The lamb is nicely charred and crispy on the surface, its meat tender and moist. The simple cumin and chili seasoning brings out the aroma of the lamb without tasting overwhelming. Your kitchen will get messy but smell heavenly!
Mongolian Food – Lost in Translation
You might have heard of or tried a dish called Mongolian beef, but this Mongolian lamb or any authentic Mongolian dish is nothing like it. Seasonings of real Mongolian food are very simple and minimal. Salt and pepper are commonly used, sometimes with the combination of cumin powder and chili flakes. When we are talking about Mongolian food in the context of China, we often refer to Inner Mongolia, an ethnically Mongolian province of China that borders the country of Mongolia. Its food and seasonings are also affected by the rest of China. For the main ingredients of Mongolian food, mutton and lamb will be at the top of the list, way above other meat, such as beef and chicken. Other important ingredients in daily life also include flour and milk, with very limited amounts of vegetables. When it comes to cooking, roast whole lamb, roast lamb leg, and naan bread are the most popular and commonly known items. Compared to mainstream Chinese food, Mongolian style roasting often features bigger cuts and larger chunks of meat.
Hunting for the Right Cut
Expats in China are often annoyed that they cannot find the right cut of meat for a decent steak or lamb chop, as Chinese butchers generally cut meat differently from Western butchers. I face the same problem even when cooking Chinese food. When I was trying to find lamb shanks at local markets, I came home disappointed and empty handed a few times. There was one time I even hunted down a halal butcher next to a small hidden mosque. I found that their lamb cuts were still very huge, with thick and tough meat. Later on, I realized that people here tend to raise the lambs to a bigger size, in order to get more meat. Don’t get me wrong, you can still find nice lamb chops if you’re in a fancy neighborhood. But I found it’s much easier to get a cut of lamb spare ribs at the average supermarket, as it’s way cheaper.
It might be difficult to judge the size of the piece of lamb above, but it weighs 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds)! Can you imagine how tough the meat was? Continue to read and you will find out how to tackle this problem!
Lamb meat is wildly popular in China and we simply don’t have enough pastures to raise the sheep. As a result, lamb meat is pricey and sometimes difficult to get (I don’t even want to start on the topic of the rampant fake lamb meat). You can find the most common cuts in a big supermarket (in Beijing), which normally includes lamb leg, spare ribs, and lamb breast (because there is a conspiracy theory that the restaurants get all the good parts first…just kidding. I hope!).
Cooking and Tips
Today, I want to introduce a Mongolian-style dish that uses chili and cumin to season and roast a whole piece of lamb spare ribs. To specify the cut, the spare ribs I’m using here are a Chinese style cut, which contains both the bone-in breast and most of the rack (in the US terminology). In China, we usually separate the entire backbone and cook it in a stew. The backbone is a popular cut (羊蝎子, yang xie zi) here.
For lamb spare ribs, the most common home cooking method is a stew or braised dish. The whole piece is just too huge and the meat is quite thick and tough. However, I found a great way to roast the whole piece in the oven, and the result was great. Cooking alert! Making this is quite messy and you should expect your kitchen counter and hands to get very greasy. But believe me, it’s totally worth it!
To cook this recipe, I did a lot of research online and learned the tips and tricks from various recipes. Here are a few tips.
The nutrition facts are calculated based on 1 of the 6 servings generated from this recipe.
