Raan

This is something Stephen has been wanting to cook for a while. I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I don’t recall hearing him mention it either but my knowedge of Indian dishes is very small and I have a very bad memory so this isn’t unusual. I first heard about it a little while ago when a friend told us his mum used to cook it on special occasions during the seventies. I couldn’t find a lot of information online when I was searching for a recipe but it did strike me as being something of a celebratory dish, simply because of the time and effort required to mix up the spices and leave the meat to marinate. It’s not something you’d have time to do after work anyway.

We marinated our lamb leg overnight, as per this recipe, but I saw several other recipes that suggested a two-step marinade: dry spices for 24 hours followed by the wet marinade for another 24 hours.

Like a lot of slow-cooked dishes, once you’ve made up the spice mixes and done the marinating, the meat then sits happily in the oven leaving you time to get on with other things. This is one of my favourite ways of cooking, especially on a Sunday when there are so many other things that need to be done. Once we’d finished all our weekend chores, we sat down to the raan which we served with chapatis, dal and spiced cauliflower.

The long, slow cooking meant that the flavours of the spices melded together perfectly with no one flavour overpowering the other. Not too hot but with a good kick and plenty of fragrant notes to lift the rounded, earthy flavours.

Our sauce had dried out quite a lot which I really liked, all those sticky, pan-edge pieces that are crispy and chewy at the same time. It would have been nice to have a little more liquid though.