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We make a lot of lamb charcuterie at Bray Cured. Actually, we make a lot of hogget charcuterie, but speaking frankly, you didn’t google ‘hogget charcuterie’ did you? You googled lamb. Luckily for both of us, lamb and hogget are next door neighbours, so everything you might want to know about lamb charcuterie applies to hogget, and vice versa.
Oh, fair enough, we should probably explain. Hogget is a sheep between one and two years old. Fact of the day there. It’s lamb up to one year, hogget between one and two and mutton after that.
Hogget has more oomph flavour-wise than lamb, so if you like lamb, chances are you’ll love hogget. Vice versa on that, too. When cooking, hogget is closer to lamb than mutton, though. It has more texture, but it accepts frying and roasting better than mutton, which tends to need low and slow cooking to break down tougher meat.
Like all charcuterie, it’s about preservation, using every scrap and enhancing flavour. For preservation, think cured meats and terrines. For using every scrap, look at haggis. On enhancing flavour, sausages, such as merguez are a great example.
With hogget (or lamb) you can make more or less every type of charcuterie you can make from pork. The muscles are similar, so the following can all be done:
Of course, you can also make sausages, haggis, pate and other types of ultimately cooked charcuterie, too.
With the air-dried meats listed above though, there are some technical challenges for the charcutier, and they stem from lamb fat. Lamb fat has a high melting point. Higher than your body temperature in fact. Therefore, it doesn’t melt when you put it in your mouth. This is the opposite of pork fat, which melts quickly at body temperature.
As a result, lamb fat has an awkward mouthfeel. It really coats the roof of the mouth, and generally, that’s unpleasant. It isn’t a factor with cooked charcuterie, where the fat is melted by cooking, but in air-dried products, we have to be careful to get the texture right.
Generally, this is achieved by carefully trimming back the fat on whole muscle charcuteries. So when we prepare a hogget bresaola or a hogget pancetta, we trim away excess fat to make a better product. With salami, it requires even more trimming. Lots of lamb fat in a salami doesn’t make for a good product, so we trim out hogget meat until it’s very lean, before adding in pork fat for texture. Some fat in the salami is essential, and pork fat melts better in a sliced salami.
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