Here in my part of South Wales we have a type of lamb thats left out to graze in the estuaries where the salt marsh plants give the meat a distinctive flavour. Well worth it if you can somehow get it in the US
Another place Mutton thrives in America is some Native American communites, specifically Navajo. I'm Navajo and grew up in New Mexico, growing up Mutton was very normalized. My grandparents knew how to butcher sheep, I ate things like mutton stew and mutton sandwiches on a normal basis. It wasn't till I moved, I realized that mutton isn't very common outside certain communities. Mutton is so ingrained into Navajo culture that an event in our Miss Navajo competitions is sheep butchering. Through colonization our taste acclimated to the flavor of mutton, things like Navajo mutton sandwiches are basic and have a lack of spices unlike other anglo mutton recipes I've seen. Navajo Mutton sandwiches just consist of grilled mutton with a whole roast green chile on frybread. After watching this video I would like to taste other mutton, since the flavors are so varying and compare it to the mutton I grew up eating.
There's a miss navajo competition... where sheep butchering is an event... that is so cool! I really couldve gone my whole life without knowing that, the internet is amazing!!
My wife is 100% Navajo and lots of mutton out in NM. Out there sage grows wild and the sheep eat it enough that I could immediately taste it. It was amazing.
yeah i was kinda appalled when he mentioned mutton and immigrants versus mentioning navajo. i grew up in page az and ate mutton for a while. then when i moved to the city and started eating lamb from places like ruths chris or local greek restaurants, i cant go back to rez mutton. its so overcooked and barely seasoned or has flavor. its too bland now that i upgraded my pallet. but i do love fry bread and green chile. blue corn mush is great too
Indeed! I ordered some Navajo mutton for this video: www.chambersmeatcompany.com/ But given how long this vid got, I decided to save that for a future vid about the Range Wars.
7th generation sheep farmer/rancher here. Fabulous video. I love that you highlight the nuances of lamb without saying “Gamey; off-flavor, etc”. It saddens me that the average American consumer only eats roughly 6 oz of lamb per year, despite the fact they are such a versatile, multi use animal with the potential to re-revolutionize the food and textile system. I am incredibly impressed by the amount of research involved in this video.
@@marcpeterson1092 Fair point, but I am talking about the average American consumer. Did you know the average amount of lamb consumed per person per year in the US is less than 8 oz/person/year? If everyone just had one more bite of lamb per year, the industry would thrive.
In central Mexico (Hidalgo), they make "barbacoa" made out of mutton; it is made in a stone oven and cooked overnight, one of Mexico's greatest delicacies.
@@tacefairy Yeah north of the border anything traditionally Mexican made with lamb or mutton is instead made with beef or pork. Cause Americans are picky eaters. But if you get a chance to eat tacos *de* pastor (as opposed to the typical tex-mex tacos *al* pastor), do it. Your life will change forever.
@@tacefairy Well, I would guess Barbacoa has some resemblance or connection to the word BBQ, but originally, when us mexicans refers to Barbacoa, we are thinking of the dish and not the cooking style. Specially now, that the word BBQ has becomed part of our leguage, we use both terms in the different situations we are mentioning
First of all, barbacoa is a taino word from the Caribbean area that the Spanish brought to the mainland in the 1520's, natives like the Otomí or Nahuatl were cooking in that way meat well before that. Now barbacoa in Mexico is done out off different animals depending on the region, like beef in the northern areas, goat in Sinaloa, but in Central Mexico it is done in a pretty ancient way, the sheep is wrapped in maguey leaves and put in a stone oven underground overnight, it is difficult to do in the cities, most of the time it's prepared in rural areas, the most famous barbacoa comes from the state of Hidalgo, but it is done in other places as well, it is expensive by Mexican standards, but people from Mexico City are willing to pay the premium for the experience, it is trully a unique and delicious experience, it is so jucy it "sweats" a kind of broth that you eat before the actual meat, you can also have "mixiotes" were the mutton is done with the nopal plant and wrapped with the film of the maguey leaves, as you can see from the animal and the cooking process it is completely different than what you call beef barbacoa in Northern Mexico, it is a much more indigenous dish and well worth the experience if you can try it.
Mutton is still a staple on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, there are mature sheep grazing all over the place and it was served at every local restaurant and at the yearly culture festival
I moved out of Arizona decades ago. I still miss Navajo tacos, mutton on fry bread, and buying mutton at the Safeway in Flagstaff. There is some native spice (Juniper berries?) that balances the off taste of mutton.
Sadly it seems many younger natives don't seem to keen on mutton or lamb as the older folks. I wonder if the Welsh suffer from a similar cultural divide in tastebuds as well
I spent a month in Mongolia and stayed with herding families throughout the steppes. They primarily eat mutton and let me tell you, it was the most exquisite, tender, and flavorful meat I’ve ever had. I’ve craved mutton ever since but alas it’s not available anywhere.
i had the chance to eat "samsa" with real fatty "baran" meat (this is big middle asian goat) and yes it has the smell but it was one of the tastiest meat i ever ate
im from chile and i once tasted the new zeland lamb meat and it happened something similar, didnt like that meat as much as the one i grew up with. Love the content! un saludo amigo
In South Africa we grow sheep across the country, but sheep that is farmed in the Karoo is prized for its flavour. Its an arid region (semi-desert) and the flavour of the mutton/lamb that comes from there is very unique and frankly worth its weight in gold.
In the past, Australia's wealth came from 3 things, wheat, wool and gold. When I grew up in the 60's (in sheep country) mutton was the only sheep product you could get at the butcher. After a full-on marketing blitz in the 70's it's now rare to find mutton as everyone sells lamb. A lot of the flavour in lamb is developed in the fattening up process shortly before slaughter. Ones that are fed mostly grain tend to have less flavour, while grass fed is better. In South Australia we have lamb that feed on saltbush and develop a very distinct and sought after flavour.
Well said, here in the UK we also prize salt marsh lamb and mutton is now far less common than it once was. I absolutely agree with you on grass feeding too… it’s an essential part of developing the best meat.
I will never forget the taste of mutton from my experience as a kid, living in Saudi Arabia. It was a really common street food in Al Khobar and Al Dammam (we lived in Daharan during the late 70’s). I remember the smells of it cooking when we would go into Khobar shopping or exploring. I actually kind of liked the taste of it.
Great video as always Adam! In Hong Kong, we call the sheepy taste 酥 (pronounced like "sew" in Cantonese or "sue" in Mandarin) and we slow-cook it in large clay pots with thick sauces and sheets of fried beancurd. Really interesting that this colloquialism in our language was used in the research paper!
There's another comment on this video with another version of the character that senc posted. Love Chinese, the history for characters is always interesting.
I grew up eating lamb and mutton here in Australia and it still remains my favourite meat after 63 years! I also love goat , especially as a curry, but my wife, who was born in Malaysia sometimes finds lamb too strong…
Greetings from Saudi Arabia! This is really interesting for me as someone who eats a lot of lamb meat as Saudi. I believe the most popular bread here is a breed called "Naemi". You should try our national dish "Kabsa" that's cooked with lamb meat if you ever come to visit Saudi Arabia.
In Norway our national dish is "fårikål" meaning "sheep in cabbage" and it is just what you'd expect. Every year around autumn you can buy dirt cheap sheep meat and people boil it with cabbage and whole black pepper for many hours to make it tender. The best part about it is that it tastes even better when you reheat it the next day, so you can always make way too much without fear of having leftovers. Oh, and if you really want to try some intense sheepish flavours, try "fenalår", which is cured leg of sheep, it's just like a cured ham except it's very dark colored and taste very much like sheep.
Never been a fan of fårikål :( Not only for the sheepish taste that I don't like, but I like my vegetables to have a crunch. However, fårikål should be a must for anyone who likes sheep
Very interesting. I grew up in rural Australia. Most common meat was sheep. Roast leg of lamb, chops, my favourite meals. I don't like it but uncles loved lambs fry, mum would eat sheeps brains etc. I used to work a day now and then for a guy who managed a farm. He couldn't pay me (it was a tax write off basically for some lawyer in the city) but a full days work, he would kill a sheep. I would put in the boot/trunk of mums car (had sheets and tarps etc) and take it to the pub and would hang it in the cool room. After it set it would go out the road to another guy who had bandsaw and he would butcher it. Pub, and guy with bandsaw would take their cut and I would get the rest. Was true barter system. I remember living in Alberta, Canada, a very beef heavy state in a beef heavy country. I was talking to a friend who was from Newfoundland, and she asked what I missed about living elsewhere. I said food, and especially lamb. She was disgusted that I ate lamb. I asked why, she said they are so cute. Her father is a sealer. She has no issues with eating seals, but lamb? So not only is taste etc a reason, very culturally significant reasons why food is popular somewhere and not elsewhere. Also had lamb in Argemtina - was different, but put it down to the sauces used above anything else.
I guess its more about what you come in contact with? When you actually interact with certain animals you realise it's not a cartoon, its a dirty, smelly, bitey bastard creature that's too stupid for it's own good and too smart for yours, and it absolutely would eat you if it could. I'm talking about sheep, cows, and seals in this case. Only one is a known carnivore, but all 3 would eat a kitten or a baby duck without even blinking. Deer will strip a corpse before any other scavenger too, coyotes gotta wait in line. Anyway, all I'm saying is never feel bad about eating an animal, they don't give damn how cute **you** are
I moved away from oz as a child. When I went back in 1979 for a while, my first meal was breakfast ,sausage and eggs. I was wide eyed looking at this gigantic sausage on my plate. When I cut into it watery fat covered my plate. Absolutely ruined my taste for Lamb. Took me years till I ate lamb biryani that I can now enjoy lamb again lol
Its likely that the "mutton" in halal stores is actually goat rather than mature sheep. Like you mentioned, mutton is used to refer to goat's meat in south asians cultures who might frequent these stores. Young goat's meat is also called mutton in this context and has almost none of the smells you would associate with lamb or older sheep mutton.
@@micah4801 But the most important thing is, even goat only tastes like the real stuff if it's imported from Pakistan or India. If the local goat breed isn't similar, then it's better to find the best local lamb that comes close in taste. Of course you can't go wrong with beef or chicken since they taste the same everywhere.
I was with some guys who shot a trophy Ram. nobody wanted the meat. “thats’s wasteful.” I thought. I got the backstrap bagged up. even the tenderloin sliced thin and seared was extremely tough, weirdly oily, and definitely had that strong sheepy flavor. game animals also have all that extra cortisol affecting their flavor and texture. but it was extreme, even compared to venison
Was that some American species? I tried a mouflon, if it was really muflon and not a scam (got it from some Caucasian dude was grilling kebabs on trail so it didn't exactly come with a certificate) it wasn't bad or overly chewy. A bit gamy and definitely much more intense than what I'm used to (more intense even than the mutton I had in Mongolia >
@@absalomdraconis Mongolians often do it, in fact they often stew mutton in/with addition of milk and the dish is amazing. (Just make sure it's not sheep milk if you're a very strict Jew or non-Pauline Christian, some schools claim the part about cooking lamb in mother's milk isn't literal and should be understood as "sheep in general")
The male rams have the thickest oil in thier fur it gets on clothes and will get on the meat I'm sure too. It dosnt smell good and it won't wash out easily. That's why they won't eat it I'm sure it affects the flavor.
I grew up in Durban, South Africa, in a mostly traditional Indian home. The only red meat we really ate was mutton, and very occasionally goat. I never really ate beef until I was 10. Then I had bacon. Tradition went out the window around that time.
In Cape Town, in all of forty years, I only twice found goats' meat in stores. It is the healthiest of all red meats, with the least bad fats, and very nutritious. But the toffee-nosed consumers reject it and stew dead pigs instead. I don't have religious taboos, but I grew up on a farm, saw a pig. It ain't no food! 😂. Give me Karoo lamb or mutton any day, but it's hard to find in the city where the woke buy their food.
@@unwoke1652A few years ago I had to go work at a ruby mine in Mozambique. The food was very indian because the cooks etc were all from India and I goy tired of not knowing what I am eating. The one day they had goat as an option and I said yes, please. Much to the disgust of some other South African contractors there.
I was born in the 1940's and in my early days we ate lamb quite often, as did the other kids I knew. That was in northeast Ohio, which was pretty mainstream US whiteguy territory. Over the years I have become a little perplexed as to why lamb has fallen so far out of favor. After seeing this video I want to try putting some lamb in my smoker. I have purchased goat meat at my local Chinese market and it tastes nothing like lamb; it is very mild. So it was a disappointing experiment. Thanks for another interesting video.
You can thank me later, if you make it. There is a very spiced smoked lamb leg named Sikandari raan. It's said that it was Alexander the Great's favourite dish in India. He was apparently quite a foodie. Regardless of the veracity it's absolutely delicious.
Here's a cultural explanation I've heard from my parents as to why people (at least in NZ) perfer lamb over sheep. I'm a younger generation kiwi, but even just back in my grandparents childhood - if you were skint broke (which they were), the cheapest form of artificial light was sheep-tallow candles. And as you'd expect, when you burn it your whole house is permeated with sheep smell. After smelling that every evening, do you really want sheep for dinner? Mmmmm slow roast candles haha. It's amazing how much the feed, environment, and variety of an animal can change the flavour. I tried wild boar once, hunted from a reserve, and honestly tasted nothing like even free range pork you can buy. The sheep people ate back in the day could've tasted different to modern mutton. Also, always wondered why 'mutton' in India refers to goat meat, not lamb.
Fellow kiwi here. I grew up in the 70s, so no tallow candles, but we ate a lot of mutton, because it was cheap. I suspect a lot of the reason people don't eat it here now is just because of that association with poverty, and the old fashioned "meat and three vege" style of eating. When more international cuisines started becoming popular in NZ in the 80s, suddenly mutton became deeply unfashionable and pretty much disappeared.
@@FutureCatNZ The association with ''famine food'' is VERY context variable, and strong. Example: My grand parents (Gaspésie region of Québec, Canada) were from a coastal fishing village in the Depression. So fish was pretty valuable. Lobster, crab and shrimp? Those were the things that got caught in the nets and had no value. You went far in the field to drop the shells and debris: you don't want the neighbors to see you are reduced to eat ... lobster! The Shame of lobster poverty. There a lot of food that are pretty nutritious, but had that association, but not anymore with the younger generations. So we see a rediscovery of ''old time foods'' that are nutritious, tasty, and in certain cases more ''eco-friendly'' with young chefs. Pork, mutton, oats, barley, sourdough bread, legumes, mushrooms, organs... All sorts of things my Grand-parents hate (due to the Depression and the following WWII rationing) but I enjoy very much. And even if they rationally KNOW these things can be good, the memory of these things, badly prepared, with poverty is too much.
@@naamadossantossilva4736 no I'm pretty sure the brits used to use the term interchangeably back in the 17/1800s so mutton got cemented as goat meat in indian english. the same applies to so many other in it too, the indian english dialect is so interesting. also i see you ms portuguesa
I’m in Australia and we eat lamb quite a lot. My parents grew up on sheep farms and we ate lamb a lot, I love the taste, and I really distinctly recall the smells and taste as you discuss them, but I’ve very rarely had mutton though! When I have, it’s always been slow cooked and cooked along with other flavours in stews etc. to drown out the flavour. But there is nothing better on this earth than a beautiful roast lamb flavour! Yum
In Iranian food we get rid of the gamey taste with two ways; 1. We use onions, rubbing them against the meat and marintating our meat and kebabs in onion, which cuts through the strong taste. 2. When making our stews (similar to curries) we remove the foam that raises to the top of the simmering broth, this gets rid of the gamey taste as well. Now you just have a better version of beef, with maybe some subtle pleasant difference.
Lamb is head and shoulders better than beef (no pun intended), and it's a damn shame people don't eat more of it in America, which according to Adam is why it's so expensive. It's fairly easy to get right cuz the meat is so naturally tender, and has just the right amount of fat content. Making lamb curry is an unfortunate luxury cuz of how expensive lamb is. My local halal market only occasionally stocks lamb shank due to limited availability. I guess at the end of the day, it's not exactly healthy either, and regardless of the price I'd still eat way more chicken and fish.
My understanding is that the reputation that the Welsh (and Scots) had for bestiality with Sheep actually came from them exploiting a quirk of English law to reduce their punishment when caught stealing English Sheep. Stealing a sheep would get them the death penalty, but if they plead guilty to merely borrowing the sheep to have sex with her then the punishment would be reduced to a small fine. Furthermore, if they claimed to have already had sex with the sheep then the animal would have to be slaughtered and no one was allowed to eat it, so they could cost the English owner more than the value of the fines they themselves had to pay.
In southern Chile it is tradition to cook the whole animal in a wooden stake for hours, very famous around here. It is also traditional to collect the blood of the animal as it is sacrificed, and add spices to drink it or eat it once it has coagulated, it's called "ñachi".
When you revealed that skatole was a component of what makes mutton taste "sou", the term "barnyardy" immediately made sense to me. I don't like mutton or strong tasting lamb because to me, the taste is reminiscent of working farms or stock yards.
In the inland Chinese province I came from (Guizhou if you are curious), we have mutton rice noodle soups that are very delicious. Those mutton rice noodle soup restaurant that has the sheepiest smell is usually the most popular. Those restaurant usually have less smell of spice as well. We usually enjoy those noodle soup with spicy chili oil and raw garlic. When I visited the northern part of China where mutton is frequently on the menu, the locals say that "Eating mutton without garlic reduces flavor by a half". There is also a beef version of that rice noodle soup. But for me, I prefer mutton rice noodle soup to beef rice noodle soup since they have more complex flavor. Beef version tends to taste less vibrant and you taste more spice than beef. In addition, those sheepiest restaurant usually serve sheep insides as well so sometimes I get sheep liver (yes, you can order sheep PP if you are lucky). So I guess if I go to Scotland someday, I am going to eat a lot of haggis.
@@danieleyre8913 shoot, I think should mention that the meat is exclusively from goat (yes, goat tastes better). But I am not familiar with the vocabulary of goat meat.
It’s hard to avoid haggis tatties and nips (that’s potatoes and turnips how it’s traditionally served) - I eat as much as I can when there and it doesn’t have a strong game flavour you might expect.
I recall Mum making a mutton stew on a Saturday. She’s start it early in the day in the pressure cooker, then it would bubble away on stovetop with a variety of vegetables for several hours. Since our kitchen was sort of an extension off the main house cooking smells didn’t really permeate throughout . (This is what I think about as folks remodel their home to open concept. They need an alternate cooking space for smelly foods 🤷♀️ )
Little grammatical nitpick: sheep aren’t ‘sheared’, they are ‘shorn’. My parents raised sheep (for wool), and I grew up with that - I do not miss it, let me tell you. I love the meat, and lanolin’s great for your skin. (Our sheep grazed in our fields in summer, and ate hay (alfalfa hay) in winter.
Brilliant video! Coming from the UK, the flavour of "Sheep" was something I always missed after I moved to the US. Here in Oregon, we can get some quite spectacular mutton from a couple of local butchers, funky and edgy rather than mild Kiwi lamb. Mutton kofta is still one of my favourites.
I love mutton and I have always preferred it to lamb, which generally tastes bland in my opinion. Coming from a Mediterranean culture it has been a staple of the local diet (Greece) and I personally eat mutton quite often. The smell in my opinion is something that you can easily get used to, I have American friends here that didn't even come close to it initially and now they just die for it. Also, while many people avoid it, if you get a really high quality mutton then you can try it grilled - medium rare - which is simply heavenly. Also to offer my ideas about the smell: Sheep raised in areas like Britain or New Zealand, tend to have a stronger smell when older due to the climate of the areas. These are areas with rich green pastures that lead to well-fed sheep with a much greater fat concentration (and smell). Sheep from the eastern Mediterranean tend to be raised in areas with much drier climate which leads to less fat and not as strong of a smell. Finally, one type of sheep meat that you did not mention is Ram meat, which is notoriously difficult to cook (extremely tough) and much more smelly (add in the hormones, if you have ever been close to a ram, you know what I mean). Ram meat can be delicious and tastes completely different (starts to get closer to deer meat) but it is almost impossible to find good one, as diet is extremely important to make it easily edible. In some islands here there is a tradition of releasing a ram to a dry islet for a few months, where he will survive just with wild herbs, weeds and their moisture, as there is no water. This leads to a massive loss of fat and the previously hard to eat ram becomes extremely tasty.
You literally don't understand yourself what you are prattling about. Greece is not Mediterrenean and shepherd culture is most definitely not Neogreek which you actually are. It is *Aromanian* and you fraudently hijacked with your Neogreek propaganda and claimed credit. Simple and truthful. We already both complusively lying and from your writing style I already actually know you are a child in the head and a completely sophistry-spewing lying immature hysterical woman in the head who opportunistically talks with your fancy Anglo-Saxon diction where it fits her/you. *No* instead Greek is most truly in fact actually *Western Asian and tsiftetelo-Anatolian culture, an Oriental culture.* Your cuisine is 90% *TURKISH.* In Neogreeks of course you don't talk with the same manner but you still actually talk *condescendingly uneducated* and *overfamiliarly uncouth* with a neurotically punchable attitude. You play a role here.
I also prefer mutton, but that is quite impossible to find in Australia today - unless you have a shepard friend. Yes, our lamb has very little flavour, I do not bother buying it.
I much prefer Mutton and Adult Goat (seemingly even harder to find here in a store than Mutton) over lamb or the southwestern Cabrita del horno served in some restaurants in San Antonio. The best that I have had was Anatolian Mutton and Goat where the whole animal was spit roasted. Probably got more than my "Fair" share at the serving table since many of my colleagues wanted something "New and Exciting" for dinner instead of "Standard Chow Hall" meals and then decided that the flavors were not for them and then paid extra to eat at the chow hall anyway. I had already paid for my meal and sort of "Pigged Out" while I could. Well worth the later teasing and hassles that came with having stayed long after others had left. For me just another enjoyable experience during my two years in country. Learned to pass on the heated sweetened goat milk, however. Cold without extra sugar is much better in my opinion.
Wow I joined this channel for recipes and am now fascinated by Adam and his ability to dive deep into food science with videos like these. I had no idea he'd go this deep. Thank you so much Adam this content is amazing!
Had a neighbor growing up that had sheep to shear. At one time he spent the most on record for a single ram. We went over there for Sunday night dinner one night. We had mutton on pizza. It was memorable. Chewy and the mutton flavor was rather unique. If we were told is was mutton it would be older then definitely. We helped him dock tails and band rams one year. 350 lambs done both mornings 5-9am. We did it so early to not give the lambs heat stress.
Also usually when we eat lamb (at least here in australia!) it’s not a tiny little lamb. It’s like a teenage sheep. They’ve grown quite a lot but haven’t reached maturity, so they have plenty of meat (a tiny lamb would have barely any), but haven’t matured and got the mutton taste yet
I choose wool over synthetic fibres when I have the choice. Then again, I also like sheepy-flavoured meat. And for years my favourite sweater had a strong lanolin odour whenever it got wet, which since I lived in Oregon at the time was pretty often.
Same, wool, cotton, and linen > synthetics. The wool is often blended with synthetics (15-30%) for more durability; it still works like wool, warm and wicking moisture.
Great video. Lamb and Mutton are staples in my city (Durban, South Africa). It’s probably due to the country being an old British colony AND the huge population of Indians that were brought to the city in the 1800s who did not eat pork and beef so sheep became the go to meat. One of the best versions of sheep is a mutton bunny chow made using mutton curry, made in the Durban style which is very different to other curry styles, filled into hollowed out white bread. You might have seen some fancy versions of these but the best are at local spots in and around the city. Lamb has taken over from mutton as the easier to get and more primary meat available but mutton is still available and still of high quality. Oddly, goat meat is rare in SA especially in cities so any mutton you get generally will be from sheep.
This is all so interesting! Especially the scent component. I grew up not eating red meat or pork, and still never have. So I didn't acquire a taste for these things. I have a pretty decent sense of smell, and the few times I smelled cooked lamb, it was the worse smell I ever encountered in my life. I couldn't stay in the same room, and couldn't kiss my husband after he'd eaten some. For comparison, beef doesn't smell actively bad, but I certainly don't like beef flavored things, and pork smells pretty bad (yes, even bacon), but not as intensely pungent as lamb.
Here in South Africa we have the most succulent and delicious tasting lamb and mutton unique and indigenous to the Karoo desert region. The Karoo sheep mainly feed on this indigenous flora, which is nutritious as well as palatable to the sheep. These shrubs have a very herby aroma, varying from rosemary, thyme, sage, eucalyptus and lavender. One can say that the sheep flavour their own meat while grazing. Karoo Lamb is South Africa's first geographical indication (GI) in the meat industry and has achieved the unique achievement to be recognised by the European Union as a true GI - a product with similar geographical and sensory features to Parma ham, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and many other lamb, ham and cheese specific to a geographical region.
When living CapeTown we had Karoo mutton and lamb packs delivered once a month, I miss it still. Now living in New Zealand the lamb is just too fatty and Sheepy. Have taken to Goat which is popular here now due to Goat farming for milk.
As an Indian (living in Fiji) I can't eat beef so my main source of red meat is lamb which is my favourite meat. I never buy shanks though because while a cheaper cut over shoulder chops, shanks are trickier to cook and has a taste that doesn't agree with me just like chumps or neck pieces, so while it costs me more I always go for shoulder chops, tell them to cut it thin, lightly marinate it with soy sauce, salt and pepper minutes before cooking and pop them in the oven for fifteen to twenty minutes to pull out tasty barbecued lamb to supplement my carnivore diet. Fun.
Some of the nicest mutton I ever ate was cooked by an Indian friend's Mum. It was spicy and tender, and had a wonderful gravy. I ate three servings. I regret nothing.
I’m from MENA descent, where we only consume sheep of the fat-tailed variety (they produces more coarse wool, and are reared mainly for the quality of their meat). The tail fat is an essential ingredient and flavour profile to us. In fact no kebab recipe is complete before mixing in a significant amount of tail fat (called Liya in Arabic) to add a unique savoury flavour. Tail fat can be purchased separately, and is used in many recipes. Even in food that doesn’t use sheep meat. So I found it rather strange when you criticised the taste of more fatty mutton, and said that the leaner meat is more palatable! I’m bringing to question wether this is because tail fat tastes fundamentally different from the rest of the sheep, or because American food culture is just too generally avert to more developed taste profiles? EDIT: Tail fat is also high in HDL and actually helps counteract high cholesterol and reduce the risk of CVD.
im australian and i love lamb meat, and i was thinking the whole time the fat is my favourite part, and why i love lamb so much, the fat tastes great, beef fat and pork fat are both tough and flavourless in most cases in my experience. tldr lamb fat is gods gift to man
@@ForageGardener americans dont even give a shit about whats "american food" most americans will tell you their favorite food is some sort of "ethnic" food or texmex type mash up of cultures food. We just like objectively good tasting stuff. And the cleanest most regulated food in the world.
@@ForageGardener Have you never tasted BBQ before? The American palate has a lot more complexity than you’re dismissing it as. Your argument about blandness comes from the corporatized agro-group factory foods filling shelves around the entire world, not just America.
I've had mutton on several occasions, and really like it, but then I like "strong" meat flavours but I know a lot of people don't. One of my big complaints about beef and chicken we get is that so much of it is bland. But then the food trade is catering for the market they can sell to.
I grew up in Spain, and my grandma had a buncha unused land she leased to this sheep farmer for grazing, and in exchange we got a cheese a week & a mutton or two a year. It’s just such a nostalgic food to me now. But it does smell like unwashed rural farmer even while cooked
I just cannot get enough of these videos! I've never been so adventurous with food but these videos have encouraged me to try new things with the understanding that I don't need to be a professional chef and I can make things the way I like them without feeling ashamed. Appreciate the content as always Adam. Keep up the great work! 👍
Lamb is my favorite meat. Your discussion of the regional differences, brought memories of a trip In the late 90's, to England and France. I was with a former sorority sister. We both live on the US west coast ... San Francisco, and Salem, OR. In the south of France, we ate in a "family style" restaurant, which featured a lamb stew that day. My friend was hesitant. She said "lamb is sour." I didn't know what she meant. The dish was delicious, and she was surprised that she loved it, too. Later, in London, we ate in a Pub that offered "Shepherd's Pie," on the menu. (I could kill for Shepherd's Pie.) I told her it was lamb, and we both ordered it, enthusiastically. It WAS "sour." And, I knew what she had meant in the French restaurant. I asked if it was mutton, and was assured that it was lamb. I've heard that Scottish lamb is superb, but we didn't get to Scotland on that trip. Someday. I think that most of our lamb, in northern California, comes from Sonoma County, which is also a major dairy, and wine, region. Lamb, cheese and wine ... it doesn't get much better than that!
There is a ton of shepherding in central Utah, and there’s a festival in my grandma’s home town once a year where they serve Mutton that Friday evening and Lamb sandwiches for lunch the next day. Definitely brings back good memories.
So, in Iceland there's a lot of sheep/lamb and a lot of our traditional dishes are lamb-based, the Icelandic lamb tastes of a whole lot more than the New Zealand one, from what I've tasted - to the point that I'd call the New Zealand lamb flavourless.
I'm from NZ, and I rate lamb as less taste, Hogget medium taste, mutton as fully flavoured. Lamb is up to a year old, hogget between 1 and 2 years, mutton 2yrs and over.. often an older animal. Lamb has become the fashion, and the older sheep are hard to get now (locally), maybe they are sold overseas. To me, Mutton is my preference.
Here in Australia, we used to do a lamb roast almost every week. Our lamb is similarly mild in flavor like NZ lamb and goes great with baked potatoes and gravy.
AND I remember back in the 70's Lamb was served at least 4 times per week in our house as it was by FAR the cheapest of all the meats. The butcher would al;ways throw in a few "shanks" for free if you had a dog . Those shanks are now AUD $25 a kilo !!!!! AHHHH
@@tilapiadave3234 back then it was so abundant that Lamb Slouvaki was made into a traditional Australian Greek dish. It was so impactful it made it back to Greece
I remember buying hogget 20 years ago here in South Australia because it was the cheapest meat I could find. I was raised on it my grandparents were farmers, so I never noticed the slightly stronger taste.
Glad to see your video. I grew up in South Africa, where I learned to love lamb, and mutton even more. For the last 38 years I have been living in the country of my birth, USA, up in the rural northeast. I crave mutton or even lamb all the time, but can't afford the expensive Ozzy imports, plus it is very weak in taste. A year ago however, I managed to buy a whole sheep off a local wool farm. The old ewe was past it for their purposes. She is cut and packed in my freezer. I pull some out only for special occasions. 3 days ago I pulled out the large rack of ribs, and the missus and I where in heaven with slow roasted mutton ribs. People don't know what they are missing. And as an aspiring home chef, I can tell you that mutton is by far the best meat for Indian and North African curry dishes. Venison is big around here (whitetail deer) and if you get a young one there is a very mild taste, But put down a 5+ year old buck and you can actually taste it. My second favorite.
@@UlrichHoltzhausen Not any more. He and his wife immigrated here (Maine, USA) 5 years ago. He has a lot of contacts over there still of course, and goes back over often. I came over here in 1987.
One of the best ever texas style chili's I ever did was using a fairly strong tasting lamb. The heavier rich taste made the chili amazing, and it just took on so much more of the chili flavour then beef usually does. Well worth it. Also a reason I love lamb dishes in the indian cuisine but never really ever order any beef based dishes.
In Jamaica we eat only local adult goat or sheep (mutton), never the youngster (lamb). From foreign we import only goat or ewe mutton (mainly Australian or New Zealand), but no lamb. Yes it requires a long cooking time, but we have acquired this pronounced taste by complementing it with our herbs & spices - it's a national treasure, JUST DELICIOUS.
Besides slow cooking mutton, the alternative would be to pre-cook it (with salt & whatever herbs & spices you want) in a pressure cooker. Well, that's what we do here in Malaysia. You could also soak / pre-marinate any meat in a ginger & water solution. Gniger is a natural tenderiser & it also mellows out the meaty smell & flavour. Using ginger this way is a Chinese method that's applicable to all meats. As for terminologies, in Malaysia (and possibly throughout Southeast Asia), mutton is goat meat & lamb is sheep meat. Sheeps aren't local to this region, but goats are. So I suppose it makes sense that we only import lamb & not adult sheep. Never understood why Westerners referred to sheep as both lamb & mutton. Thanks for the clarification. Cheers..
In vietnam, they use vinegar, with salt and ginger to clean & tenderize beef. Their Pho-soup is really nice. But Malaysia easily wins best mutton soup on this planet.
At the start of the video I thought to myself "Well I've had plenty of mutton as BBQ growing up in Western Kentucky." I didn't know we're one of the few areas with an actual appetite for mutton in the US. The Fancy Farm picnic in Graves County has good mutton in August.
I started eating New Zealand lamb raw (and cooked) a few years ago, but the store I bought it at stopped selling it. I live in Japan so its fairly safe, but the taste was really unique. I think it was mostly in the fat, but it was very delicious.
As a worker for one of the biggest lamb processing factories in New Zealand, you’re definitely right in saying that a lot of the flavour comes from the fat. There’s a lot of lean cuts that really just taste like dry beef steak. Also to weird you out, theres a good chance i have handled the lamb you eat. About 80-85% of our product is exported and china/japan are our biggest markets. So much so that only for japan we specially produce sukiyaki or really thin sliced lamb shoulder
Also a Kiwi, I would have to disagree with you on the flavour being in the fat, I grew up on lamb and mutton, but I can't stand the flavour of the fat. If it is dry, it is over cooked.@@Pheatan
I've tried lamb/mutton so many times, so many places, cooked so many different ways with different sauces and accompaniments and I still can't get myself to like it. It just always tastes like how sheep smell to me and I cannot stand it. I love venison, I've eaten muskrat, I can handle gamey flavors but lamb just doesn't do it for me.
Thank you for this! I have always thought mutton tastes "gamey" - far more like venison than beef. Inever knew why though, until now. As for my personal favorite, the piggys get my vote 😊
When I went to Japan, one of the things I made sure to try there was horse sashimi, and it was legit delicious, and unlike any other red meat I've had. I would definitely eat it here if it wasn't taboo.
I live in Japan and yeah, horse is super good. I kind of like whale too but it's VERY gamey and most Japanese people don't even like it as far as I can tell. Lamb/mutton are actually my favorite meats but very hard to find here sadly.
@@TMTLive Whale smells like crossover between pork and fish, no wonder many people are aversed by it. Only saw it once in a discount supermarket in Japan, and never saw it in mainstream supermarket there
Wow, you just blew my mind! I had an 8th of a cow as a deal from a local farmer, frozen and already dismembered. It was the best quality of beef you could get, like grass fed and free roaming. Some parts had a pretty strong taste of sheep or venison. With your explanation I know, that it must have come from the all grass diet of that particular cow.
I'm in Kentucky, in a rural farming community. We used to have a general store that served chopped barbequed mutton and it was the absolute best, they closed down a bit over a decade ago and I've not seen anywhere else, nearby, that serves it. Everywhere else I've had it has been a disappointment like they just roast it in the oven or boil it then chop it up with BBQ sauces versus actually smoking it, I wish eating it would come back in style.
Good info in excellent video. I grew up on a sheep and cattle ranch in New Zealand. We had 5000 sheep (& 500 cattle). “Lamb” for us meant a sheep up until a year of age. From one to two years old, a sheep is a “hogget”, and from 2 yo onwards it is “mutton”. Lamb is very soft and has a delicate flavour. Hogget is probably what you’re getting in the US as “New Zealand lamb”. “Mutton” is very strong tasting (which is why it’s delicious) and needs to be slow roasted for many hours. My mother roasted mutton every weekday, putting it in the oven at 1500 (3pm) and we’d eat at 1900 (7pm). Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we could not buy actual lamb because it was all exported to earn money for the nation. Kiwis could buy only hogget, but of course, we never bought sheep, pigs, or cattle to eat because we ate animals we grew. Our animals ate grass and winter root crops. We never fed them grain.
I went to a butcher in cleveland that specialized in sheep and special ordered mutton as he didn't have any in stock. I just wanted to try it since I love lamb. He gave me some "mutton chops" but the taste was slow close to lamb as to be hard to distinguish. After seeing your video I suspect he just didn't want to tell me he couldn't get it and gave me lamb chops. They were slightly larger than the lamb chops i normally see but that was basically it.
Market for proper mutton is so small in the US that the best he could lay hands on was an older lamb. With so few buyers it rarely makes sense to pay to feed a sheep to maturity, when profit can be made much earlier.
@@davidturner7577 also he failed to adress something, the heavy lamb is the farmed animal with the highest feed efficiency and protein conversion, due to their hormones and the fact that they are grazing (or eating grain) and drinking milk. In less than a year they give +20kg of meat per head
When I was high school age my cousin and some classmates families raised sheep, and we often had home ground and grilled Lamb Burgers that were just incredible tasting with home made dark mustard with a little radish mixed in and mint jelly. I know it sounds weird but it was really good with a side thick cut potatoes wedges with the peel left on.
I never understood the mint jelly/lamb combo. Or pork/apple is another that i see a lot.. not a huge pork chops fan. But i love pulled pork and duh bacon.... But tenderloins and chops are always less tastey chicken to me.
Very late to this party but if you ever get a chance try South African Karoo lamb. They are free range and eat bushes that are basically wild rosemary. It's something special.
I eat lamb chops or cutlets at least twice a week, I absolutely love its delicious fatty, melty, crispyness when pan fried at a high heat. Grilled over wood coals is also delicious. I'm also just getting in to eating mutton, it's just criminal that it's not eaten more in this country which is absolutely covered in sheep. I think if you asked your average British person in the street nowadays they wouldn't even know what mutton was, much less have tried it.
I grew up less than 2 minutes from moonlight BBQ and still live in Owensboro. Moonlight was a childhood staple and until very recently I never realized that mutton ( Our family's go-to ) was such a local thing and not very widespread. The way folks talk about it you would think it's popular all over the country lol. Been a long time fan and geeked out when I saw you go to moonlight while watching some videos of yours I've missed over the years. Cheers Adam!
Grew up in the area myself and if I don't go at least yearly it was a bad year since St. Augustine at Reed stopped having their July 4th picnic years ago (I grew up there in the 70s).
Glad you enjoyed some Moonlite mutton! It's always amusing to me that Owensboro is known for our BBQ, but also as one of the only places that mutton is eaten in the US. I grew up eating mutton, so it never seemed strange to me.
My grandmother owns a sheep farm. I had only ever had mutton or lamb from her. I like that meat and use it often to cook with. The first time that I ever got some from another place It was so sharply different. It wasn’t bad, but definitely worse than what I was used to
As a welshman I can confirm we're big on lamb/sheep! In the UK we also have a middle category. Lamb is anything younger than one year. Mutton is anything older than two. If its between 1 and 2 years old its called Hogget or Shearling. This is definitely the sweet spot!
It used to be that lamb was any animal that didn't have it's adult teeth when slaughtered, and hogget was between growing it's adult teeth and 2 years, but this was changed because some farmers sent lambs to market but they were hogget by the time they reached the slaughterhouse, which led to disputes over pricing and labeling.
10:51 Hey Adam! Just a quick tip for future situations in case you find yourself referring to molecules and their relation to taste. "Octanoic" is not pronounced "octonic." It's pronounced Oc-tuh-no-ic. The suffix "-oic" indicates that the molecule is a carboxylic acid, that is it has a the funciontal group COOH (a carbon with a double bond to an oxygen as well as a single bond to an -OH alcohol group). The "oct" indicates that it's an 8-carbon molecule. Perhaps the carboxylic acid we are most familiar with (especially those who cook!) is 'ethanoic acid' whose prefix "eth" indicates a 2-carbon molecule (think ethanol; a 2-carbon alcohol). If you haven't guessed it already, ethanoic acid = vinegar! Indeed, this is why red wine left out for too long turns to vinegar: It has changed from a 2-carbon alcohol to a 2-carbon carboxylic acid. Neat! Bonus fun fact: The 2-carbon carboxylic acid, ethanoic acid, is vinegar. The 1-carbon carboxylic acid is also known as "methanoic acid" (think methane as a 1-carbon alkane) which is also known more casually as formic acid. Forma is latin for ant. And some communities (e.g., native tribes of the past - maybe some of the present?) have been known to crush ants over their food on purpose for the acid taste that comes from their crushed bodies.
To the taste of lanolin "you would not want in your meat": Camel milk contains lanolin, too and it clearly tastes like wool. For westerners it's really odd, but in Dubai camel milk is quite a common drink.
As someone who grew up in Southern Indiana/Western KY, Moonlite BBQ is a real treat! Next time you're in Owensboro, try Old Hickory off Frederica Street. It's where all the locals go for mutton.
See, I grew up just a couple counties over from Owensboro (and still live in the general area) and have been to Moonlite a couple dozen times, while I find them Okay, I don't think they're anything to write home about. I've had better bbq in many other places, even middle of nowhere Arkansas who isn't exactly known for bbq. I know they must have been better because everyone I know always raved about them growing up, but I feel like I've given them enough tries to say that I'll definitely eat there if I'm craving bbq, but if there's other options nearby I'll likely try them.
Actually, here in New Zealand, many exported sheep meat products undergo a process that removes that "sheep-y" flavour - something about foreigners not being able to handle it.
As a Western Kentuckian (Paducah, even farther west than Owensboro), we did have mutton barbecue from time to time. In fact, as a "wet" barbecue, I found I actually preferred it for sandwiches even over pork! Its certainly not the main BBQ meat, but its a flavor that is readily available.
My grandparents had a sheep ranch when I was growing up so I've had a lot of delicious lamb (and mutton). Generally if someone says "I don't like lamb" it's because their first experience with it was not cooked properly. The flavour is so distinct that if your first association with it is negative most people won't be able to get past it, regardless of how well it's prepared for them later. Where as I associate it with yummy, and even not so good sheep I think is delicious 😅
I learned a lot today about sheep meat. I didn't realize there was so much variation in taste. There is a local (WA state) restaurant that has a roast lamb dinner I like quite well. I never thought about the age of the sheep but given the meat is pretty mild it probably really is 'lamb' and not 'mutton'.
Thanks for this episode, I/we have been eating lamb since I was a child (I'm now 70). My mom was born in England and emigrated with her mom and dad as a child. My grandparents brought with them the love of lamb. We (my family) eat lamb regularly and over the years, I have had many occasions where I detected an "off" odor in the meat. The smell is very repugnant to me while most other people do not even detect the odor. It is so bad for me that if I do eat is, I can smell it in my (poop) the next day, to the point now that I cannot cook lamb in my home that I detect this odor in. And yes, to me it smells like poop (shit)!!! I have pointed it out to grocers where I have purchased the (usually lamb leg) roasts and they accepted the return but I sensed that they couldn't really smell it. I usually can tell as soon as I open the (cryovac) package that it's bad. Well that is bad to me, because I cannot eat it or even cook it in my home. Thanks Al, Latendre
Some people are sensitive to the taste/smell of meat from the rams even when they are only 7-8 months old when butchered. Others don't notice a difference so perhaps that's the reason.
For anyone interested, the Chinese word specifically for “the sheepy taste” is 膻, pronounced “Shan” in Mandarin. I suspect the “soo” from the paper is a dialect or just a result of mishearing or misremembering.
I'm Australian and I have always loved mutton. It is one of my favourite meats, Its just so damn hard to get hold of these days. You have to generally get the butcher to order it in specially even if they can. My mother and I recently found a farm that butchers, processes and sells all there own animals cow, sheep, pigs etc. and we can get mutton from them but the only catch is we have to buy the whole sheep as they have to let the sheep age specially for us to buy. The market for mutton just isn't there unfortunately, which is a shame as when prepared correctly it is such a nice meat, as you found out when you had the mutton BBQ. Anyway thanks for another great video. You should do a mutton BBQ video that I would love to see.
Glad you included the Mutton BBQ from Western KY! We used Moonlite to cater our wedding. I wanted that mutton at our reception (we had chicken and pork, too). It’s an awesome flavor!
Adam. Seriously. You rock. I love watching cooking videos on TH-cam but you bring something else to the table. You give us Knowledge Dumps and they're riveting. Your sense of humor is also very well appreciated. Loved the Monty Python clip. You're not just a home cook, you're a Teacher, and you're the kind of Teacher that students will hang around with after class just to hear more stories. Keep up the Good Work. I'm going to watch every single one of your videos and do my best to remember to hit the like button on each one. P.S. I initially wrote this comment just after the Holy Grail clip, but now I've finished the entire video and I'm quite simply in awe of the research you performed and the presentation you delivered. You definitely have a knack for making topics sound interesting and entertaining.
Plenty lamb here in Ireland, we pronounce ewe 'yo'. I can recommend sheep in your field for magic mushrooms! Margaret Atwood also compared the smell of unwashed hair to lamb in the Maddaddam trilogy, enjoyed when the scientist mentioned it too.
Just love the diverse group of audience you have writing in the comments. I for one have a question regarding this video; why didn't you touch on the topic of male goats/sheep smelling more than female one's or castrated ones? I guess maybe it is a practice to castrate in the US but in India this isn't done and the male goats have a really foul smell (which I guess are the pheromones). Is this common in other countries too?
In the usa, meat animals are usually slaughtered by 5-7 months old, so castration or not doesnt make a difference. But goat bucks, unlike sheep rams, do that whole "pee on my front legs until i burn them and smell like mold" thing so i can totally see the benefit of castrating male goats intended for meat, and would generally avoid a mature buck like the plague. I used to raise meat goats. I can taste the must in goat cheese and cant stand it. My butcher goats were either castrated or female.
@@rebeccaburrow7199 thanks for the insight, I searched about it on web and asked around, the minimum age of slaughter is 6 months and goes upto 15 in India which might explain the smell. And when I asked, people did say that there's a chance that males aren't castrated but it is mostly due to low knowledge on part of the people who rear them. Originally had this question because some restaurants served smelly mutton(goat meat) whereas the home versions never had that smell.
In SA, Mutton is generally the peak of meats, but rarely eaten because of how expensive it is. The traditional Christmas lunch (rather than Christmas dinner), for example, has a 'skaapboud' (lamb shank), baked for half a day or more in a low oven.
My parents farmed with cattle, sheep, trout and guinea fowl. We kept two breeds of sheep - Ile-de-France and Dorper. The Ile-de-France is a dual-purpose breed and although they are enormous and yield a lot of meat, it is not well marbled and the texture is rather coarse, but they also produce wool. The Dorper is very tasty. If you are raising sheep for meat, it is actually more profitable to slaughter them when they can still be sold as lamb, It becomes uneconomical to keep an older animal alive. Lamb from the Karoo area in South Africa is excellent because most of the animals range freely and the wild vegetation imparts a herby flavour. I'll go out of my way for genuine Karoo lamb or (preferably) mutton.
Oddly enough, as a typical white person with an American pallete I find i LOVE Goat more than lamb. Every time I have Goat I love it. I find it is way more approachable, even though I know its reputation suggests otherwise. Caribbean styles are my favorite way to enjoy Goat currently. I'd love for you to try something like that out. I think Goat might surprise people in its appeal. I don't even like Lamb by comparison 😅
Especially, mannish water which is a soup made from the ram goat in Jamaica. The rams pee on themselves so it has that scent and flavor Adam was probably talking about.
@@DavidGalvanwiz If you ever manage to find someone that makes mannish water (not goat (head) soup which is the female), you will completely understand what I am talking about.
In Greece lamb (or sometimes goat) is the staple food of Easter day. The whole animal minus some entrails which are used for various meaty delicacies is slow roasted on a spit all morning and (like 8 hours or so) that day and served with only salt and pepper. The best part of the feast is pinching the exterior parts of the animal while still on the spit so as to have snack while waiting for the whole thing to get ready. Up until recently (60s-70s), many people living in villages had their own small flock and was customary for the children of the family to help with the herding. Nowadays it is probably considered a delicacy, so we generally don't have it too often, but it seems like young people seem to prefer it less in general. Mutton is far more rarely eaten and mostly in stews it seems.
I immigrated from Iraq to the U.S. and to me, even the stuff you find in Halal markets don't taste as strong as the meat from Iraq, I think my favorite would be the fat tail sheep which I don't see here in the U.S.
My favorite land animal to eat is "whatever's on sale" and here near the smack-dab center of the US that generally means chicken, pork, and beef. I've periodically splurged on "exotic" animals, mostly to introduce them to my children, but for day-to-day nutrition we stick to the big three. When they were significantly younger I grilled a batch of lamb chops that were about as mild as possible, and even then the four of them said they didn't particularly like the strong flavor. I don't know if a new effort would be able to break through that memory, and I'm not exactly motivated to spend the coin to find out. They did, however, really enjoy the duck I roasted for Christmas a few years ago.
That's interesting; see, my kiddo LOVED little lamb chops (I'd get them when they went on 'Manager's Special' because they were getting close to the sell by date - I'm generally a "whatever's on sale" cook too, though I'm in the northeastern US lol) & would get frustrated with me when I would finally take the bone out of her tight tiny fist! 😆 She stopped liking them as she got older, though. However, this did just remind me that there was a whole host of things she used to love & then abruptly stopped one day...but she's recently started reintroducing them to her meals; I should pick up some lamb chops next time I see them for a good price & see what she thinks these days (she's nearly 9 now)! I'll have to try some duck with her too. We *do* have an Indian market in town, maybe I can find some goat to try there?
If you know anyone who hunts you could try some deer meat, if it's an older animal we just soak the meat in salt water for a few days and th3 gameiness is gone, that method would prolly work on Mutton to
1:55 OMG is that Moonlight BBQ in Owensboro Kentucky?!? My family used to drive 50 minutes east from Evansville Indiana one Sunday a month after church.
„and we tend to like food that doesn't taste like anything” it's probably the reason why the not-meat (livers, stomachs, blood, brains, hearts, lungs) isn't eaten as often as it was in the past
I’ve also heard that the soldiers in the US coming home from WWII had eaten a lot of canned mutton that had gone rancid and when they came home wouldn’t let their wives and mothers serve lamb and/or mutton and therefore we “lost the taste” for it. Because of this the per capita consumption dropped precipitously after WWII.
@@eironbull I think canned foods flavor can change but not go rancid. If sealed properly there will be no air and no bacteria in the can. Halting bacteria growth.
My mom loves lamb and mutton, "chivito", here in Argentina it tastes totally different from beef and with a very different texture. You usually cook it "A la cruz", that means putting it in a cross and roasting it over fire (ideally firewood) for several hours. And remember, when roasting, bone side to the fire, otherwise you burn the meat
Hey Adam, in southern Utah there are many sheep ranchers and mutton eaters. Particularly Piute, Sanpete, Sevier and Garfield counties. My grandfather raised sheep and we ate mutton quite regularly.
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Here in my part of South Wales we have a type of lamb thats left out to graze in the estuaries where the salt marsh plants give the meat a distinctive flavour. Well worth it if you can somehow get it in the US
We have the same in France, like in the famous Mont St-Michel. And I think canadians have it too, so it may be easier to found for an american ^^
Our wales is the home of sheep. 3 sheep for every person 😁🏴
Brave of you to mention Wales in the comment section of a video about sheep
Uppa wales 🏴
It's so weird seeing the us not eating much lamb, seems like a meat they would like
Another place Mutton thrives in America is some Native American communites, specifically Navajo. I'm Navajo and grew up in New Mexico, growing up Mutton was very normalized. My grandparents knew how to butcher sheep, I ate things like mutton stew and mutton sandwiches on a normal basis. It wasn't till I moved, I realized that mutton isn't very common outside certain communities. Mutton is so ingrained into Navajo culture that an event in our Miss Navajo competitions is sheep butchering. Through colonization our taste acclimated to the flavor of mutton, things like Navajo mutton sandwiches are basic and have a lack of spices unlike other anglo mutton recipes I've seen. Navajo Mutton sandwiches just consist of grilled mutton with a whole roast green chile on frybread. After watching this video I would like to taste other mutton, since the flavors are so varying and compare it to the mutton I grew up eating.
There's a miss navajo competition... where sheep butchering is an event... that is so cool! I really couldve gone my whole life without knowing that, the internet is amazing!!
My wife is 100% Navajo and lots of mutton out in NM. Out there sage grows wild and the sheep eat it enough that I could immediately taste it. It was amazing.
@@liamg9410 yeah but its not a miss navajo competition like a beauty contest. its more about cultural representation, not looks...
yeah i was kinda appalled when he mentioned mutton and immigrants versus mentioning navajo. i grew up in page az and ate mutton for a while. then when i moved to the city and started eating lamb from places like ruths chris or local greek restaurants, i cant go back to rez mutton. its so overcooked and barely seasoned or has flavor. its too bland now that i upgraded my pallet. but i do love fry bread and green chile. blue corn mush is great too
Indeed! I ordered some Navajo mutton for this video: www.chambersmeatcompany.com/ But given how long this vid got, I decided to save that for a future vid about the Range Wars.
7th generation sheep farmer/rancher here. Fabulous video. I love that you highlight the nuances of lamb without saying “Gamey; off-flavor, etc”. It saddens me that the average American consumer only eats roughly 6 oz of lamb per year, despite the fact they are such a versatile, multi use animal with the potential to re-revolutionize the food and textile system. I am incredibly impressed by the amount of research involved in this video.
I would eat more lamb if it wasn't so expensive.
@@marcpeterson1092 Fair point, but I am talking about the average American consumer. Did you know the average amount of lamb consumed per person per year in the US is less than 8 oz/person/year? If everyone just had one more bite of lamb per year, the industry would thrive.
Most people I know, they don't care for lamp. The ones that eat it, prefer grain fed.
I like that barnyard taste in lamb 😂
It's expensive and difficult to get in rural places. I'm not surprised that people go for cheaper stuff during a cost of living crisis.
In central Mexico (Hidalgo), they make "barbacoa" made out of mutton; it is made in a stone oven and cooked overnight, one of Mexico's greatest delicacies.
Bruhh. Everything that comes out of Mexico is a delicacy. Even the "bad" food is good food 🤤
So is barbacoa traditionally sheep? It seems like it's a cooking style now, or at least here in Texas, just refers to tender stewed meat
@@tacefairy Yeah north of the border anything traditionally Mexican made with lamb or mutton is instead made with beef or pork. Cause Americans are picky eaters. But if you get a chance to eat tacos *de* pastor (as opposed to the typical tex-mex tacos *al* pastor), do it. Your life will change forever.
@@tacefairy Well, I would guess Barbacoa has some resemblance or connection to the word BBQ, but originally, when us mexicans refers to Barbacoa, we are thinking of the dish and not the cooking style. Specially now, that the word BBQ has becomed part of our leguage, we use both terms in the different situations we are mentioning
First of all, barbacoa is a taino word from the Caribbean area that the Spanish brought to the mainland in the 1520's, natives like the Otomí or Nahuatl were cooking in that way meat well before that.
Now barbacoa in Mexico is done out off different animals depending on the region, like beef in the northern areas, goat in Sinaloa, but in Central Mexico it is done in a pretty ancient way, the sheep is wrapped in maguey leaves and put in a stone oven underground overnight, it is difficult to do in the cities, most of the time it's prepared in rural areas, the most famous barbacoa comes from the state of Hidalgo, but it is done in other places as well, it is expensive by Mexican standards, but people from Mexico City are willing to pay the premium for the experience, it is trully a unique and delicious experience, it is so jucy it "sweats" a kind of broth that you eat before the actual meat, you can also have "mixiotes" were the mutton is done with the nopal plant and wrapped with the film of the maguey leaves, as you can see from the animal and the cooking process it is completely different than what you call beef barbacoa in Northern Mexico, it is a much more indigenous dish and well worth the experience if you can try it.
Mutton is still a staple on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, there are mature sheep grazing all over the place and it was served at every local restaurant and at the yearly culture festival
I moved out of Arizona decades ago. I still miss Navajo tacos, mutton on fry bread, and buying mutton at the Safeway in Flagstaff. There is some native spice (Juniper berries?) that balances the off taste of mutton.
Sadly it seems many younger natives don't seem to keen on mutton or lamb as the older folks.
I wonder if the Welsh suffer from a similar cultural divide in tastebuds as well
Are there any Navajo ranchers who sell the mutton? Or do they only have enough for their communities?
How do they cook it? I❤mutton.
I spent a month in Mongolia and stayed with herding families throughout the steppes. They primarily eat mutton and let me tell you, it was the most exquisite, tender, and flavorful meat I’ve ever had. I’ve craved mutton ever since but alas it’s not available anywhere.
Gobi desert sheeps taste different too. They are grass fed and finished.
i had the chance to eat "samsa" with real fatty "baran" meat (this is big middle asian goat) and yes it has the smell but it was one of the tastiest meat i ever ate
how exactly does one stay with herding families in mongolia?
@@noahhenman7130💸
It is available in the UK and europe. We eat it often and - yes - it's the best meat of them all!
im from chile and i once tasted the new zeland lamb meat and it happened something similar, didnt like that meat as much as the one i grew up with. Love the content! un saludo amigo
cordero magallanico >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
jajaja
que grande la seccion chilena de adam, saludos cabros ksjsjs
Wena los cabros
AUSTRALIAN LAMB IS THE BEST!
It doesn’t have any flavour. Chilean lamb>>>>>>>
In South Africa we grow sheep across the country, but sheep that is farmed in the Karoo is prized for its flavour. Its an arid region (semi-desert) and the flavour of the mutton/lamb that comes from there is very unique and frankly worth its weight in gold.
In the past, Australia's wealth came from 3 things, wheat, wool and gold. When I grew up in the 60's (in sheep country) mutton was the only sheep product you could get at the butcher. After a full-on marketing blitz in the 70's it's now rare to find mutton as everyone sells lamb. A lot of the flavour in lamb is developed in the fattening up process shortly before slaughter. Ones that are fed mostly grain tend to have less flavour, while grass fed is better. In South Australia we have lamb that feed on saltbush and develop a very distinct and sought after flavour.
Well said, here in the UK we also prize salt marsh lamb and mutton is now far less common than it once was. I absolutely agree with you on grass feeding too… it’s an essential part of developing the best meat.
When I see lamb chops for sale in the butchers department at the supermarket, I think 'they must come from F'cking big lambs'.
Agreed - mutton is the full flavour meat.
I tried saltbush lamb in Aussie years ago and was impressed. Granted, it wasn't NZ lamb, but it was good 😉
I was about to comment the same thing. Just less eloquently
I will never forget the taste of mutton from my experience as a kid, living in Saudi Arabia. It was a really common street food in Al Khobar and Al Dammam (we lived in Daharan during the late 70’s). I remember the smells of it cooking when we would go into Khobar shopping or exploring. I actually kind of liked the taste of it.
@Fawaz Shaikh Same
@Fawaz Shaikh Na I was in Jeddah from from the early 2000s to the early 2020's. Not many Aramco compounds there to my knowledge.
@Fawaz Shaikh yes, Daharan North.
@Fawaz Shaikh I don’t think so…. But that was a long time ago for me… I lived there from 1976-1979
Yes. It was a contractor camp for Aramco.
Great video as always Adam! In Hong Kong, we call the sheepy taste 酥 (pronounced like "sew" in Cantonese or "sue" in Mandarin) and we slow-cook it in large clay pots with thick sauces and sheets of fried beancurd. Really interesting that this colloquialism in our language was used in the research paper!
Mandarin uses a different character 膻
@@flashxipho Cool! Just learnt something new ;)
There's another comment on this video with another version of the character that senc posted. Love Chinese, the history for characters is always interesting.
Does that word have any relation to the "siu" in "char siu"?
@@ryanp5244 No, "siu" is 烧, which means "to burn", or "to roast" in this context.
I grew up eating lamb and mutton here in Australia and it still remains my favourite meat after 63 years! I also love goat , especially as a curry, but my wife, who was born in Malaysia sometimes finds lamb too strong…
Lamb and goat are never a favorite of Southeast Asian people. They would rather eat insects and rotten fish. Go figure
Lamb in a vindaloo is great
Greetings from Saudi Arabia! This is really interesting for me as someone who eats a lot of lamb meat as Saudi. I believe the most popular bread here is a breed called "Naemi". You should try our national dish "Kabsa" that's cooked with lamb meat if you ever come to visit Saudi Arabia.
In Norway our national dish is "fårikål" meaning "sheep in cabbage" and it is just what you'd expect. Every year around autumn you can buy dirt cheap sheep meat and people boil it with cabbage and whole black pepper for many hours to make it tender. The best part about it is that it tastes even better when you reheat it the next day, so you can always make way too much without fear of having leftovers.
Oh, and if you really want to try some intense sheepish flavours, try "fenalår", which is cured leg of sheep, it's just like a cured ham except it's very dark colored and taste very much like sheep.
Sounds pretty good ngl
odin thor's son?
It's actually pretty tasty.
Never been a fan of fårikål :( Not only for the sheepish taste that I don't like, but I like my vegetables to have a crunch. However, fårikål should be a must for anyone who likes sheep
sound super tasty!
Very interesting. I grew up in rural Australia. Most common meat was sheep. Roast leg of lamb, chops, my favourite meals. I don't like it but uncles loved lambs fry, mum would eat sheeps brains etc. I used to work a day now and then for a guy who managed a farm. He couldn't pay me (it was a tax write off basically for some lawyer in the city) but a full days work, he would kill a sheep. I would put in the boot/trunk of mums car (had sheets and tarps etc) and take it to the pub and would hang it in the cool room. After it set it would go out the road to another guy who had bandsaw and he would butcher it. Pub, and guy with bandsaw would take their cut and I would get the rest. Was true barter system. I remember living in Alberta, Canada, a very beef heavy state in a beef heavy country. I was talking to a friend who was from Newfoundland, and she asked what I missed about living elsewhere. I said food, and especially lamb. She was disgusted that I ate lamb. I asked why, she said they are so cute. Her father is a sealer. She has no issues with eating seals, but lamb? So not only is taste etc a reason, very culturally significant reasons why food is popular somewhere and not elsewhere. Also had lamb in Argemtina - was different, but put it down to the sauces used above anything else.
I guess its more about what you come in contact with? When you actually interact with certain animals you realise it's not a cartoon, its a dirty, smelly, bitey bastard creature that's too stupid for it's own good and too smart for yours, and it absolutely would eat you if it could. I'm talking about sheep, cows, and seals in this case. Only one is a known carnivore, but all 3 would eat a kitten or a baby duck without even blinking. Deer will strip a corpse before any other scavenger too, coyotes gotta wait in line.
Anyway, all I'm saying is never feel bad about eating an animal, they don't give damn how cute **you** are
I moved away from oz as a child. When I went back in 1979 for a while, my first meal was breakfast ,sausage and eggs. I was wide eyed looking at this gigantic sausage on my plate. When I cut into it watery fat covered my plate. Absolutely ruined my taste for Lamb. Took me years till I ate lamb biryani that I can now enjoy lamb again lol
Lamb are cute, but a seal is definitely cuter.
Its likely that the "mutton" in halal stores is actually goat rather than mature sheep. Like you mentioned, mutton is used to refer to goat's meat in south asians cultures who might frequent these stores. Young goat's meat is also called mutton in this context and has almost none of the smells you would associate with lamb or older sheep mutton.
Real (ie original) biriyani is made with mutton.
goat is excellent. I believe goat is always stewed. the gravy it produces is ove the top with flavor
Where I'm living goat is more expensive than sheep. Also goat meat or mutton is trickier to cook it properly than lamb.
@@marcuscicero9587 nah we do a lot of stuff with goat not just stew
@@micah4801 But the most important thing is, even goat only tastes like the real stuff if it's imported from Pakistan or India. If the local goat breed isn't similar, then it's better to find the best local lamb that comes close in taste. Of course you can't go wrong with beef or chicken since they taste the same everywhere.
I was with some guys who shot a trophy Ram. nobody wanted the meat. “thats’s wasteful.” I thought. I got the backstrap bagged up. even the tenderloin sliced thin and seared was extremely tough, weirdly oily, and definitely had that strong sheepy flavor. game animals also have all that extra cortisol affecting their flavor and texture. but it was extreme, even compared to venison
Much like fish with a "fishy" taste, there's likely a way to mellow it- maybe the same "soak it in milk" technique as with fishiness?
Was that some American species? I tried a mouflon, if it was really muflon and not a scam (got it from some Caucasian dude was grilling kebabs on trail so it didn't exactly come with a certificate) it wasn't bad or overly chewy. A bit gamy and definitely much more intense than what I'm used to (more intense even than the mutton I had in Mongolia >
@@absalomdraconis Mongolians often do it, in fact they often stew mutton in/with addition of milk and the dish is amazing. (Just make sure it's not sheep milk if you're a very strict Jew or non-Pauline Christian, some schools claim the part about cooking lamb in mother's milk isn't literal and should be understood as "sheep in general")
The male rams have the thickest oil in thier fur it gets on clothes and will get on the meat I'm sure too. It dosnt smell good and it won't wash out easily. That's why they won't eat it I'm sure it affects the flavor.
@@Sk0lzky 🤦Because obviously ancient Hebrews didn't have the words to say "all sheep forever, no seriously just all of them"...
I grew up in Durban, South Africa, in a mostly traditional Indian home. The only red meat we really ate was mutton, and very occasionally goat. I never really ate beef until I was 10. Then I had bacon. Tradition went out the window around that time.
In Cape Town, in all of forty years, I only twice found goats' meat in stores. It is the healthiest of all red meats, with the least bad fats, and very nutritious. But the toffee-nosed consumers reject it and stew dead pigs instead. I don't have religious taboos, but I grew up on a farm, saw a pig. It ain't no food! 😂. Give me Karoo lamb or mutton any day, but it's hard to find in the city where the woke buy their food.
@@unwoke1652 I agree on the mutton but raise you a camel. is also really nice but hard to find.
@@unwoke1652A few years ago I had to go work at a ruby mine in Mozambique.
The food was very indian because the cooks etc were all from India and I goy tired of not knowing what I am eating.
The one day they had goat as an option and I said yes, please.
Much to the disgust of some other South African contractors there.
I was born in the 1940's and in my early days we ate lamb quite often, as did the other kids I knew. That was in northeast Ohio, which was pretty mainstream US whiteguy territory. Over the years I have become a little perplexed as to why lamb has fallen so far out of favor. After seeing this video I want to try putting some lamb in my smoker. I have purchased goat meat at my local Chinese market and it tastes nothing like lamb; it is very mild. So it was a disappointing experiment. Thanks for another interesting video.
Hope you can find some more appealing meat soon
@Jeffrey Wagner that's such cap
You can thank me later, if you make it. There is a very spiced smoked lamb leg named Sikandari raan. It's said that it was Alexander the Great's favourite dish in India. He was apparently quite a foodie. Regardless of the veracity it's absolutely delicious.
Here is a good recipe that has been slightly westernised to make our lives easier: th-cam.com/video/quvqApiThgE/w-d-xo.html
Make curry goat, it's the best way.
Here's a cultural explanation I've heard from my parents as to why people (at least in NZ) perfer lamb over sheep. I'm a younger generation kiwi, but even just back in my grandparents childhood - if you were skint broke (which they were), the cheapest form of artificial light was sheep-tallow candles. And as you'd expect, when you burn it your whole house is permeated with sheep smell. After smelling that every evening, do you really want sheep for dinner? Mmmmm slow roast candles haha.
It's amazing how much the feed, environment, and variety of an animal can change the flavour. I tried wild boar once, hunted from a reserve, and honestly tasted nothing like even free range pork you can buy. The sheep people ate back in the day could've tasted different to modern mutton.
Also, always wondered why 'mutton' in India refers to goat meat, not lamb.
Fellow kiwi here. I grew up in the 70s, so no tallow candles, but we ate a lot of mutton, because it was cheap. I suspect a lot of the reason people don't eat it here now is just because of that association with poverty, and the old fashioned "meat and three vege" style of eating. When more international cuisines started becoming popular in NZ in the 80s, suddenly mutton became deeply unfashionable and pretty much disappeared.
I’m a Brit in the U.S. We’ve always used mutton to refer to an older sheep or goat, and lamb to mean a young sheep.
@@FutureCatNZ The association with ''famine food'' is VERY context variable, and strong.
Example: My grand parents (Gaspésie region of Québec, Canada) were from a coastal fishing village in the Depression. So fish was pretty valuable.
Lobster, crab and shrimp? Those were the things that got caught in the nets and had no value.
You went far in the field to drop the shells and debris: you don't want the neighbors to see you are reduced to eat ... lobster! The Shame of lobster poverty.
There a lot of food that are pretty nutritious, but had that association, but not anymore with the younger generations. So we see a rediscovery of ''old time foods'' that are nutritious, tasty, and in certain cases more ''eco-friendly'' with young chefs.
Pork, mutton, oats, barley, sourdough bread, legumes, mushrooms, organs... All sorts of things my Grand-parents hate (due to the Depression and the following WWII rationing) but I enjoy very much.
And even if they rationally KNOW these things can be good, the memory of these things, badly prepared, with poverty is too much.
Maybe the indians mistook them.Shorthair sheep and goats look very similar,especially if hornless.
@@naamadossantossilva4736 no I'm pretty sure the brits used to use the term interchangeably back in the 17/1800s so mutton got cemented as goat meat in indian english. the same applies to so many other in it too, the indian english dialect is so interesting.
also i see you ms portuguesa
I’m in Australia and we eat lamb quite a lot. My parents grew up on sheep farms and we ate lamb a lot, I love the taste, and I really distinctly recall the smells and taste as you discuss them, but I’ve very rarely had mutton though! When I have, it’s always been slow cooked and cooked along with other flavours in stews etc. to drown out the flavour. But there is nothing better on this earth than a beautiful roast lamb flavour! Yum
I’ve always loved lamb curry. I haven’t noticed a “gamey” flavor, mostly it tastes like nicer beef.
Once you put meat in a spicy stew it just not that gamey anymore
just like some restaurants use spices to hide flavor of fish went off
In Iranian food we get rid of the gamey taste with two ways;
1. We use onions, rubbing them against the meat and marintating our meat and kebabs in onion, which cuts through the strong taste.
2. When making our stews (similar to curries) we remove the foam that raises to the top of the simmering broth, this gets rid of the gamey taste as well.
Now you just have a better version of beef, with maybe some subtle pleasant difference.
Cool, its like you never watched the video explaining about the difference between lamb and mutton
Lamb is head and shoulders better than beef (no pun intended), and it's a damn shame people don't eat more of it in America, which according to Adam is why it's so expensive.
It's fairly easy to get right cuz the meat is so naturally tender, and has just the right amount of fat content.
Making lamb curry is an unfortunate luxury cuz of how expensive lamb is. My local halal market only occasionally stocks lamb shank due to limited availability.
I guess at the end of the day, it's not exactly healthy either, and regardless of the price I'd still eat way more chicken and fish.
Curry strong flavors !
"They definitely love their sheep in Wales" - I see what you did there, Adam xD
My understanding is that the reputation that the Welsh (and Scots) had for bestiality with Sheep actually came from them exploiting a quirk of English law to reduce their punishment when caught stealing English Sheep. Stealing a sheep would get them the death penalty, but if they plead guilty to merely borrowing the sheep to have sex with her then the punishment would be reduced to a small fine. Furthermore, if they claimed to have already had sex with the sheep then the animal would have to be slaughtered and no one was allowed to eat it, so they could cost the English owner more than the value of the fines they themselves had to pay.
Please dont mean what i think it means....
I laughed way too hard for something I'm not sure was even intended when I heard it lol
11:17 I absolutely love how much joy the scent expert clearly takes in talking about the scents he's got
In southern Chile it is tradition to cook the whole animal in a wooden stake for hours, very famous around here. It is also traditional to collect the blood of the animal as it is sacrificed, and add spices to drink it or eat it once it has coagulated, it's called "ñachi".
Yuck
@@velocibadgery I'm from Southern Chile and I also find it gross
Sounds good
Just coagulated? Wow. I'm fine with blood but that texture can't be nice.
que rico un ñachicito diablooo
When you revealed that skatole was a component of what makes mutton taste "sou", the term "barnyardy" immediately made sense to me. I don't like mutton or strong tasting lamb because to me, the taste is reminiscent of working farms or stock yards.
The "sou" compounds were sweaty-smelling medium-chain fatty acids, like the 4-methyloctanoic, not skatole.
Different compounds, different smells.
You should try South African Karoo ‘lamb’. They are usually older but eat non grass vegetation. The flavour is incredible.
In the inland Chinese province I came from (Guizhou if you are curious), we have mutton rice noodle soups that are very delicious. Those mutton rice noodle soup restaurant that has the sheepiest smell is usually the most popular. Those restaurant usually have less smell of spice as well. We usually enjoy those noodle soup with spicy chili oil and raw garlic. When I visited the northern part of China where mutton is frequently on the menu, the locals say that "Eating mutton without garlic reduces flavor by a half".
There is also a beef version of that rice noodle soup. But for me, I prefer mutton rice noodle soup to beef rice noodle soup since they have more complex flavor. Beef version tends to taste less vibrant and you taste more spice than beef.
In addition, those sheepiest restaurant usually serve sheep insides as well so sometimes I get sheep liver (yes, you can order sheep PP if you are lucky). So I guess if I go to Scotland someday, I am going to eat a lot of haggis.
Well now i need to try that mutton noodle soup! Sounds delicious!
Are you sure the mutton is from sheep? Because it could be from goats
@@danieleyre8913 shoot, I think should mention that the meat is exclusively from goat (yes, goat tastes better). But I am not familiar with the vocabulary of goat meat.
It’s hard to avoid haggis tatties and nips (that’s potatoes and turnips how it’s traditionally served) - I eat as much as I can when there and it doesn’t have a strong game flavour you might expect.
I recall Mum making a mutton stew on a Saturday. She’s start it early in the day in the pressure cooker, then it would bubble away on stovetop with a variety of vegetables for several hours. Since our kitchen was sort of an extension off the main house cooking smells didn’t really permeate throughout . (This is what I think about as folks remodel their home to open concept. They need an alternate cooking space for smelly foods 🤷♀️ )
Little grammatical nitpick: sheep aren’t ‘sheared’, they are ‘shorn’.
My parents raised sheep (for wool), and I grew up with that - I do not miss it, let me tell you. I love the meat, and lanolin’s great for your skin. (Our sheep grazed in our fields in summer, and ate hay (alfalfa hay) in winter.
Sheared isn't wrong
@@speedwagon1824 when speaking of shearing sheep in the past tense, it's 'shorn'.
Grew up in a farming family (cows, rather than sheep) you could always tell which farmers sheared sheep, cause they were the only ones with soft hands
Brilliant video! Coming from the UK, the flavour of "Sheep" was something I always missed after I moved to the US. Here in Oregon, we can get some quite spectacular mutton from a couple of local butchers, funky and edgy rather than mild Kiwi lamb. Mutton kofta is still one of my favourites.
You should roast a leg of mutton - like lamb but just a lot more so.
I love mutton and I have always preferred it to lamb, which generally tastes bland in my opinion. Coming from a Mediterranean culture it has been a staple of the local diet (Greece) and I personally eat mutton quite often. The smell in my opinion is something that you can easily get used to, I have American friends here that didn't even come close to it initially and now they just die for it. Also, while many people avoid it, if you get a really high quality mutton then you can try it grilled - medium rare - which is simply heavenly.
Also to offer my ideas about the smell: Sheep raised in areas like Britain or New Zealand, tend to have a stronger smell when older due to the climate of the areas. These are areas with rich green pastures that lead to well-fed sheep with a much greater fat concentration (and smell). Sheep from the eastern Mediterranean tend to be raised in areas with much drier climate which leads to less fat and not as strong of a smell.
Finally, one type of sheep meat that you did not mention is Ram meat, which is notoriously difficult to cook (extremely tough) and much more smelly (add in the hormones, if you have ever been close to a ram, you know what I mean). Ram meat can be delicious and tastes completely different (starts to get closer to deer meat) but it is almost impossible to find good one, as diet is extremely important to make it easily edible. In some islands here there is a tradition of releasing a ram to a dry islet for a few months, where he will survive just with wild herbs, weeds and their moisture, as there is no water. This leads to a massive loss of fat and the previously hard to eat ram becomes extremely tasty.
You literally don't understand yourself what you are prattling about. Greece is not Mediterrenean and shepherd culture is most definitely not Neogreek which you actually are. It is *Aromanian* and you fraudently hijacked with your Neogreek propaganda and claimed credit. Simple and truthful. We already both complusively lying and from your writing style I already actually know you are a child in the head and a completely sophistry-spewing lying immature hysterical woman in the head who opportunistically talks with your fancy Anglo-Saxon diction where it fits her/you. *No* instead Greek is most truly in fact actually *Western Asian and tsiftetelo-Anatolian culture, an Oriental culture.* Your cuisine is 90% *TURKISH.*
In Neogreeks of course you don't talk with the same manner but you still actually talk *condescendingly uneducated* and *overfamiliarly uncouth* with a neurotically punchable attitude. You play a role here.
I also prefer mutton, but that is quite impossible to find in Australia today - unless you have a shepard friend. Yes, our lamb has very little flavour, I do not bother buying it.
I much prefer Mutton and Adult Goat (seemingly even harder to find here in a store than Mutton) over lamb or the southwestern Cabrita del horno served in some restaurants in San Antonio. The best that I have had was Anatolian Mutton and Goat where the whole animal was spit roasted. Probably got more than my "Fair" share at the serving table since many of my colleagues wanted something "New and Exciting" for dinner instead of "Standard Chow Hall" meals and then decided that the flavors were not for them and then paid extra to eat at the chow hall anyway. I had already paid for my meal and sort of "Pigged Out" while I could. Well worth the later teasing and hassles that came with having stayed long after others had left. For me just another enjoyable experience during my two years in country. Learned to pass on the heated sweetened goat milk, however. Cold without extra sugar is much better in my opinion.
I love to milk directly into my hot morning tea, and give it a frothy head!
Wow I joined this channel for recipes and am now fascinated by Adam and his ability to dive deep into food science with videos like these. I had no idea he'd go this deep. Thank you so much Adam this content is amazing!
His macaron video is hilarious. It’s what got me hooked on his channel.
Had a neighbor growing up that had sheep to shear. At one time he spent the most on record for a single ram. We went over there for Sunday night dinner one night. We had mutton on pizza. It was memorable. Chewy and the mutton flavor was rather unique. If we were told is was mutton it would be older then definitely. We helped him dock tails and band rams one year. 350 lambs done both mornings 5-9am. We did it so early to not give the lambs heat stress.
Also usually when we eat lamb (at least here in australia!) it’s not a tiny little lamb. It’s like a teenage sheep. They’ve grown quite a lot but haven’t reached maturity, so they have plenty of meat (a tiny lamb would have barely any), but haven’t matured and got the mutton taste yet
I choose wool over synthetic fibres when I have the choice. Then again, I also like sheepy-flavoured meat. And for years my favourite sweater had a strong lanolin odour whenever it got wet, which since I lived in Oregon at the time was pretty often.
Same, wool, cotton, and linen > synthetics. The wool is often blended with synthetics (15-30%) for more durability; it still works like wool, warm and wicking moisture.
Great video. Lamb and Mutton are staples in my city (Durban, South Africa). It’s probably due to the country being an old British colony AND the huge population of Indians that were brought to the city in the 1800s who did not eat pork and beef so sheep became the go to meat. One of the best versions of sheep is a mutton bunny chow made using mutton curry, made in the Durban style which is very different to other curry styles, filled into hollowed out white bread. You might have seen some fancy versions of these but the best are at local spots in and around the city. Lamb has taken over from mutton as the easier to get and more primary meat available but mutton is still available and still of high quality. Oddly, goat meat is rare in SA especially in cities so any mutton you get generally will be from sheep.
This is all so interesting! Especially the scent component. I grew up not eating red meat or pork, and still never have. So I didn't acquire a taste for these things. I have a pretty decent sense of smell, and the few times I smelled cooked lamb, it was the worse smell I ever encountered in my life. I couldn't stay in the same room, and couldn't kiss my husband after he'd eaten some. For comparison, beef doesn't smell actively bad, but I certainly don't like beef flavored things, and pork smells pretty bad (yes, even bacon), but not as intensely pungent as lamb.
I had to do a double take at 9:45. I heard that as "hardly" rather than "heartily", but given the context, obviously the latter makes more sense.
Literally opened up the comments just now to say the exact same thing
Here in South Africa we have the most succulent and delicious tasting lamb and mutton unique and indigenous to the Karoo desert region. The Karoo sheep mainly feed on this indigenous flora, which is nutritious as well as palatable to the sheep. These shrubs have a very herby aroma, varying from rosemary, thyme, sage, eucalyptus and lavender. One can say that the sheep flavour their own meat while grazing. Karoo Lamb is South Africa's first geographical indication (GI) in the meat industry and has achieved the unique achievement to be recognised by the European Union as a true GI - a product with similar geographical and sensory features to Parma ham, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and many other lamb, ham and cheese specific to a geographical region.
I would love to try some. Sounds delicious
Do you guys taste the same after eating the lamb? Asking for a friend.
This is why farming is awful we are feeding animals the same thing and just destroying everything that makes them them
When living CapeTown we had Karoo mutton and lamb packs delivered once a month, I miss it still. Now living in New Zealand the lamb is just too fatty and Sheepy. Have taken to Goat which is popular here now due to Goat farming for milk.
As an Indian (living in Fiji) I can't eat beef so my main source of red meat is lamb which is my favourite meat. I never buy shanks though because while a cheaper cut over shoulder chops, shanks are trickier to cook and has a taste that doesn't agree with me just like chumps or neck pieces, so while it costs me more I always go for shoulder chops, tell them to cut it thin, lightly marinate it with soy sauce, salt and pepper minutes before cooking and pop them in the oven for fifteen to twenty minutes to pull out tasty barbecued lamb to supplement my carnivore diet. Fun.
@@RoshanAntonyTauro it's against my religion and culture.
Some of the nicest mutton I ever ate was cooked by an Indian friend's Mum. It was spicy and tender, and had a wonderful gravy. I ate three servings. I regret nothing.
I’m from MENA descent, where we only consume sheep of the fat-tailed variety (they produces more coarse wool, and are reared mainly for the quality of their meat). The tail fat is an essential ingredient and flavour profile to us. In fact no kebab recipe is complete before mixing in a significant amount of tail fat (called Liya in Arabic) to add a unique savoury flavour. Tail fat can be purchased separately, and is used in many recipes. Even in food that doesn’t use sheep meat.
So I found it rather strange when you criticised the taste of more fatty mutton, and said that the leaner meat is more palatable!
I’m bringing to question wether this is because tail fat tastes fundamentally different from the rest of the sheep, or because American food culture is just too generally avert to more developed taste profiles?
EDIT: Tail fat is also high in HDL and actually helps counteract high cholesterol and reduce the risk of CVD.
Where are the Mena from? I recently watched a video about Uzbekistan which featured these fat tailed sheep
And yes American food is pretty boring in several senses. Majorly just the same 5 flavors again and again and again. Salty and sweet especially.
im australian and i love lamb meat, and i was thinking the whole time the fat is my favourite part, and why i love lamb so much, the fat tastes great, beef fat and pork fat are both tough and flavourless in most cases in my experience. tldr lamb fat is gods gift to man
@@ForageGardener americans dont even give a shit about whats "american food" most americans will tell you their favorite food is some sort of "ethnic" food or texmex type mash up of cultures food. We just like objectively good tasting stuff. And the cleanest most regulated food in the world.
@@ForageGardener Have you never tasted BBQ before? The American palate has a lot more complexity than you’re dismissing it as. Your argument about blandness comes from the corporatized agro-group factory foods filling shelves around the entire world, not just America.
I've had mutton on several occasions, and really like it, but then I like "strong" meat flavours but I know a lot of people don't. One of my big complaints about beef and chicken we get is that so much of it is bland. But then the food trade is catering for the market they can sell to.
I grew up in Spain, and my grandma had a buncha unused land she leased to this sheep farmer for grazing, and in exchange we got a cheese a week & a mutton or two a year. It’s just such a nostalgic food to me now. But it does smell like unwashed rural farmer even while cooked
I just cannot get enough of these videos! I've never been so adventurous with food but these videos have encouraged me to try new things with the understanding that I don't need to be a professional chef and I can make things the way I like them without feeling ashamed. Appreciate the content as always Adam. Keep up the great work! 👍
Lamb is my favorite meat. Your discussion of the regional differences, brought memories of a trip In the late 90's, to England and France. I was with a former sorority sister. We both live on the US west coast ... San Francisco, and Salem, OR. In the south of France, we ate in a "family style" restaurant, which featured a lamb stew that day. My friend was hesitant. She said "lamb is sour." I didn't know what she meant. The dish was delicious, and she was surprised that she loved it, too. Later, in London, we ate in a Pub that offered "Shepherd's Pie," on the menu. (I could kill for Shepherd's Pie.) I told her it was lamb, and we both ordered it, enthusiastically. It WAS "sour." And, I knew what she had meant in the French restaurant. I asked if it was mutton, and was assured that it was lamb.
I've heard that Scottish lamb is superb, but we didn't get to Scotland on that trip. Someday.
I think that most of our lamb, in northern California, comes from Sonoma County, which is also a major dairy, and wine, region. Lamb, cheese and wine ... it doesn't get much better than that!
There is a ton of shepherding in central Utah, and there’s a festival in my grandma’s home town once a year where they serve Mutton that Friday evening and Lamb sandwiches for lunch the next day. Definitely brings back good memories.
So, in Iceland there's a lot of sheep/lamb and a lot of our traditional dishes are lamb-based, the Icelandic lamb tastes of a whole lot more than the New Zealand one, from what I've tasted - to the point that I'd call the New Zealand lamb flavourless.
I'm from NZ, and I rate lamb as less taste, Hogget medium taste, mutton as fully flavoured.
Lamb is up to a year old, hogget between 1 and 2 years, mutton 2yrs and over.. often an older animal. Lamb has become the fashion, and the older sheep are hard to get now (locally), maybe they are sold overseas. To me, Mutton is my preference.
Here in Australia, we used to do a lamb roast almost every week. Our lamb is similarly mild in flavor like NZ lamb and goes great with baked potatoes and gravy.
AND I remember back in the 70's Lamb was served at least 4 times per week in our house as it was by FAR the cheapest of all the meats. The butcher would al;ways throw in a few "shanks" for free if you had a dog . Those shanks are now AUD $25 a kilo !!!!! AHHHH
@@tilapiadave3234 back then it was so abundant that Lamb Slouvaki was made into a traditional Australian Greek dish. It was so impactful it made it back to Greece
I remember buying hogget 20 years ago here in South Australia because it was the cheapest meat I could find. I was raised on it my grandparents were farmers, so I never noticed the slightly stronger taste.
Yea the shank went to the dog back then now it's a delicacy lol
American lamb is milder
Glad to see your video. I grew up in South Africa, where I learned to love lamb, and mutton even more. For the last 38 years I have been living in the country of my birth, USA, up in the rural northeast. I crave mutton or even lamb all the time, but can't afford the expensive Ozzy imports, plus it is very weak in taste. A year ago however, I managed to buy a whole sheep off a local wool farm. The old ewe was past it for their purposes. She is cut and packed in my freezer. I pull some out only for special occasions. 3 days ago I pulled out the large rack of ribs, and the missus and I where in heaven with slow roasted mutton ribs. People don't know what they are missing. And as an aspiring home chef, I can tell you that mutton is by far the best meat for Indian and North African curry dishes.
Venison is big around here (whitetail deer) and if you get a young one there is a very mild taste, But put down a 5+ year old buck and you can actually taste it. My second favorite.
Come over for a Braai! Some lamb chops on the fire.
@@UlrichHoltzhausen I would love that. The last SA braai I had was at my brother's home in Fouriesburg back in 2013.
@@nathanlambshead4778 Would be nice. Does your brother reside in SA?
@@UlrichHoltzhausen Not any more. He and his wife immigrated here (Maine, USA) 5 years ago. He has a lot of contacts over there still of course, and goes back over often. I came over here in 1987.
@@nathanlambshead4778 Okay. How did you come to live here?
One of the best ever texas style chili's I ever did was using a fairly strong tasting lamb. The heavier rich taste made the chili amazing, and it just took on so much more of the chili flavour then beef usually does. Well worth it. Also a reason I love lamb dishes in the indian cuisine but never really ever order any beef based dishes.
That does sound great and kind of makes me want to try a lamb chilli now
In Jamaica we eat only local adult goat or sheep (mutton), never the youngster (lamb). From foreign we import only goat or ewe mutton (mainly Australian or New Zealand), but no lamb. Yes it requires a long cooking time, but we have acquired this pronounced taste by complementing it with our herbs & spices - it's a national treasure, JUST DELICIOUS.
GOAT FEAST :D
Besides slow cooking mutton, the alternative would be to pre-cook it (with salt & whatever herbs & spices you want) in a pressure cooker. Well, that's what we do here in Malaysia. You could also soak / pre-marinate any meat in a ginger & water solution. Gniger is a natural tenderiser & it also mellows out the meaty smell & flavour. Using ginger this way is a Chinese method that's applicable to all meats.
As for terminologies, in Malaysia (and possibly throughout Southeast Asia), mutton is goat meat & lamb is sheep meat. Sheeps aren't local to this region, but goats are. So I suppose it makes sense that we only import lamb & not adult sheep. Never understood why Westerners referred to sheep as both lamb & mutton. Thanks for the clarification.
Cheers..
In vietnam, they use vinegar, with salt and ginger to clean & tenderize beef. Their Pho-soup is really nice.
But Malaysia easily wins best mutton soup on this planet.
At the start of the video I thought to myself "Well I've had plenty of mutton as BBQ growing up in Western Kentucky." I didn't know we're one of the few areas with an actual appetite for mutton in the US. The Fancy Farm picnic in Graves County has good mutton in August.
I started eating New Zealand lamb raw (and cooked) a few years ago, but the store I bought it at stopped selling it. I live in Japan so its fairly safe, but the taste was really unique. I think it was mostly in the fat, but it was very delicious.
As a worker for one of the biggest lamb processing factories in New Zealand, you’re definitely right in saying that a lot of the flavour comes from the fat. There’s a lot of lean cuts that really just taste like dry beef steak.
Also to weird you out, theres a good chance i have handled the lamb you eat. About 80-85% of our product is exported and china/japan are our biggest markets. So much so that only for japan we specially produce sukiyaki or really thin sliced lamb shoulder
@@Pheatan Yes, I see the thinly sliced stuff now mostly. I bought lamb chops last year but haven't seen it in awhile.
Also a Kiwi, I would have to disagree with you on the flavour being in the fat, I grew up on lamb and mutton, but I can't stand the flavour of the fat. If it is dry, it is over cooked.@@Pheatan
I've tried lamb/mutton so many times, so many places, cooked so many different ways with different sauces and accompaniments and I still can't get myself to like it. It just always tastes like how sheep smell to me and I cannot stand it. I love venison, I've eaten muskrat, I can handle gamey flavors but lamb just doesn't do it for me.
Thank you for this! I have always thought mutton tastes "gamey" - far more like venison than beef. Inever knew why though, until now. As for my personal favorite, the piggys get my vote 😊
When I went to Japan, one of the things I made sure to try there was horse sashimi, and it was legit delicious, and unlike any other red meat I've had. I would definitely eat it here if it wasn't taboo.
NOOOÒ!!!!! MR. EDDDDDDD!!!! WHHHHYYYY!!!
There is also whale meat in Japan
I live in Japan and yeah, horse is super good. I kind of like whale too but it's VERY gamey and most Japanese people don't even like it as far as I can tell.
Lamb/mutton are actually my favorite meats but very hard to find here sadly.
@@TMTLive Whale smells like crossover between pork and fish, no wonder many people are aversed by it. Only saw it once in a discount supermarket in Japan, and never saw it in mainstream supermarket there
@@TMTLive I love Genghiz Khan when I travelled to Hokkaido
Wow, you just blew my mind! I had an 8th of a cow as a deal from a local farmer, frozen and already dismembered. It was the best quality of beef you could get, like grass fed and free roaming. Some parts had a pretty strong taste of sheep or venison. With your explanation I know, that it must have come from the all grass diet of that particular cow.
I'm in Kentucky, in a rural farming community. We used to have a general store that served chopped barbequed mutton and it was the absolute best, they closed down a bit over a decade ago and I've not seen anywhere else, nearby, that serves it. Everywhere else I've had it has been a disappointment like they just roast it in the oven or boil it then chop it up with BBQ sauces versus actually smoking it, I wish eating it would come back in style.
Family is from hopkinsville, KY I get Mutton by the pound everytime I go down, can still get it from a couple different places up that way
15:04 thanks for the detour! (And thanks to your family for their patience :) )
Good info in excellent video. I grew up on a sheep and cattle ranch in New Zealand. We had 5000 sheep (& 500 cattle). “Lamb” for us meant a sheep up until a year of age. From one to two years old, a sheep is a “hogget”, and from 2 yo onwards it is “mutton”. Lamb is very soft and has a delicate flavour. Hogget is probably what you’re getting in the US as “New Zealand lamb”. “Mutton” is very strong tasting (which is why it’s delicious) and needs to be slow roasted for many hours. My mother roasted mutton every weekday, putting it in the oven at 1500 (3pm) and we’d eat at 1900 (7pm). Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we could not buy actual lamb because it was all exported to earn money for the nation. Kiwis could buy only hogget, but of course, we never bought sheep, pigs, or cattle to eat because we ate animals we grew. Our animals ate grass and winter root crops. We never fed them grain.
No. Hogget is now very hard to find in NZ. It is better business for farmers to raise lamb.
I went to a butcher in cleveland that specialized in sheep and special ordered mutton as he didn't have any in stock. I just wanted to try it since I love lamb. He gave me some "mutton chops" but the taste was slow close to lamb as to be hard to distinguish. After seeing your video I suspect he just didn't want to tell me he couldn't get it and gave me lamb chops. They were slightly larger than the lamb chops i normally see but that was basically it.
modern meat breeds don't taste really that different, there's a way bigger difference between breeds than between an older and youger animal
Sooo, lamb dressed as mutton?
Market for proper mutton is so small in the US that the best he could lay hands on was an older lamb. With so few buyers it rarely makes sense to pay to feed a sheep to maturity, when profit can be made much earlier.
@@davidturner7577 also he failed to adress something, the heavy lamb is the farmed animal with the highest feed efficiency and protein conversion, due to their hormones and the fact that they are grazing (or eating grain) and drinking milk. In less than a year they give +20kg of meat per head
When I was high school age my cousin and some classmates families raised sheep, and we often had home ground and grilled Lamb Burgers that were just incredible tasting with home made dark mustard with a little radish mixed in and mint jelly. I know it sounds weird but it was really good with a side thick cut potatoes wedges with the peel left on.
Sounds glorious! 🤤
I never understood the mint jelly/lamb combo. Or pork/apple is another that i see a lot.. not a huge pork chops fan. But i love pulled pork and duh bacon.... But tenderloins and chops are always less tastey chicken to me.
Very late to this party but if you ever get a chance try South African Karoo lamb. They are free range and eat bushes that are basically wild rosemary. It's something special.
I love mutton and that "sheepy" taste is intoxicating to me. Mutton also tend to be rich in fat which is perfect for a soup.
I eat lamb chops or cutlets at least twice a week, I absolutely love its delicious fatty, melty, crispyness when pan fried at a high heat.
Grilled over wood coals is also delicious.
I'm also just getting in to eating mutton, it's just criminal that it's not eaten more in this country which is absolutely covered in sheep. I think if you asked your average British person in the street nowadays they wouldn't even know what mutton was, much less have tried it.
I grew up less than 2 minutes from moonlight BBQ and still live in Owensboro. Moonlight was a childhood staple and until very recently I never realized that mutton ( Our family's go-to ) was such a local thing and not very widespread. The way folks talk about it you would think it's popular all over the country lol. Been a long time fan and geeked out when I saw you go to moonlight while watching some videos of yours I've missed over the years. Cheers Adam!
Grew up in the area myself and if I don't go at least yearly it was a bad year since St. Augustine at Reed stopped having their July 4th picnic years ago (I grew up there in the 70s).
When you said that you heartily recommend the beef, it sounded like "hardly" to me. Thank you for adding the captions, helps me improve my English.
Glad you enjoyed some Moonlite mutton! It's always amusing to me that Owensboro is known for our BBQ, but also as one of the only places that mutton is eaten in the US. I grew up eating mutton, so it never seemed strange to me.
My grandmother owns a sheep farm. I had only ever had mutton or lamb from her. I like that meat and use it often to cook with. The first time that I ever got some from another place It was so sharply different. It wasn’t bad, but definitely worse than what I was used to
As a welshman I can confirm we're big on lamb/sheep! In the UK we also have a middle category. Lamb is anything younger than one year. Mutton is anything older than two. If its between 1 and 2 years old its called Hogget or Shearling. This is definitely the sweet spot!
Can also be called weather. Very tasty
It used to be that lamb was any animal that didn't have it's adult teeth when slaughtered, and hogget was between growing it's adult teeth and 2 years, but this was changed because some farmers sent lambs to market but they were hogget by the time they reached the slaughterhouse, which led to disputes over pricing and labeling.
10:51
Hey Adam! Just a quick tip for future situations in case you find yourself referring to molecules and their relation to taste.
"Octanoic" is not pronounced "octonic." It's pronounced Oc-tuh-no-ic.
The suffix "-oic" indicates that the molecule is a carboxylic acid, that is it has a the funciontal group COOH (a carbon with a double bond to an oxygen as well as a single bond to an -OH alcohol group). The "oct" indicates that it's an 8-carbon molecule.
Perhaps the carboxylic acid we are most familiar with (especially those who cook!) is 'ethanoic acid' whose prefix "eth" indicates a 2-carbon molecule (think ethanol; a 2-carbon alcohol). If you haven't guessed it already, ethanoic acid = vinegar! Indeed, this is why red wine left out for too long turns to vinegar: It has changed from a 2-carbon alcohol to a 2-carbon carboxylic acid. Neat!
Bonus fun fact: The 2-carbon carboxylic acid, ethanoic acid, is vinegar. The 1-carbon carboxylic acid is also known as "methanoic acid" (think methane as a 1-carbon alkane) which is also known more casually as formic acid. Forma is latin for ant. And some communities (e.g., native tribes of the past - maybe some of the present?) have been known to crush ants over their food on purpose for the acid taste that comes from their crushed bodies.
To the taste of lanolin "you would not want in your meat": Camel milk contains lanolin, too and it clearly tastes like wool. For westerners it's really odd, but in Dubai camel milk is quite a common drink.
As someone who grew up in Southern Indiana/Western KY, Moonlite BBQ is a real treat! Next time you're in Owensboro, try Old Hickory off Frederica Street. It's where all the locals go for mutton.
See, I grew up just a couple counties over from Owensboro (and still live in the general area) and have been to Moonlite a couple dozen times, while I find them Okay, I don't think they're anything to write home about. I've had better bbq in many other places, even middle of nowhere Arkansas who isn't exactly known for bbq. I know they must have been better because everyone I know always raved about them growing up, but I feel like I've given them enough tries to say that I'll definitely eat there if I'm craving bbq, but if there's other options nearby I'll likely try them.
Actually, here in New Zealand, many exported sheep meat products undergo a process that removes that "sheep-y" flavour - something about foreigners not being able to handle it.
whats the process up there on that steepest cliff? Is it the famous push back well
As a Western Kentuckian (Paducah, even farther west than Owensboro), we did have mutton barbecue from time to time. In fact, as a "wet" barbecue, I found I actually preferred it for sandwiches even over pork! Its certainly not the main BBQ meat, but its a flavor that is readily available.
My grandparents had a sheep ranch when I was growing up so I've had a lot of delicious lamb (and mutton). Generally if someone says "I don't like lamb" it's because their first experience with it was not cooked properly. The flavour is so distinct that if your first association with it is negative most people won't be able to get past it, regardless of how well it's prepared for them later. Where as I associate it with yummy, and even not so good sheep I think is delicious 😅
I learned a lot today about sheep meat. I didn't realize there was so much variation in taste.
There is a local (WA state) restaurant that has a roast lamb dinner I like quite well. I never thought about the age of the sheep but given the meat is pretty mild it probably really is 'lamb' and not 'mutton'.
There are three age types of sheep
Meats. Hogget is older than lamb
And younger than mutton.
Would be good flavour without being so tough.
Thanks for this episode, I/we have been eating lamb since I was a child (I'm now 70). My mom was born in England and emigrated with her mom and dad as a child. My grandparents brought with them the love of lamb.
We (my family) eat lamb regularly and over the years, I have had many occasions where I detected an "off" odor in the meat. The smell is very repugnant to me while most other people do not even detect the odor. It is so bad for me that if I do eat is, I can smell it in my (poop) the next day, to the point now that I cannot cook lamb in my home that I detect this odor in. And yes, to me it smells like poop (shit)!!!
I have pointed it out to grocers where I have purchased the (usually lamb leg) roasts and they accepted the return but I sensed that they couldn't really smell it. I usually can tell as soon as I open the (cryovac) package that it's bad. Well that is bad to me, because I cannot eat it or even cook it in my home.
Thanks Al, Latendre
Some people are sensitive to the taste/smell of meat from the rams even when they are only 7-8 months old when butchered. Others don't notice a difference so perhaps that's the reason.
For anyone interested, the Chinese word specifically for “the sheepy taste” is 膻, pronounced “Shan” in Mandarin. I suspect the “soo” from the paper is a dialect or just a result of mishearing or misremembering.
sou 酥 is cantonese
Or it could be 骚 sao, also means stinky/musky, or even slutty lol
Or is it (sao)骚?
@@daniellin1726 I think ur correct
I'm Australian and I have always loved mutton. It is one of my favourite meats, Its just so damn hard to get hold of these days. You have to generally get the butcher to order it in specially even if they can. My mother and I recently found a farm that butchers, processes and sells all there own animals cow, sheep, pigs etc. and we can get mutton from them but the only catch is we have to buy the whole sheep as they have to let the sheep age specially for us to buy. The market for mutton just isn't there unfortunately, which is a shame as when prepared correctly it is such a nice meat, as you found out when you had the mutton BBQ. Anyway thanks for another great video. You should do a mutton BBQ video that I would love to see.
I tend to find lamb shanks to be a very popular christmas dinner / lunch here in australia, is that just me?
If you’re in Melbourne Vic markets has Mutton.
As a food chemist I really enjoyed this episode. Well done!
As a Greek I've been dying for this video!
I don't doubt it.
Malaka
@@InfiniteGatsu ευχαριστώ Ντικ 💞
Glad you included the Mutton BBQ from Western KY! We used Moonlite to cater our wedding. I wanted that mutton at our reception (we had chicken and pork, too).
It’s an awesome flavor!
Adam. Seriously. You rock. I love watching cooking videos on TH-cam but you bring something else to the table. You give us Knowledge Dumps and they're riveting. Your sense of humor is also very well appreciated. Loved the Monty Python clip.
You're not just a home cook, you're a Teacher, and you're the kind of Teacher that students will hang around with after class just to hear more stories. Keep up the Good Work. I'm going to watch every single one of your videos and do my best to remember to hit the like button on each one.
P.S. I initially wrote this comment just after the Holy Grail clip, but now I've finished the entire video and I'm quite simply in awe of the research you performed and the presentation you delivered. You definitely have a knack for making topics sound interesting and entertaining.
Plenty lamb here in Ireland, we pronounce ewe 'yo'. I can recommend sheep in your field for magic mushrooms! Margaret Atwood also compared the smell of unwashed hair to lamb in the Maddaddam trilogy, enjoyed when the scientist mentioned it too.
Funny. When Adam mentioned sheep dung my first thought was " hmm magic mushrooms" 😆
Just love the diverse group of audience you have writing in the comments.
I for one have a question regarding this video; why didn't you touch on the topic of male goats/sheep smelling more than female one's or castrated ones?
I guess maybe it is a practice to castrate in the US but in India this isn't done and the male goats have a really foul smell (which I guess are the pheromones).
Is this common in other countries too?
In the usa, meat animals are usually slaughtered by 5-7 months old, so castration or not doesnt make a difference. But goat bucks, unlike sheep rams, do that whole "pee on my front legs until i burn them and smell like mold" thing so i can totally see the benefit of castrating male goats intended for meat, and would generally avoid a mature buck like the plague. I used to raise meat goats. I can taste the must in goat cheese and cant stand it. My butcher goats were either castrated or female.
@@rebeccaburrow7199 thanks for the insight, I searched about it on web and asked around, the minimum age of slaughter is 6 months and goes upto 15 in India which might explain the smell.
And when I asked, people did say that there's a chance that males aren't castrated but it is mostly due to low knowledge on part of the people who rear them.
Originally had this question because some restaurants served smelly mutton(goat meat) whereas the home versions never had that smell.
In SA, Mutton is generally the peak of meats, but rarely eaten because of how expensive it is. The traditional Christmas lunch (rather than Christmas dinner), for example, has a 'skaapboud' (lamb shank), baked for half a day or more in a low oven.
My parents farmed with cattle, sheep, trout and guinea fowl. We kept two breeds of sheep - Ile-de-France and Dorper. The Ile-de-France is a dual-purpose breed and although they are enormous and yield a lot of meat, it is not well marbled and the texture is rather coarse, but they also produce wool. The Dorper is very tasty. If you are raising sheep for meat, it is actually more profitable to slaughter them when they can still be sold as lamb, It becomes uneconomical to keep an older animal alive. Lamb from the Karoo area in South Africa is excellent because most of the animals range freely and the wild vegetation imparts a herby flavour. I'll go out of my way for genuine Karoo lamb or (preferably) mutton.
Oddly enough, as a typical white person with an American pallete I find i LOVE Goat more than lamb.
Every time I have Goat I love it. I find it is way more approachable, even though I know its reputation suggests otherwise.
Caribbean styles are my favorite way to enjoy Goat currently. I'd love for you to try something like that out. I think Goat might surprise people in its appeal. I don't even like Lamb by comparison 😅
Especially, mannish water which is a soup made from the ram goat in Jamaica. The rams pee on themselves so it has that scent and flavor Adam was probably talking about.
I'm a huge fan of goat as well. I never even knew it was easily available in the US until I started eating a lot of Indian food.
@@carmelitajones7779 no way that would go more than skin deep?
@@DavidGalvanwiz
If you ever manage to find someone that makes mannish water (not goat (head) soup which is the female), you will completely understand what I am talking about.
I went to a carnival mostly to try curried goat. They'd sold out when I got there
In Greece lamb (or sometimes goat) is the staple food of Easter day. The whole animal minus some entrails which are used for various meaty delicacies is slow roasted on a spit all morning and (like 8 hours or so) that day and served with only salt and pepper. The best part of the feast is pinching the exterior parts of the animal while still on the spit so as to have snack while waiting for the whole thing to get ready. Up until recently (60s-70s), many people living in villages had their own small flock and was customary for the children of the family to help with the herding. Nowadays it is probably considered a delicacy, so we generally don't have it too often, but it seems like young people seem to prefer it less in general. Mutton is far more rarely eaten and mostly in stews it seems.
I immigrated from Iraq to the U.S. and to me, even the stuff you find in Halal markets don't taste as strong as the meat from Iraq, I think my favorite would be the fat tail sheep which I don't see here in the U.S.
In RSA I've had barbequed sheep tails. Great snack.
My favorite land animal to eat is "whatever's on sale" and here near the smack-dab center of the US that generally means chicken, pork, and beef. I've periodically splurged on "exotic" animals, mostly to introduce them to my children, but for day-to-day nutrition we stick to the big three.
When they were significantly younger I grilled a batch of lamb chops that were about as mild as possible, and even then the four of them said they didn't particularly like the strong flavor. I don't know if a new effort would be able to break through that memory, and I'm not exactly motivated to spend the coin to find out. They did, however, really enjoy the duck I roasted for Christmas a few years ago.
That's interesting; see, my kiddo LOVED little lamb chops (I'd get them when they went on 'Manager's Special' because they were getting close to the sell by date - I'm generally a "whatever's on sale" cook too, though I'm in the northeastern US lol) & would get frustrated with me when I would finally take the bone out of her tight tiny fist! 😆 She stopped liking them as she got older, though. However, this did just remind me that there was a whole host of things she used to love & then abruptly stopped one day...but she's recently started reintroducing them to her meals; I should pick up some lamb chops next time I see them for a good price & see what she thinks these days (she's nearly 9 now)! I'll have to try some duck with her too. We *do* have an Indian market in town, maybe I can find some goat to try there?
If you know anyone who hunts you could try some deer meat, if it's an older animal we just soak the meat in salt water for a few days and th3 gameiness is gone, that method would prolly work on Mutton to
1:55 OMG is that Moonlight BBQ in Owensboro Kentucky?!? My family used to drive 50 minutes east from Evansville Indiana one Sunday a month after church.
„and we tend to like food that doesn't taste like anything” it's probably the reason why the not-meat (livers, stomachs, blood, brains, hearts, lungs) isn't eaten as often as it was in the past
Head cheese is freaking awesome
I’ve also heard that the soldiers in the US coming home from WWII had eaten a lot of canned mutton that had gone rancid and when they came home wouldn’t let their wives and mothers serve lamb and/or mutton and therefore we “lost the taste” for it. Because of this the per capita consumption dropped precipitously after WWII.
Canned meat doesn't go rancid.
@@BatCaveOz And wtf eats rancid meat? The body will do what it can to reject it too.
@@BatCaveOz why not? Canned things still go bad frequently
I heard that the soldiers had the canned stuff so often they just got sick and tired of it, not that it was rancid
@@eironbull I think canned foods flavor can change but not go rancid. If sealed properly there will be no air and no bacteria in the can. Halting bacteria growth.
My mom loves lamb and mutton, "chivito", here in Argentina it tastes totally different from beef and with a very different texture.
You usually cook it "A la cruz", that means putting it in a cross and roasting it over fire (ideally firewood) for several hours. And remember, when roasting, bone side to the fire, otherwise you burn the meat
Hey Adam, in southern Utah there are many sheep ranchers and mutton eaters. Particularly Piute, Sanpete, Sevier and Garfield counties. My grandfather raised sheep and we ate mutton quite regularly.
Wayne County here. Yes, dutch oven mutton was the king of our community events my whole life!