Name: Lamb Rack Cooked in a Haystack with Sweet Potato, Onion Marmalade, Chickpeas, and Merguez
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: Zest from 1 lemon; 3 tablespoons butter; Salt and freshly ground black pepper; Fleur de sel, as needed; Butcher’s twine; 3 cedarwood sheets or spruce-wood sheets (you’ll need 2 but they sometimes break); 1 bay leaf; 3 tablespoons hazelnut vinaigrette (2 parts hazelnut oil, 1 part sherry vinegar, whisked together); 4 tablespoons (60 g) butter; Juice of ¼ lemon; ½ cup (90 g) dried chickpeas, soaked in plenty of cold water overnight (or 1 cup/180 g good-quality canned chickpeas); Squeeze of lemon juice; 3 tablespoons grapeseed oil; 1 small handful organic hay; 2 tablespoons butter; 2 tablespoons Madeira; 2 teaspoons (9 g) brown sugar; Salt; Grapeseed oil, as needed; 2 tablespoons (30 g) butter; ½ small onion; 1 tablespoon olive oil; 4 ounces (120 g) red pearl onions, thinly sliced; 2 to 3 tablespoons sherry vinegar; 4 or 5 cloves garlic, lightly smashed; Organic hay (about 8 big handfuls); ¼ teaspoon Aleppo or Espelette pepper; Small bunch thyme; 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard; ¼ teaspoon minced garlic

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Gabriel Kreuther

By Gabriel Kreuther

Published 2021

About

On the farm, cooking with hay is an old and common practice, so bringing this practice to Manhattan’s fine-dining scene is a pleasure for me. We light the hay on fire, so that when we present the hay-wrapped lamb to the table, smoke fills the dining room with its fragrance. We even infuse the jus with hay. (In this recipe, I only call for veal jus. But at the restaurant we would roast lamb bones and simmer them in the veal jus for 20 minutes, then strain them through a chinois.) I think thi