Lamb Leg Roulade
Lamb, a very traditional meal at Easter mainly because Christians traditionally eat lamb at Easter and Jews at Passover because of religious aspects.
Lamb is a less than one-year old sheep. It’s very popular in several cuisine of Mediterranean, in Asia where other red meats are forbidden to eat for religious reasons and often prepared in Australia and Ireland also. Most of the countries have their own famous specialty like Turkish kebab, Indian biryani, Scottish haggis, Greek moussaka, Irish stew and the list goes on.
I purchased Irish lamb for my recipe because it’s free-range and naturally fed. For this recipe I bought a boneless lamb leg for roulade and I’ve used my fresh herbs – which are grown on my balcony – to make the marinade. It’s a very simple marinade, garlic, thyme and rosemary are very common herbs for lamb dishes.
One of my favorite kitchen appliances is my Instant Pot with lots of different cooking method. I chose the slow cooker method to braise the lamb first and then I put it into the oven just for some minutes to grill the top. I’ve also added instructions to cook the lamb in the oven, if you don’t have access to an instant pot, the only addition is that you have to add 150ml stock. But before you get to cooking an important part is to marinate your lamb or any meat properly, as you will see from the instruction this recipe calls for marinating overnight, so start a day ahead with this recipe to get the best result. I served this lamb roulade with muhammara, baba ganoush and marinated artichoke.
Lamb Leg Roulade
Equipment
- Instant Pot or Slow Cooker
Ingredients
Meat
- 2 kg boneless lamb leg
Marinade
- 6 tbsp thyme finely cut
- 3 tbsp rosemary finely cut
- 4 cloves garlic crushed
- 50 ml olive oil
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp pepper ground
Braise
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 red onion peeled and cut in half
- 2 bulb garlic cut in half
- 1 small bunch fresh thyme
Roast
- 6 slice bacon
Instructions
Prep & Marinade
- Cut lamb leg for two same size parts in that line where the bone was. Then make it into thin flat piece that makes it easy to roll. Slide the knife along through the meat and open it up. You will get two 1 kg/each almost flat piece of meat.
- Make the marinade. Mix all ingredients in a bowl.
- Rub half of marinade on top of the lamb slices.
- Roll the slice and tie together with cooking string. Repeat it with the other slice.
- Rub the other half of marinade on top of the lamb rolls.
- Put the rolls into a ziploc bag overnight.
- Doesn’t matter which method you choose, remove the marinated lamb from the fridge minimum 1 hour before roasting, it has to be on room temperature.
Instant Pot Method
- Put onion, garlic, bay leaves, and half bunch of thyme into the Instant Pot.
- Place lamb rolls on top of onions and herbs and put the other half bunch of thyme on top of the rolls.
- Cover the Instant Pot and braise the lamb rolls for 6 hours on low adjust.
- Preheat the oven to 250°C on full grill function.
- Take the roulades out from the Instant Pot and place them on a roasting pan.
- Cover their top with bacon slices.
- Put the roulades into oven and grill them about for 4 minutes until bacon is golden brown.
- Take the roulades out from the oven and leave them rest for 10 minutes. You do not have to cover them.
- Remove the strings and slice the roulades.
Oven Method
- Heat the oven 190°C.
- Heat 2 tbsp oil in a large frying pan and brown the roulade. It’s about 2-3 minutes.
- Put onions, garlic bulbs, herbs into a roasting tin, pour stock and place the roulade on the top.
- Cover with a foil.
- Roast it for 1 hour 30 minutes. Turn the roulade half time, because both sides have to be in the gravy.
- Take off the foil and check its internal temperature. It’s 75°C when it’s ready. If it's still under when you check it, put it in for another 10 minutes.
- Cover roulade with bacon slices and roast it on grill function for 3-4 minutes until the bacon is golden brown.
- Rest for 10 minutes.
- Remove the strings and slice the roulade.