is that we actually kept
the shoulder section of ribs
attached to the entire rib section.
If you looked online, crown roast of lamb,
probably a little bit smaller
because it's just these eight ribs.
We wanna french the entire rib section.
So we're gonna start drawing our line.
(jazzy instrumental music)
Just connecting the dots.
So we're just gonna take off this belly meat.
- [Ben] This will just make it a lot easier for us
as we're kind of like actually frenching the bones,
to not have to be pulling all that other meat off.
- Lamb belly, big piece.
Not quite as sexy as pork belly,
so probably just grind it.
Gonna take our skirt steak off.
We're just gonna trace along our cartilage.
- [Ben] We now have all the ends of all of our ribs exposed.
- [Brent] Gonna trace the ribs themselves
separate the meat between.
- [Ben] Now on to the fun part.
- [Brent] So you've already freed up that membrane
and the whole idea is that
you can just tear the whole thing off.
(upbeat jazzy music)
All right, we're frenched!
Hard part hopefully done. - Yep.
- This gives you a really nice look at
this whole muscle, from the neck into the shoulder
into the ribs, into the loin, it's all one thing.
Cool, let's make ourselves a crown.
- So what is this gonna look like whole?
It's kinda loosey goosey.
- I feel like it needs some structure
or is it better as one singular piece?
Two seems like too much.
- Two is too much? - Two is too much.
- Yeah, I think we might be, yeah, I think
you might be right, I think we're just doing
two individual crowns, we each get a crown!
- Yay!
- So I think we're in a good spot,
let's tie these up, get them in the oven.
- Great, all we're gonna do is mold this into a crown
and we're going to attach the adjoining ribs together.
(soft upbeat music)
Tie it back, keeping it together, simple as that.
- Baby got back on the shoulder end.
We have our two crowns, one for you and one for me.
- Season them up.
We're gonna roast this, hot oven, 450 to start,
get a nice little char, maybe drop it down a little bit
but we don't wanna cook it too much
so hot and fast, get it out and get her going.
- We'll probably be temping it on the loin end
'cause we don't wanna overcook that too much.
Took us longer to prep it
than it's gonna take us to cook it.
- I'm ready to eat it.
- Yeah, let's go.
(upbeat music)
♪ Whose rack is the prettier rack ♪
♪ Of all the racks in the land ♪
♪ Whose rack is the prettiest rack ♪
(laughing)
- [Brent] This went a lot faster than I expected.
It went 450. - Yep.
- For 12 minutes. - Yep.
- Dropped it down to 250 another 12 minutes.
We did temp 130 on the loin end but we're only about
100 on the shoulder end and as we slice it out,
I think it's gonna be pretty darn rare but that's okay.
- You wanna cut into one of these.
- Let's go.
- Gonna cut the string, free this guy up,
we're just gonna lay it out flat again.
Oh yeah, that's rare baby.
Look at that. - Beaut.
(soft upbeat music)
These shoulder chops might not be as pretty
as the rib chops but they look freakin' delicious.
- I'm eating the shoulder, he's eating the loin.
(grunting)
Flavor's freaking great.
You try this one.
- The shoulder is really awesome, I really love this
but flavor-wise, they're totally on par,
this is just a little bit more tender.
- I really love the flavor of the shoulder
but that needs to go to at least a proper rare,
if not medium-rare, so I think this cooking method,
using all 13 ribs, doesn't really work.
It's okay, we live and we learn.
- So crown roast, stick to the actual rib section.
Do two of those together, maybe that's why there's
a million recipes suggesting just that online.
- Turns out, maybe. - Yep, alright.
We thought we were smarter than the internet.
And the shoulder-shoulder, like it's not the same thing,
it can't be cooked the same way.
- Just don't cook them together is the lesson we learned.
(soft upbeat music)
♪ Who is wearing a crown of lamb ♪
♪ I believe it's Brent ♪