I don't know about you, but my favorite land animal to eat is sheep.
Or at least, I thought it was.
Being that I live in the United States, most lamb I've ever had was probably either domestically
raised, like these sheep I saw in Pennsylvania, or what I ate was imported from Australasia.
Half of American lamb comes from Australia or New Zealand.
But the other day, I went to the store to get some shanks, and the butcher said, "Sorry,
we just stopped carrying the New Zealand lamb.
Our new stuff is from Chile.
Do you still want it?"
Do I still want it?
What are you saying?
You saying I can't handle the Chilean stuff?
Put them shanks on the scale.
Meat me.
But then I went home and spent several days cooking these shanks to develop a recipe you
may have seen in my previous upload, and I was like, oh yeah, now I see what the butcher
meant.
The Chilean lamb tastes totally different.
It didn't taste bad, mind you, but that meat had some flavor notes in it that were totally
unfamiliar to me.
Strong ones, too.
New Zealand lamb is famously mild, and I've had some domestically raised lamb from here
in the United States that tasted disappointingly indistinguishable from beef.
That is to say, no sheepy taste at all.
And so, I'm really not sure I can say that lamb is my favorite meat, because that sheepy
flavor is not just one thing.
Scientists have identified many different organic compounds that characterize sheep
meat, and they vary enormously depending on the breed and the sex of the animal, what
the animal ate, how old it was at slaughter.
The meat of an adult sheep is known as mutton, and mutton is virtually unheard of here in
the United States.
I mean, there's some recent immigrants who have brought a taste for mutton with them
to this country, and so in big cities, particularly in the east, you might find a little bit of
mutton frozen in a halal grocery, for example.
Mutton is much stronger in taste than lamb.
And as near as I can tell, there was only one place in the U.S. where white people still
eat mutton as a matter of tradition, and we will visit there before we finish today.
Before we talk about how age effects sheep meat flavor, though, let's talk about breeding.
Dogs were the first animals domesticated by humans, but that was in a hunter-gatherer
context.
At the dawn of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, sheep and goats were among the first
animals domesticated.
Goats like this guy are closely related to sheep, they taste pretty similar, and indeed
the word mutton often refers to goat meat in South Asian and Caribbean cuisine.
Sheep and goats are incredibly hardy creatures — tough little guys capable of thriving
in a vast array of climates.
This is probably one reason why there is much more genetic and flavor diversity among modern
domestic sheep than there is among cattle or pigs or chickens.
The original wild ancestor of the sheep was probably this guy.
He's called a mouflon...
...from around the Caspian Sea area.
But with a little bit of breeding, sheep can live just about anywhere, and so they do.
Look at all these different sheep breeds.
Sheep with horns sheep, with no horns, white sheep, black sheep, brown sheep, sheep with
long flowing wool, sheep with short curly wool, sheep with no wool at all — "hair
sheep" suited for hot climates.
So many different kinds of sheep, and most of these are just the British breeds documented
in a lovely book called "Much Ado About Mutton" by Bob Kennard, with a forward by HRH Prince
of Wales.
Oh, His Royal Highness.
Prince Charles is a noted fan of mutton.
It's his favorite dish he says.
Oh, and by favorite, Brits of course, I mean favourite.
Anyway, Charles sponsored a whole campaign some years ago called "the Mutton Renaissance,"
trying to get Brits to eat more mutton and help out UK farmers who often have trouble
selling their older animals — for example, breeding females, called ewes, that have reached
the end of their breeding days.
Brits still eat a lot of lamb — younger sheep — far more lamb than us Americans
eat, but Brits eat hardly any mutton anymore, despite the fact that they used to eat a ton
of it.
British sheep were originally bred and kept chiefly for wool, also a little bit for their
milk, and to some extent for the fertilizing power of their manure.
You'd let your sheep graze on a field one year, they'd poop all over it.
And then the next year, you'd plant grains on that same field and you would get a great
crop.
That and wool is why the Brits kept sheep.
Sheep eating has a deeper history in those parts of the world where there's a cultural
and religious aversion to eating pigs.
Christians in Britain ate pigs just fine, so they sheared sheep.
And indeed, breeds developed for wool are reputed to taste pretty awful.
Some of them just far too much fat, hardly any lean at all.
Some people say that they can taste the lanolin.
It's this waxy substance that's naturally found on wool.
It's used in cosmetics and such, and yeah, I suppose I wouldn't want to have that flavor
in my meat.
But as Bob Kennard documents in his book here, Britain's industrial revolution created a
huge new demand for food in the cities.
People working in factories needed to be fed, and they were often weaving textiles out of
newly imported cotton rather than wool, because consumers generally prefer cotton when they
have a choice.
And so, the obvious choice was to eat the sheep.
The meat of an adult sheep is cheaper because there is more of it compared to a little lamb,
thus references to mutton permeate Victorian era culture; nursery rhymes, literature, righteous
facial hair.
And then shepherds in Britain and the colonies started to develop new breeds of sheep specifically
for meat — breeds that tasted way better and had a lot more lean relative to the fat.
Most of the strong flavors in sheep come from the fat.
We'll get back to that.
But the problem remained that mutton, adult sheep meat, is extremely tough and has to
be cooked low and slow.
Indeed, when I cooked these lamb shanks that I suspect might have been from slightly older
animals, maybe hoggets, they took a half a day in a low oven.
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But anyway, we were talking about the past — the days in Britain when mutton was king.
Good mutton is great, but it's very strong and very tough.
You can get steak-like cuts from a mature sheep, but almost nobody cooks them like steaks
— grilled to medium rare.
Mutton is just too tough for fast cooking.
You have to mince it or slow cook it for hours.
Lamb on the other hand is tender, so it's been a delicacy since biblical times, right?
It's a very inefficient thing to produce, which is why it's still expensive to this
day because lambs are small.
And also, you have not yet gotten several crop of wool out of it before you slaughter
it.
So, it's very resource intensive, which is why it's historically regarded as this special
treat, this special thing for holiday feasts, for example.
But with the rise of industrialization and globalization, all kinds of previously special
treats have become everyday fare for us, right?
And so it is the case with lamb.
When most people in the wealthy West eat sheep nowadays, it's lamb.
And lots of research verifies that lamb has less of those strong flavor compounds we associate
with sheepy taste.
What are those compounds?
Chiefly, they are branched chain fatty acid.
This is one of the early studies on the topic, a 1975 paper by New Zealand government scientists
who were basically trying to figure out how to sell meat to Asia.
They mention a Chinese word, "SOO," that describes an undesirably sweaty aroma of sheep.
And so, they use distillation and gas chromatography and such to try to isolate the SOO compounds
that Chinese consumers apparently hate, which turned out to be 4-methyloctanoic and 4-methylnonanoic
acids; volatile, medium chain fatty acids.
It is thought by scientists that these special-smelling fatty acids are created via metabolic pathways
in the animal associated with rumination.
Sheep eat grass, but not directly.
The indigestible cellulose in grass must first be fermented by bacteria living in the sheep's
multi-chambered stomach, its rumen, and all kinds of interesting flavor compounds result
from the interaction of the grass and the bacteria and the sheep, such as branched chain
fatty acids.
Grass-fed beef often has BCFAs as well, and sometimes you can taste them in the meat.
When I lived in Georgia, I got grass-fed beef from this place called Rocking Chair Ranch
that I heartily recommend.
This beef had what I perceived as a pronounced lamb flavor in the fattier cuts.
That could have also come from this orange peel they used in supplemental feed.
The cattle eat orange oil there.
Regardless, that beef tasted delicious.
Rocking Chair Ranch.
But mainstream beef is generally at least "finished" on grain.
That is, it eats grain almost exclusively or exclusively in the months leading up to
its slaughter.
They do this to fatten the beef, but it also seems to have this effect of diluting those
strong-smelling fatty acids that are in the meat, if they were there at all in the first
place.
And it standardizes the meat, makes it less smelly.
And sheep are sometimes grain finished as well, sometimes to the point where they barely
even taste like sheep.
That's a criticism I have of some American lamb, though certainly there is some amazing
American lamb too.
What exactly do these characteristically sheepy fatty acids smell like?
Well, I can tell you because I happen to have some in a bottle, courtesy of a bloke named
Harry Sherwood.
Harry is a perfumer in the UK who is also pursuing a PhD in philosophy of perception
at University of London, and he sent me a bottle of 4-ethyloctanoic acid.
This stuff is known for its particular low odor threshold.
Humans can detect it at less than two parts per billion.
"I've got it neat here, so I'm going to just...
I don't even have to open this and I get it."
"So when you say yours is neat, does that mean mine is diluted?"
"Yours is diluted to 1%, which is more than enough, given that it occurs at parts per
million in the meat you eat.
So, this is a good dose.
Mine is then 100 times stronger than that."
"Whoa."
"Yep."
"It's sheep."
"It's sheep, it's wool, it's all those things.
But do you get an unwashed hair aspect as well?"
"Yes, I do."
"It's one of the strongest fatty acid components of meat.
And according to the research, from what we've been able to gather; as a lamb ages, the concentration
of this increases in the meat."
And sheep can have varying proportions of these different smell compounds depending
on how they were raised, their sex, how old they were when they were slaughtered, what
breed they were, all that kind of stuff, the forage they ate.
Plus, there's other things in sheep meat that make it taste sheepy, not just the medium
chain fatty acids we've been talking about.
This paper mentions the use of linoleic acid as a feed supplement in the lamb industry.
That's a polyunsaturated fat prone to oxidation.
Here's a resulting oxidation product found in lamb meat that consumers identified as
a "sweet, oily aroma."
Of course, another name for lipid oxidation is rancidity.
Lipid oxidation creates lots of flavors that we like in some context, and we find very
unappealing in others.
It depends on the concentration and potentially what other smells are around it, as is the
case with another compound that is found in lamb meat sometimes, and that is called skatole.
Skatole is thusly named because it is one of the smells of poop, scat. 3-methylindole
is created by the digestion of the amino acid tryptophan, and the research indicates it
is particularly present in sheep that have gotten either naturally high-protein forage
or protein-supplemented feed.
Now, the weird thing is that people have been found to actually like the smell of skatole
and related indoles as long as they're in very low concentration, or if they're in combination
with other certain smells, as in the case of lots of flowers.
These smells are in jasmine, for example.
"They've done brain studies now where they give people jasmine, a jasmine accord, with
and without this foul smelling component, and people prefer it and their brains light
up more in their pleasure centers if it has the foul component in it."
"Yeah."
"Which is very interesting, because you'd think, 'Oh, humans just love...
They just prefer the sweet dainty one.'
But of course, no, we want the real stuff.
And what this molecule signals to our brain is, 'This is a real thing.'
Real things have bad bits in them.
Real fruits have overripe components in them.
Real meats have a slight 4-ethyloctanoic acid lamb component in them."
And sheep meat has some noticeable skatole in it as well; depending on how the sheep
is raised, what it ate, all that kind of stuff.
And all of these weird smells tend to get stronger in the animal as it ages, hence why
mutton stronger than lamb, hence why Americans don't really eat mutton anymore or really
ever.
It's just too strong, and we tend to like food that doesn't taste like anything, at
least White Americans.
Consumption of any sheep meat is just tiny in the United States, even lamb these days,
which is another reason why it's so expensive — it's rare.
This is all do in part to historical factors.
We can talk more another day about the Range Wars in the old American West — wars between
cowboys and shepherds fighting over the same grazing lands.
The cowboys won.
American wool always had to compete with the massive American cotton industry, and what
wool production we had fell off a cliff in the mid-20th century with the introduction
of synthetic fibers.
People generally don't choose wool when they have alternatives.
But there is one place in the U.S. where sheep meat reigns supreme — mutton, no less — adult
sheep.
And that is Western Kentucky.
This is Moonlite Bar-B-Q in Owensboro, Kentucky.
For some reason, mutton evolved as the go-to meat for barbecue around Owensboro.
Nobody here knows why.
They speculate it's a practice descended from Welsh settlers in this area — they definitely
love their sheep in Wales.
Barbecue in the American context, of course, refers to tough fatty meat that has been smoked
for many hours until very soft.
And indeed, that is a delicious treatment of mutton.
The smoke really balances all the other strong flavors.
So, maybe sheep is my favorite meat.
I suppose it depends on the sheep.