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A real Aussie staple is a rack of lamb.
It's such a delicious thing and I love cooking it.
I wanna show you how to trim a rack of lamb
and even take it to the next step
of Frenching it, or French trimming the rack of lamb,
which is what you quite often find in a restaurant.
Let me show you how you do it.
You start off with a rack of lamb,
and you see all the bones down this side of the rack, OK?
On the other side, you'll find a cap of fat
and sometimes little pieces of meat.
Most of the times you'll find, in a meat section,
the butcher has gone along
and just removed that little piece of meat, OK,
exposing the bone.
So if I continue to do that all the way down...
..now we have a rack that you probably recognise,
where the bones are exposed.
Now, what usually happens is
you get it like that and you cook it like that
and the bones kind of go a little bit funky.
And I'll show you what I mean.
What I wanna do is trim them right down.
So you can put your knife into the rack of lamb
and cut right along the bones...
..removing any excess fat or pieces of meat.
Now, to even that up you can just go ahead
and cut through it
and create sort of an imaginary line
that you can then work from.
The next thing you do is turn it over
and using the heel of your knife,
you scrape all of that fat and little pieces of meat away.
Now, a good way to do this
is to get yourself an old tea towel
and you literally just grab hold of that piece of meat there
that's on the bone and you pull it away.
And then you end up with a really nice, clean bone,
which means when it cooks, it's gonna actually be something nice
that you can hold onto and eat from.
The good news is when you come into Coles,
we actually sell these already Frenched, right?
So the butcher does a lot of the hard work for you.
You end up with a rack that looks like that.
So see these beautiful clean bones?
Now, the way to prep it before you actually cook it...
You get yourself some foil.
And then you fold it in half and just tear it into little pieces.
OK, now the only thing is
that has to be longer than the bone.
But you go through there and you're gonna wrap each individual bone
and then just fold it over at the top so it doesn't go anywhere.
And then that's gonna stay beautiful and clean
as opposed to becoming, you know, blackened and disintegrated.
So there you go - that's one way to prep it.
Now, the next thing that we're gonna do
is just score the fat.
So you see this fat here?
I like to just run a knife over the top like that,
which just allows it to open up as it cooks.
And a lot of that fat is gonna render down.
And that's ready to go in the oven.
Now, the one thing that a lot of you mightn't even realise
is the rack of lamb is actually just a big line-up of cutlets.
Alright? So if you go in...
Go through the bone.
You're cutting these beautiful cutlets.
So you just go straight down and through.
So you can go ahead, slice those up into cutlets,
marinate them, cook them on the barbie.
So many things to do with a rack of lamb.
I'm gonna roast this one. Actually, I'm gonna cheat.
I'm gonna half-French one rack and I'm gonna show you the difference
between a Frenched rack of lamb and a non-Frenched rack of lamb.
So onto my board. That looks OK.
It wasn't cooked in a terribly hot oven, but if it was,
some of these bones would be really charred and really burnt.
But watch what happens when I just remove these little pieces of foil.
Do you see the difference?
Do you see how clean and beautiful these bones look
compared with these ones down here that still have
all those little pieces of lamb left on them, little bits of fat?
So I think it's a really nice way to get that restaurant presentation
when you're trying to elevate your dinner just a little.