Perhaps you are looking for a new dish to cook for your family and friends. Greek food is an ethnic style of cooking that is loved by pretty much everyone. If you are looking for a new cooking challenge, one dish you can certainly try is Greek Leg of Lamb. Just use the following recipe. You will probably want to invite some people over to your home for a dinner party though. This particular recipe will serve eight to ten people.
Ingredients that you will need include olive oil, ten to fifteen cloves of garlic, two tablespoons of freshly ground black pepper, seven whole sprigs of rosemary, one tablespoon of kosher salt, and seven pounds of leg of lamb. The olive oil you use should not be virgin.
The first step is to slice your cloves of garlic into small slivers that should be thinner than a penny. The thinner you can get these slivers, the better. After you have finished, set these garlic slices aside for now.
Secondly, take the rosemary and remove the leaves from two of the rosemary sprigs. Now take the rosemary leaves and finely chop them up. After you have finished dicing, set these aside as well.
Now turn on your oven and preheat it to five hundred degrees. Next, get your leg of lamb. Remove the butcher’s string if there is any.
Take a paring knife and spear the meat, driving the knife about a third of an inch deep. Take one of the pieces of garlic you sliced earlier and insert it into the slit. Push it all the way in. Keep repeating this step, cutting into the meat and inserting slivers of garlic into the top and the sides of the leg of lamb.
Once you are finished inserting the garlic, take the olive oil and add a thin coat of olive oil on to the lamb. Once you are finished coating the lamb, take the salt, crushed black pepper, and finely diced rosemary and sprinkle it over the lamb on both sides.
Now get a roasting pan. Place the sprigs of rosemary you saved earlier and put them in the pan. Place the leg of lamb on top of the sprigs in the pan.
Place the pan with the leg of lamb into the oven you preheated to five hundred degrees. Cook the meat for twenty minutes. After the twenty minutes are up, lower the temperature to three hundred and fifty degrees. Cook it at this temperature for an hour.
If you want most of your lamb medium rare, do not wait an hour and instead finish cooking when the internal temperature reaches one hundred and forty five degrees.
After you have finished cooking the lamb, remove it from the oven and then let it rest for twenty minutes. After twenty minutes, place the lamb on a cutting board. Take a knife and carve it into slices.
For a sauce, you can use the juices that were left behind in the pan. You may also consider squeezing a little bit of lemon juice over the slices of lamb or sprinkling it with dried Greek oregano.
The last step of course is to serve it to your hungry guests. If you prepared it correctly, they are sure to enjoy the succulent lamb cooked in olive oil, spices, and garlic in a traditional Greek style. Consider serving the lamb with other traditional Greek items such as a classic Greek salad, Avgolemono lemon egg soup, artichokes also cooked in olive oil, and so forth. By preparing an authentic Greek meal, you are sure to impress your friends and loved ones.
