As I mentioned in my earlier posts this week, Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating egg and lamb. So it was a given that the main course for our Easter dinner would be lamb. To make it even more appropriate for Easter, the sauce of this lamb dish is made with an egg yolk. Abbacchio Brodettato is a lamb dish from Lazio, the region around Rome. Abbacchio is suckling lamb, but any young lamb will do to make this dish. This dish has a very original taste, as lamb is not often combined with prosciutto, lemon, and egg yolk. It works very well and the lamb is very tender. It is almost like eating white meat, and therefore it can be no surprise that a full-bodied oaked white wine is a better pairing for this than red wine.

As the lamb is stewed, I couldn’t resist preparing it sous-vide. You could of course also prepare this on the stove, just make sure you use very low heat to prevent the lamb from drying out.

Ingredients

For 4 servings

600 grams (1.3 lbs) lamb shoulder, in cubes

50 grams (2 oz) prosciutto, thinly sliced and roughly chopped

2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1/2 Tbsp flour

125 ml (1/2 cup) dry white wine

1 small onion, chopped

1 Tbsp chopped fresh flatleaf parsley

1 egg yolk

juice and grated zest of 1/2 lemon

pinch of dried oregano or marjoram

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation

Dry the meat with paper towels and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and sauté the onion and prosciutto until the onion is translucent.

Add the lamb and brown quickly on all sides over high heat.

Lower the heat and add the flour. Stir to mix.

Add the white wine.

Bring to a boil and then lower the heat. If cooking traditionally, lower the heat to very low, cover and simmer until the meat is tender (about one hour).

If cooking sous-vide, transfer the contents of the pan to a zip-loc sous-vide pouch and seal it with as little air as possible using the water deplacement method. Cook sous-vide for 24 hours at 57C/135F.

After cooking sous-vide (I neglected to take a picture, sorry), transfer the contents of the pan back to the pouch. If you’d like to concentrate the sauce, start with the liquid only, cook it over high heat, stirring, until it has reached the desired thickness, and then add the meat.

Combine the egg yolk, the lemon juice, grated lemon zest, the parsley, and the oregano in a small bowl.

Stir with a fork until well mixed.

Lower the heat and add this mixture to the meat.

Stir and cook over low heat for 1 minute.

Serve immediately on warm plates.

Wine pairing

Like I already mentioned in the introduction, this pairs best with a full bodied white. We enjoyed it with a Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Riserva, partly aged in new oak barriques.