Lamb Shanks Roasted "al la Matignon" with Chef Thomas Keller

Hello everybody and welcome to Williams-Sonoma here in San Francisco for our first ever, I think, webcast out of this beautiful kitchen. First of all, I want to introduce you to Devin Nell, our Chef de Cuisine at the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group who's been with me for quite a while and who's helped me with many recipes and has put together this one for us and I think you're going to be very excited. I also want to acknowledge Amanda Haas, our Chef de Cuisine here at Williams-Sonoma for all of her help and support through this process and again, welcome. So thank you for coming and thank you for joining us. Before we get started, I want to talk about the way I view cooking and it's very simple. It's a very simple equation. It has two parts. The first part is about ingredients. Now certainly you see some ingredients here and the ingredients are really, really, really important and they're part of the responsibility that we have in sourcing and chefs really spend a lot of time sourcing high quality ingredients. It's what makes us special. It's what makes us have the ability to give our guests and give you an extraordinary experience at our restaurant. So we're always sourcing ingredients and with that, we have a great relationship with our farmers, our fishermen, our gardeners, and our foragers. Those individuals who commit their lives to bringing us these ingredients. In fact, we have one here right now because we're going to do a wonderful recipe for you. It's lamb shank from Elysian Fields Farm, I'm sorry, from Purebred, which is part of Elysian Fields Farm in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania and we're going to cook it a la matignon and we're going to serve it with ratatouille, yellow corn, ants and mills polenta, and a beautiful sauce. So I want to introduce you all to a great friend of mine and a wonderful man, Mr. Keith Martin. Oh, Chef Thomas, thank you very much. Chef Devin, I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. Thank you very much. It's good to have you. At Elysian Fields, we think more holistically in our approach. We really like to focus on the animal and really the focus needs to shift away from consumerism to the animal. We agree. You know, it's as I said, it's all about our ingredients, making sure that we have those extraordinary ingredients and being able to support individuals like you. So again, really, I commend you for your efforts and for your commitment to bringing us these extraordinary animals that we use every day and we don't ever take them for granted. The other part of an equation is the equation we talk about ingredients and we need to really talk about our execution. Now, execution has a lot of, you know, several, I shouldn't say a lot of things, but several things involved in execution. One of them is skills. Devin has great skills. I have skills that sometimes border on his, but he's an extraordinary chef. Amanda has a certain level of skills. All of you have certain levels of skills. So I would encourage you, certainly today, hopefully you'll learn a couple things and if you can take a couple things away from anything, then you're way ahead of the game. But we want to encourage you to continue to work on your skills, whether that's your knife skills, your roasting skills, just your ability to organize and do mise en place or, you know, get everything ready so that when you do start a recipe, you can finish it without being distracted by having to go to the refrigerator or go to the store to get something that you forgot. Execution also has to do with our tools, you know, a great cutting board, a wonderful sharp knife or a wonderful set of sharp knives, some spoons, things like this, which we need to be able to cook. And then, of course, our equipment and many of those things are our ovens, making sure that our ovens are calibrated successfully. We talked about that earlier today, making sure that these ovens were calibrated successfully. Talk to us a little bit about calibration, Devin. I mean, really, the concept of calibration is very simple. Just because the dial says that your oven is 350 degrees does not necessarily mean that it's 350 degrees. So, you know, if your oven's too hot, you're going to cook too fast, you might go too far. If it's too slow, you might not achieve the same results. So, really, the best thing you can do is purchase a small, inexpensive rack-mounted thermometer. A little thermometer that hangs with your oven, right? Yeah, so, I mean, really, in terms of calibrating your oven, you can either have that professionally done or you just learn where your oven is at certain times and cook from what your temperature is actually reading, not what the dial says, because that will affect, ultimately, the cooking time. In this recipe, yeah, I believe we specified three and a half hours, but that may be longer or less. Depending on the calibration of it, but also depending on the size of the lamb. In this case, the size of the lamb or whatever you're cooking, we're using, what, about a pound and a quarter lamb shank? These are pound and a quarter lamb shanks. Right, right, so if it's heavier, if it's a pound and a half, you know, it may take a little longer. If they're a pound, they may take a little less time, but always making sure that you have your equipment. And then, of course, we're going to talk about, you know, our all-clad cookware here, and I am so proud to be associated with this company. Number one, I believe they make the best cookware in America, and number two, they're made in America, so I'm extremely proud of that. Today, you know, and when we talk about all-clad cookware, we talk about three, I think, three specific things for me is recovery, how fast the pan reheats after you add something, conductivity and distribution of heat, how the pan distributes the heat and how it conducts the heat to bring it up to a very even distribution, and then, of course, shape and size. And this is a very interesting pan. This is the all-clad essential pan. Correct. And you have articulated so well the quality of the shape as it relates to this recipe. I think this pan is great for many reasons. I think it's really versatile, but in this application, what it really does is it helps distribute the moisture, because we're not adding a tremendous amount of moisture in comparison to like a traditional braise. So what we want to do is create steam and break down the vegetables, break down the lamb, and have that steam circulate. So if you can see the shape of the pan, the steam is going to come out to the side and condense on the top and then actually baste the meat as it's cooking and maintain that moisture. So it's a great pan for a lot of things, but especially this application. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and saute or roast or pan roast this lamb shank. Devin's going to season it with some salt. So we're using kosher salt, really because it's easy to distribute evenly. It's kind of a coarse grind that allows you to pick it up and rain the salt down. We love it when the salt rains down. We don't ever want to season like this, right, because it's not distributed evenly. The higher you go, the more the natural gravity distributes the salt as it falls through the air. So we want to make sure that we understand that distribution is very, very important. Even distribution is very, very important. Typically, you would see in any recipes, as well as in some of my older cookbooks, where we talk about seasoning it with salt and pepper. Well, I just want to enlighten you and give you a little bit of information on that, because I've kind of changed my philosophy on seasoning. So it's not necessarily about salt and pepper. Salt enhances flavor. We all know that salt will bring out the quality of the ingredient in the flavor. So we know when we say something tastes bland, why is it tasting bland? Well, it's tasting bland because it doesn't have enough seasoning, doesn't have salt in it. Of course, if it's over salted, it tastes like salt. We don't want to do that. We want to add enough salt to bring out the flavor. Pepper, on the other hand, adds flavor. So pepper has its own flavor, and it's adding flavor. And if we put pepper on there now, of course, we're adding it to this hot oil, the pepper also may scorch and burn, adding a different flavor to it, which we don't really like. So we're not going to use pepper anymore in the beginning of the seasoning process. We're going to use it at the end more as a condiment to add the flavor of afterwards. So we're going to set that pepper aside. You can see here we've heated up our oil, and we've got it quite hot. You can see a little smoke. It starts to shimmer on top. That's about where we want it to be. The tempering of the lamb. Yes, so the lamb is tempered. And really what that entails is just pulling the lamb out of, or any meat, any meat, fish, any type of protein out of the refrigerator at least a half an hour or longer before you cook it. And that eliminates like a cold core. So you're going to get a very even heating distribution when you cook it. When you add it to your pan, you're not going to cool the oil off, and you're just going to have a much better cooking process. I think it's important to note too, we added quite a bit of oil here, and that's not going to be retained in the food. So a lot of people are worried about using a large quantity of oil when they sear because they're conscientious about the fat content of the food. This oil is serving its purpose only really to brown the lamb, and after the process is over, we're going to discard it. So I think it's going to help create an even browning just by filling in all the voids and imperfections of the surface. All right, so if you don't know how much oil to add, err on the side of too much oil as opposed to not enough oil, okay? Okay, so we're going ahead and do that. Let's talk about the process of matignon, and what matignon means, and how we get to that point, and really what's the purpose of these beautiful vegetables that we have cut up here. Sure, so matignon is basically a bed of vegetables that meat, fish, or any other product is cooked in. And what we've chosen today to use are leeks, carrots, and onions. We selected these because they contribute a sweetness to the overall dish, they're aromatic, and they release a lot of moisture. So oftentimes like a traditional pot roast, we would have like large chunks of vegetables that are designed to cook slowly with this. What we want here is we want these vegetables, we cut these about three-eighths of an inch roughly. I mean, it doesn't have to look beautiful, but they're small size, and what we want that to do is to expose more surface area of the vegetables, release more aroma, more flavor, and more liquid. So that's going to become our cooking liquid. Right, and so we're doing a lamb shank matignon here. What else is it good for? I mean, you know, we talked about that again, you know, being able to roast a la matignon as well. In other words, not cover something up. A chicken, for example, may be a good way to roast a matignon. I mean, really anything you can cook, it's a different way of approaching cooking. Obviously, other braised cuts like short ribs, lamb shoulder would be great. You could do spare ribs like this. You know, it would all work, but even something that's really delicate and, you know, that needs a lot of moisture, such as like a piece of halibut. Halibut's a very lean, white flesh fish. If we put a piece of halibut in the oven, it's just got dry air circulating around it. It's going to dry the fish up itself. If we did halibut, we're surrounding it with the moisture of the vegetables, and we're maintaining that moisture of the fish itself. I mean, obviously the cooking time is going to be different, but we, you know, it certainly can apply to almost anything. And then one of the things that we also we can suggest is after you cook with the matignon, you know, we are going to discard the vegetables in this case, but, you know, I can recommend that you could use it, you could use it as actually part of the dish. They're really going to be beautiful vegetables. They've absorbed, they've not only given a lot of flavor, but they've absorbed a lot of flavor as well. So they can become part of the dish. You could have almost a one pot dish if you want. Other things we've done with that is we've pureed it to make a soup. We've made a bolognese sauce with it, pasta farts with it, and there's so many different elements that you can do. So, you know, think about that as you're starting to learn how to cook is being able to extend the quality of your recipe beyond that specific recipe there. So you can see here we've gotten some really wonderful color on our lamb shank here. Okay, so it's almost done. We're going to take it out of the fat here right now. You'll be very careful, of course. So I think we have time for a question. So let's look at some questions from our Twitter feed. What is the difference between a stew and a matignon? Well, a stew is going to have much more liquid in it. So you're going to add enough liquid into the ingredients that they're actually going to stew. They're going to be totally encased in liquid, almost like a braise. But a stew is going to be something that's done on top of the oven when a braise is something that's done in the oven. So hopefully that helps you understand the difference between a typical stew and a matignon. Okay, so now we're going to begin the process of building our sauce or building our flavor profiles here. So we're going to drain off some of our oil here, right? And some of that salt, that was excess salt that was on there as well, will go away with it. So we're eliminating some of the salt that was excess on there as well. Okay, let me check. You can see how much salt we have left over out of that. So not all the salt is going into the recipe. Then we're going to deglaze it here with some water. Okay, get some of that nice, the meat juices that were trapped on the bottom of the pan, we want to be able to get those off. Start that building of the flavor. You know, I always, I always think of myself as a, almost as a, as a carpenter. You know, we, carpenters build walls, and you see when, when you're looking at a wall, we always see the beautiful wall as it, as it looks from the exterior. But behind it, there are many different elements that help support that wall. So when you're building your sauce, we're doing the same thing. We're adding different ingredients, whether they're liquids or vegetables or aromats or spices, to, to the sauce to build the flavor profile without even recognizing necessarily any one of those ingredients. And it's a very important thing to think about. I think that's a great point, because if you just read a recipe and add all the ingredients to the pot, you're going to get a very different quality of finished product than if you take the time to, to really add the detailed techniques. I think the best, the thing about this recipe is really not the recipe itself, but it's a technique of building flavor with really humble ingredients. You have a piece of meat and some really, you know, nice vegetables, and, and that's really about it. And you can make a lot of, a lot of flavor with, with, without a million different spices or, or, you know, ingredients. Right, right. We talk about spices. If you do, if you like spices, I mean, you can make this, you can add curry to this, you can add paprika to this, you could add chili powder. I mean, you can have almost anything you want to, to increase or to extend flavor profile. So don't always just think about it as the recipe that we're giving you today. Think about how you can make it your own recipe using some of these techniques, which I think is the most important thing. So not only do we have our matignon, we're going to add a bouquet garni, which is traditional. It's got parsley stems, some thyme, and, and bay leaf, and then a few pieces of crushed garlic. Again, if you don't like garlic, don't use garlic. If you don't like thyme, maybe you want to substitute it with, with rosemary or something. Yeah, I mean, anything. Lemongrass, you can make it anything you want. Exactly. That would, actually, lemongrass sounds really good. Yeah, sounds really good. So we're going to continue this. We're going to add now, we're going to add our, our vegetables. Okay. And you can see how high that is right now. We're going to cook this down. And of course, it's going to reduce or diminish in, in volume because a lot of the water that's in the vegetables is actually now going to release. And part of the way to get the water to release from the vegetables is again, adding salt. So we're going to add a little bit of salt to that. Now, when you put salt on a tomato, for example, you know, you see all the moisture comes to the top or, or eggplant, you know, the, the, the, the, the technique to remove some of that bitterness from the eggplant is by taking the water out of the eggplant, which is actually what causes it to be bitter. So I think we can take another question from our, from our Twitter feed. If we have one, this is a good time as we're cooking down our vegetables here. Any tips or shortcuts you can make at home if you're crunched for time? I think, I think this is actually a perfect question. Exactly. I mean, obviously we're ready for this one, but I mean, if you really think about we're cooking pretty much in real time here, for the most part, with the exception of the cooking time. So getting this ready up to this point really took us, I think, 15 minutes now at the most, what you, what this is great about this recipe is it can be stopped halfway. And so it's something when you do have the time, maybe at the end of the night, you know, you come home from work, you can go to this point, put this in the oven and let it cook for, you know, the required amount of time to make it tender, and then just put it in the refrigerator. And then the next day, all you really need to do is heat it up and continue. And it's probably another half an hour, you know, or so from there. So, I mean, I think that you, you obviously can't cook this more quickly, you know, in a conventional means, but, but I think if, if you organize your time, it's very, very doable. Right. You know, again, it's called mise en place in planning. One of the things that I love about dishes like this is that the transformation, you know, you're transforming a cut of meat that you can't cook quickly. In other words, I mean, a steak, a filet of fish, anything like that, you can take a, you can take a steak home and cook it in seven minutes, basically going to be done. But you know what you're going to have, and the quality, the quality of the ingredient is certainly paramount there. I mean, if you're going to have, if you want to have a great experience with a steak, then you've got to, you know, spend the money to get a really great steak. Lamb shanks, on the other hand, you know, again, quality of ingredients are paramount, but it's the transformation through the process that, that's so important, because if you don't take, use the right technique, take the right amount of time, you're not going to have what we want to, what we want to be able to, we want you to be able to have, which is a really wonderful experience, not only in the cooking process, because for me, that, that's one of the meaningful things is to be able to transform something like this into something that is so good through the, the different sounds that you have when you're cooking food like this, the different aromas, and already we're smelling all these different aromas in the kitchen from the different items we're cooking. The vegetables now, you know, are taking on, you know, that beautiful sauteed vegetable quality, but I can also start to smell the thyme in here as it cooks and starts to envelop the kitchen in that, in that beautiful aroma. So transformation of ingredients like this is so satisfying and gratifying for me. And it goes from being bitter and pungent to being sweet. Right. You know, so if, again, like if you just kind of threw all the ingredients in there and went, went in the oven, you didn't take the time to create that sweetness, something, something's been compromised in your recipe. So that, that wouldn't be an area where I would take the time, but, you know, maybe just organizing, you know, organizing your time around this recipe really is beneficial. Yeah. But it's the transformation of these ingredients, which I think is so important. So, you know, do this a day ahead, do this two days ahead. This is a dish that, you know, you could do on, on a Saturday or Sunday, or you can certainly eat it that night, but you can also eat it on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. You can, you could, you could cook six shanks, for example, if you wanted to, and eat two or three that night and then turn the rest into, you know, into a beautiful ragu. You can turn it into tacos. You can turn it into a lasagna. I mean, you can turn it into so many different things. You can make sandwiches out of it. I mean, it just, the opportunities for you are endless in a dish like this. So don't be afraid to spend the time, because what's going to happen once you spend the time is the versatility of the, and the quality of the, the food that you've cooked is going to be so gratifying. Okay, so anything else on that, Devin, you can add? Uh, no, I think you hit, hit, uh. So we're going to do now here, we're going to add some red wine. Okay, go ahead. You want to pour that in there? Um, and again, you know, if you don't like wine in your food, then of course, don't use wine. Um, you can use chicken stock, fruit juice, I mean, almost anything you want. Um, we, we like the wine for a couple of different reasons. It helps enrich the, the color and helps enrich the flavor. We like that, but again, you know, this is your recipe. This can be your recipe if you just modify it in specific ways. Now, the thing about, about any alcohol, uh, and certainly wine falls into that category, is we want to be able to cook off the alcohol before we continue with the recipe. So cooking off the alcohol is nothing more than just letting it simmer, letting it, letting it cook. And the way you can tell, um, number one, you know, you, you want to be able to experience what alcohol feels like, uh, on your, in your nasal passage. So what you want to do, um, to experience that is you just stick your head in and you take a, you inhale it and, and the alcohol is going to burn, the raw alcohol that's in there is going to burn my, my, my nostrils right up in here. Uh, so I know there's still alcohol in there, so I need to continue to cook it until when I do, I don't feel the, the burn of the raw alcohol anymore, but I smell the sweetness of the wine. So we're gonna let that cook probably for about three or four minutes in order for that alcohol to evaporate. That alcohol will be the first thing that evaporates. Alcohol is a very volatile liquid, so it's going to be the first thing that evaporates off this wine. And we don't, we want to make sure that it's all gone before we continue with the process. Because once we cover this and we trap it, you know, and as Devin was explaining earlier, the, the process of, of the cooking and, and, and the steam and the steam basting the, the lamb shanks again, if that alcohol is in there, it's not going to go away. And alcohol will dry meat too. I mean, it's probably not as much of a problem here, but it does dry, dry meat out. Okay. So we have another question from our, from our Twitter friends. When do you use the flour to help sear the protein? I mean, you can, you can always use flour. You can elect not to. It's more of a, it's more of a older style of cooking, but really if I were, if I were to use flour, I would have applied the flour at the very last minute prior to searing. You just want a really light coating. So what I would do if I were to use flour on that shank is I would have seasoned it and then immediately dredged it in flour and shaked off the excess. So it's just a very, very thin coating. If you do it too far in advance, that salt is going to pull moisture from the meat and you're going to get more, almost like a fried chicken batter for, for lack of a better description, like a very thick coating that's going to flake off into sheets. And it's instead of thickening your sauce somewhat and taking on, just give it like a nice nutty roasted flour flavor, you're going to, you're going to wind up having like little bits and sheets of flour that's been braised in your, in your sauce. And remember, flour is a hydrocollide. Oh, it's a hydrocollide. What the hell is that? A hydrocollide is an ingredient that binds water together. So it makes water thick, right? So, you know, it's a new term that we've used a lot lately in, in our, in modern kitchens. They have all different kinds of hydrocollides, things like xantham, xantham gum, carrageena, gelan, things like this. But flour is also a hydrocollide. In other words, it makes water thick. And so in the old days, when they would do a lamb, a ragu d'agneau or a lamb stew, we would always coat the pieces of lamb in flour as we sautéed them. Then we would add the liquid. So what would happen is the flour that was on the lamb would begin to bind the water, begin to make the stew, if you will. So, so flour in that process was a thickening agent, not necessarily a process of being able to brown the meat, because we can brown, brown, we can, we can color the meat without adding flour. But if we added flour, it would help with thickening this. Okay. Another thing that we thought that we talked about earlier too, is, is if you wanted to serve the vegetables with this dish, but you wanted to have a starch, so you had starch, you know, you had vegetables and starch, you could put pieces of potato in here. And the fact that adding potatoes would do, would do what? It would thicken it, you'd liberate the starch from the potatoes and thicken it. Right, right. So it'd be a more modern and light approach. Exactly. Because it's potato starch, you know, much like corn starch or rice flour, things like that, modified starches. Okay. Are we ready to add the lamb back? We are. We are. Okay. So we're gonna add it, we're gonna, now we're gonna nestle our lamb shanks in there. Okay. You can see how, how beautiful I smelled it. Is there any, is there any, stick your head in there. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. You can't really, you, you have to trust us on this, please. Because we've nestled our lamb there. Okay. We're gonna go ahead and cover it. So I think when you, when you cover it, it's important to... It's important to clean the lid. Yeah. It's important to get that steam generating. So, I mean, obviously your lamb's cooler, so it's gonna, it's gonna slow the cooking down a little bit. So we want to reinvigorate the heat, get it going before we go into the oven. Right. Now as this continues to cook, the vegetables are gonna give up more of their liquid. They're become more compressed and the lamb will really be then enveloped in the liquid. Shall we go in the oven? All right. Okay. We got through that part. I think we did okay, didn't we? Thank you. Made it. Okay. So now we're gonna go in, in, in TV time or in webcast time. We're gonna, we're gonna fast forward to the lamb shanks that we've been cooking here for about three and a half hours. Yeah. Right. It should be about three hours. Yeah. And we're gonna get our, we're gonna get it ready here with, to do, I'm sorry, Seth. We're gonna get ready here to do our sauce. Okay. So again, one of the things that we want, we want to really emphasize here is the resting. We talked about that a little bit earlier. I'm going to re-emphasize that you want to let the lamb rest for as long as possible. You know, is a half an hour enough? Well, if half hour is all you have, then it's enough. But you know, the longer that it has an opportunity, the meat has an opportunity to reabsorb the liquid, the more moist and succulent that lamb is going to be. Or any, any, any protein. I mean, if you did a braise, I'm sorry, if you did a classic braise as well, you know, you'd want to let that do the same thing. Exactly. And I think like a lot of times people, I mean, somebody asked me this the other day. He's not, he was not a cook, but he was a home chef and was wondering why his braised dishes would come out dry. And he was stating that he'd follow a recipe and this and that. And I think that could really most likely be attributed to just as soon as it's come, you know, come out of the oven, we're going to eat it. It's like, it's like eating a steak immediately off the grill. If you don't let it rest, it's going to be dry. So I mean, it applies to braising. Right, right. It's more important than braising. I mean, resting all your, your proteins is important, but in a braise or in a matinol in a situation like this, where you have that moisture, you really want to, you really want to let it rest. And if, and going back to the original earlier question was, if you wanted to stop, you know, and continue on the next day, this is the perfect point to just stop, let it cool down a little bit and then put it in your refrigerator. You can even leave it in the pan if you have the space. So it's, it's good to go. What do you think? I think it looks great. What are we doing now? Oh, I think we're taking the lamb out of here. We're going to make our sauce. Right. So you can see, right. You know, it's very important. You can see all that fat on the top. Right. And I, we're not worried about that. No. Number one, it's, it's comes from the fat that was excess fat that we had in our pan, which wasn't much, but most of this fat's coming from the lamb. So again, a lot of, a lot of flavor there. So the longer you let this sit and rest in the liquid, the better off you're going to have, because it's not only going to absorb some of the liquid, some of the fat's going to get reabsorbed as well. So that's very important. Okay. So beautiful, beautiful lamb shanks. So, I mean, if you look at the pan, you can see the level of the liquid is the same level of, of what the vegetables were, except the vegetables, I mean, have greatly diminished. And so it really, now it's, it's almost all, I mean, I would say it's reduced by at least half in terms of its original volume. It's hot. Yeah. We didn't let it rest. We didn't let it rest. No rest for the wicked. Come on, come on. Okay. Ah, there you go. Thank you, chef. See, even I struggle sometimes. It's so tender. So it's, it's melt in your mouth. You can, you can tell. And I think that's actually something we should hit on, um, is we were talking earlier about just because the timer went off and, and the recipe says it's done, it doesn't mean it's done. So we really need to be able to do is, is check to make sure that's tender. So this should actually be done before you let it rest. When we come out of the oven, we want to take something like a simple paring knife or a, you know, a cake tester. It's good. It's really good. Um, and, uh, we, we want to, we want to pierce it gently with a knife and the knife should just offer, or the meat should offer very little resistance to the knife. So it should just be able to go in without you having to push it without feeling any resilience. Um, and, and if, if it does resist, we just, we already just put the oven or the lid on right back in the oven. And a great way to practice this. So you know what it feels like is buy a baked potato, take your, take your, your, your, your, your, your pairing knife or your cake tester, whatever you're using and put it through the raw potato. You're going to feel resistance because it's raw. Uh, start baking the potato, bake it for a half an hour, and then feel the resistance. You'll still have some resistance as you go through, because it's not cooked all the way through. And then finally, after the hour or whatever it takes to cook the baked potato, when it's totally done, stick your knife through it. No resistance. That, that gives you a good indication and a good way to practice what that resistance feels like. Okay. This is wonderful. And, and I, you know, and, and I have some of the liquid on my fingers and they're sticking together because of the gelatin that's come out of the bones and the meat. So, so beautifully. So, yeah, so we're gonna go ahead and, and, uh, and strain this now. Okay. So we can start our sauce process. Now we want to be careful. So we're first going through a coarse strainer because we have a coarser, uh, you know, volume of vegetables here. And that's just going to be much more efficient than trying to go through something really fine. Right. Immediately. The larger the ingredient that's in the liquid that you're straining, the larger the hole, the strainer. Okay. And then we're going to go through a really fine hole strainer. Now I want to, I want to point out something that's really, um, some of you may not realize it, but you saw me pour all this liquid from this pot through the strainer. Now, one of the qualities of the all clad or this copper core is the rolled edge, which allows me to pour evenly and have it, and have it stream out without spilling over the edge. A straight edge pot is going to be impossible to pour out. It's going to dribble down and pour off the bottom. Right. Yeah. That's a great, just something to think about. Um, here we have a little, we're going to show you this clever, this clever little contraption here. Um, what's it called? A degreaser? Gravy separator. A gravy separator. What's it called? A gravy separator. Um, okay. So it's a gravy separator. We love gravy separators, although we don't use them. But, um, in this case we are going to try it and they work really rather well. I think I remember my mother had one of these and what happens to it is when you add your liquid or your stock, um, all of the fat, uh, in a few minutes, all the fat will rise to the top. And then of course the spigot that's on the bottom or the spout on the bottom, we'd be able to pour it off and you'd be able to have, uh, all of your stock and or your, your base for your gravy or your sauce be separated from the fat. So it's really a wonderful way in a, in a restaurant. We wouldn't actually do it this way because our volumes are much larger. We'd have a little different approach to it, but nonetheless, it works really, really well. So in the meantime, we can do with this, we can cover it, right? Just to keep it warm in the oven. Um, I think it should also be noted too, um, like another level of detail that you can add to your repertoire that, that will improve your, maybe just keep it covered. Yeah. That, that can improve your cooking. Um, you know, in, in terms of refinement and people, people really notice it is, is by investing, you know, what, 10, $15 in a small fine mesh strainer. So we're removing all the particles from that sauce. So instead of having kind of a, like a, a sauce that has a lot of fibers and, and particles in it, you're gonna have a very crystal clear, smooth, uh, silky sauce. Beautiful. Beautiful sauce. I think at home, at home, at home, you may want to put this in the oven so that you can finish your sauce. But since we've already done a sauce ahead of time and reduced it for just for time considerations, we'll just leave it here. So you can see how it's already begun to separate. Clever. We love it. Uh, it even has all different kinds of measurements on the side of it, but anyway, enough about that. So we've got, um, we've got our ratatouille up, that's our polenta. We've got our ratatouille here. Okay. We've got our polenta here. We've got our beautiful lamb there. We've got our beautiful sauce. Okay. So we've got our three components that we want to do now. Again, you know, you can serve this with anything you want. Um, we've just made some recommendations here cause I love this time of year with the, with the ratatouille that we have. Polenta is always something that I find very, very, very, very fulfilling and, and elegant. There we go. Uh, and our sauce, of course, um, which we've already reduced and you can get a sense of the color of it. Oh, there we go. And I don't know if you can see the dark, the darkness of it, but this sauce comes from that there. Okay. And I wish you were here to smell these aromas, but you're not. So what can I say? Um, I don't know. Is Keith still with us? Is Keith still with us? No. Okay. Sorry. Uh, do we have time for another question? I think we have another question just to clarify what is the desired oven temperature? Okay. Devin, you want to, do you want to get that one? We selected 275 degrees because it's, it's probably really the lowest effective temperature. I think for something like this, that, that would produce these results in a reasonable amount of time. Um, I think the crucial part with that temperature is really making sure that you bring this up to a boil or simmer before you place it in the oven, or else you're going to have that much more lag time alone in the oven. Um, you know, so, so, I mean, I didn't really, you don't want to go, you don't want to go too hard. You don't want to boil it. You don't want to boil it. So, you know, at a low simmer, 275 is really where we're going to be simmering in the oven. So I think that's a really good temperature to have it at. Okay. Um, remember cooking is all about time and temperature. So the lower the temperature, the longer you can cook it at 250, it's just going to take you, you know, X number of hours longer. Right. Um, so in our sauce here, I just want to, again, bring up something that, that I think will, will be, will be interesting for you to learn today is about, again, about seasoning because seasoning is so important when we talk about the quality of the flavors of our food. Okay. We So use, the use of salt is critical. Um, but there's another element, uh, another ingredient that also does the same thing salt does, which is enhance the flavor. And that is acid, acid. So acid in the form of, of, uh, fruit juice or, uh, citrus, you know, lemon, lime, grapefruit, orange, all have acid and all great enhancers. You see those in vinaigrettes now. You see those in different ways, use different ways in different cultures to, to add acid, acid, acid to the, to their ingredients. Ceviche is, is probably one of the most famous ways of, of, of using acid from citrus to, to really season and cure their fish. This time we're gonna use a little bit of vinegar. Uh, vinegar will also, you know, it has the acid, will enhance the flavor. And we'd like to use vinegar in areas where there's a lot of liquid. So we don't, we can reduce the amount of salt, um, by a certain amount, we'll put salt and vinegar, uh, in the, in the, in the sauce here to enhance the flavor. So just a couple of drops. If you taste the vinegar and it's not a vinegar sauce, but obviously you've added too much vinegar. We just want to, we want to make the sauce, um, taste more, um, more of the lamb. I think, I think one thing too, that we should, we should try to discuss. Sweet, sweet. That's, it's a really sweet sauce. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no. It's a really sweet sauce because of all the vegetables that we use. We think about onions, a lot of, a lot of natural sugar in onion. You think about carrots, a lot of natural sugar in carrots. You think about leeks, again, it's an onion, so there's a lot of sugar in it. So this is relatively a very, um, a really sweet sauce that has that intense flavor of the vinegar. Is that vinegar? No, did I say vinegar? The lamb. Lamb. Sorry. So, but here we're going to add a couple drops of vinegar and a little bit of salt. And then I always like, you know, I always like to finish my sauce a little bit better, but you were going to say something. I think, uh, one thing to be, to help clarify and it will help people at home is you see that we started off with a very thin liquid and we, we've, we've determined that this is, is ready to be finished sauce. Um, and the way that we, we've determined that is by, by tasting, um, rather than relying on, uh, viscosity alone. Uh, cause oftentimes if you go to, to what you perceive to be the best viscosity, it's going either salty or have an overly concentrated flavor. So yeah, it's not, it's not, it becomes something great to something that's somewhat unpleasant. So really when you think that, that your sauce tastes the best is when you should stop producing it. And if it's too thin, you can, there's nothing wrong with serving a thin sauce, but if you wanted to thicken it, you could just take, you know, corn starch or, or any other sort of, you know, thickening agent, hydrocolloid, uh, to, to, to bring that texture back. So you can have best of both worlds. So it's just something, something to think about. Right. And corn starch, you know, or any modified starch is a quick way to make something thick. You know, the Chinese, the Asians, I should say not just the Chinese, but the Asians have been using corn starch, uh, to thicken things for, for, for, I don't know, the longest time, as long as I can remember, long time. Um, and that's just, that's just a purpose of taking a little bit of cornstarch, mixing it with a little bit of water to make what we call a slurry, uh, and then mixing that a little bit in the, into the sauce. Okay. Or into your liquid. So you have a beautiful ratatouille here. I like this. And polenta can be as creamy or as thick as you like. It's one of those things that's really, it's about a personal, a personal flavor texture. We put a little bit of mascarpone in ours. We like that, but that's our richness. Um, and, uh, and a lot of butter, but you know, what can I say about the butter? Makes it good. Yeah, it makes it good. Look at that. Okay. That looks great. It smells better. And, uh, we like to finish a lot of our proteins with some finishing salt. In this case, we have some gray salt. Um, it comes from, um, from, um, from France. Uh, we like it not only because it enhances the flavors I spoke about already, but also it gives it a little bit of texture, a little bit of that, a little bit of that crunch. And I kind of like that, that crunch of salt between my teeth. Um, do you think we want pepper? I think, I think now's an appropriate time to add pepper. Now's the appropriate time to add pepper. Now would be the appropriate time to add olive oil as well. If you want to use olive oil, um, it'd be the appropriate time to add the olive oil as well. If you want us to drizzle a bit of olive oil on top. Um, there we go. Our, uh, our lamb shank, our purebred lamb shank a la matignon with ratatouille, polenta, and a beautiful sauce. Uh, I think we have time for another question. So, um, while I stuff my mouth here, maybe you want to ask the question. There you go. I mean, yeah, that's a great question because, uh, why bundle the herbs, uh, if we're going to remove them? Uh, it, it really, that's a, that's a really great question. Uh, if you're, if you're not planning on reusing the vegetables, then there really isn't much, much point in it. I mean, it, it says it's an extra step. Um, I would say possibly you could gain benefit if you bundle them tightly that they're going to release their flavor and aroma more, more slowly, but that's probably not really that big of a factor. One of the, one of the things that we talk about in our kitchens is, is habits, is creating really, really good habits. Um, so even though we may not always, um, have to bundle the herbs, there are those occasions where you need to, uh, you know, if we did a, if we did a bouquet garni in the ratatouille, which we did, um, if we would let those herbs separate, we'd be picking them out one by one, which would be a really a pain actually. Um, so we always, we, we, we encourage, um, our team, certainly the younger chefs as they're coming into our restaurant, uh, to follow good practice and good practice is always creating a bouquet garni or bundling your herbs. And you're elevating your, your, you're elevating your repertoire of skills as well. Exactly. Okay. How is it? Needs more salt. I say that in jest because we have such a high tolerance to salt that we always want a little more salt. Anyway, I think there you have it. We've had a great time. Oh, excuse me. We've had a great time sharing, uh, this technique with you. We hope that you've gained as much out of this as, as, um, as we, as we aspired for you. And, uh, at least, at least the one thing that you can grab from this, uh, would be, would be a great success for us. So thanks for joining us. Um, have a good afternoon. Thank you.