SMOKING RECIPE CLIFF NOTES:
Smoked Leg of Lamb:
- Make the marinade using honey, mustard, chopped rosemary, ground black pepper, lemon zest, and minced garlic
- Cover the entire boneless leg of lamb with the marinade, put it in a plastic bag and put in the fridge
- Remove lamb from fridge, add some salt and pepper, and put on the smoker at 225 degrees F
- Cook until internal meat temp hits 130-140 degrees
- Pull of smoker, remove the netting, slice, and serve!
Well, it's winter in Chicago, and because of that, I'm not doing much smoking these days. But I did do a leg of lamb about a month ago, and so here it is.
Before I get started with the recipe, I feel it necessary to give another shoutout to the Virtual Weber Bullet website where I got this recipe. This particular leg of lamb recipe included a honey & mustard type of marinade on it, which was delicious. Because this was my first attempt at lamb, I didn't veer of course very much. Next time around, I'll make a few changes.
First, I had to pick up my leg of lamb. While you can choose to go with the bone-in option (and then either cook with the bone in or remove it yourself), I elected to go with the leg of lamb with the bone already removed. I think this is the most common style, and it's certainly the easiest. And as usual, I picked it up from Costco - where I get most of smoking meat.
Leg of lamb from Costco
4.82lbs with the bone removed
Fat-side up
Fat-side down
Two things of note from the above pictures. One - my leg of lamb weighed in at 4.82lbs. From what I have read, that's about normal size with the bone removed. Secondly, you can see in the third and fourth picture that the lamb is wrapped in string. This is because once the bone is removed, the support that kept everything firmly together is removed. Without the string, the lamb wouldn't stay in the "balled up" shape, instead having various flaps in different directions. So with the bone removed, you need the string, and it stays on throughout the cook.
Because this recipe called for the lamb to get covered in a honey mustard marinade, it seemed best to get it set up the day before the smoke. That way, the meat gets some extra time to absorb the marinade and really take in all the flavors. So the first step is to make the marinade.
Fresh rosemary with each part pulled and chopped
Finished marinade
My pictures are limited for this marinade, but I don't think you're really missing anything by not seeing it along the way. All I did was combine in the bowl: 1/4 cup of honey, 2 tbsp of dijon mustard, 2 tbsp chopped rosemary (as shown above), 1 tsp of ground black pepper, 1 tsp of lemon zest, and 1.5 tsp of minced garlic. In the end, it looked like my second picture, and it's ready to go on the lamb.
The next step is to use your hands and rub the marinade all over the lamb.
Lamb with marinade fat-side up
Lamb with marinade fat-side down
Sitting in a plastic bag covered in marinade
There really is no secret skill to covering the lamb with marinade, as far as I can tell. You just get a little dirty and rub it all over, as can be seen above in the first two pictures. The one thing to note is that as previously mentioned, there are gaps and crevices caused by the removal of the bone. So, it's good to really try to get inside of those to apply some of the marinade where you can, even with the netting in the way. Basically, you want the marinade to touch as much of the lamb as possible.
Once you have applied the marinade, then put the lamb into a plastic bag and pour whatever marinade (if any) may be left into the bag as well. Let all the air out, seal it up, and put it in the fridge. There's no rule about how long it needs to sit in the fridge or how much time you need to do this prior to putting it on the smoker. But the more, the better, probably up to about 24 hours. For me, it went in the fridge on Friday around 5pm and I ended up putting it on the smoker around Saturday at 4pm, so just about 23 hours.
Now the lamb is only going to be on the smoker for around 2 hours, unlike a brisket, pork shoulder, or even ribs, which all require 4+ hours. So given I wanted to eat around 7pm, I decided to put it on around 4pm that day (to give myself a little flexibility).
The lamb after being removed from the fridge/plastic bag
Covered with some salt and pepper and ready to go on the smoker
Just prior to pulling the lamb out of the fridge, I got my smoker set up using the minion method, as discussed in a previous post. Because this was not going to be a very long cook, I didn't use as much charcoal in the chamber or in the chimney. As is often the case with my BBQ, I aimed for the temperature inside the smoker to be around 225 degrees F.
Once it steadied out around this temp, I moved forward with pulling the lamb out of the fridge. I then sprinkled some salt and pepper all over the lamb. I didn't want to use anything beyond salt and pepper to go with it here, as the marinade flavor was meant to be the overwhelming flavor, and I felt that any rub or other flavorful spices would take away from that. The two pictures above show the lamb covered in both the marinade and the salt and pepper, ready to go on the smoker!
Leg of lamb on the smoker!
Nearly finished product
I situated the lamb on the top rack of my smoker, with the water pan filled up below it to help maintain the 225 degree temperature. I used the usual two temperature gauge attack, with one thermometer measuring the smoker's temperature, and the other measuring the meat's internal temperature.
My target for the lamb being finished cooking was a temperature of around 130-140 degrees. Similar to a steak, lamb can be prepared with varying degrees of "doneness", and so I was really aiming for just over 130 degrees so it would be a medium-rare finish. I was expecting the meat to take 1.5-2 hours to finish cooking. However, for whatever reason, this one took a little over 2.5 hours. The second picture above is right before I took it off the smoker. I used a new Christmas present from my wife's parents - the Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen thermometer - to measure the lamb's internal temperature in a few different spots. For BBQ geeks, it is THE instant read thermometer to have - a very cool gift. Anyway, on average, the lamb was around 133 degrees when I pulled it off the smoker.
Finished leg of lamb with the net still on
Carving up the leg of lamb once the netting is removed
Close-up of the carving
Medium-rare slices of leg of lamb!
After pulling the lamb off the smoker, I let it sit for about 10 minutes just to finish cooking and cool down a bit. I then used a knife to cut off the netting. After removing that, I started slicing, simply as you can see above. As you can somewhat see from these pictures, the lamb was a perfect medium-rare.
I also made up a little mint chimichurri sauce to go with it, but I ended up not really using it because the flavoring of the lamb with the honey mustard marinade was so good, I didn't want to cover it up at all. When we finished eating, my wife told me she already knows she wants me to make this again for our Easter dinner - only 3 months away! Until next time..
SMOKING RECIPE CLIFF NOTES:
Smoked Leg of Lamb:
- Make the marinade using honey, mustard, chopped rosemary, ground black pepper, lemon zest, and minced garlic
- Cover the entire boneless leg of lamb with the marinade, put it in a plastic bag and put in the fridge
- Remove lamb from fridge, add some salt and pepper, and put on the smoker at 225 degrees F
- Cook until internal meat temp hits 130-140 degrees
- Pull of smoker, remove the netting, slice, and serve!
