I’ve been making lamb curry since 2003. I’ve tried a few different recipes and I sometimes make it up as I go along but I’ve never been able to get the lamb tender enough to melt in the mouth. Tonight I discovered the secret, almost by accident. It’s the cooking temperature – it needs to be low.

I preheated the oven to 150 degrees. I sliced up some lamb neck fillet into fairly large chunks as they shrink during cooking. I didn’t bother to marinade, I simply made a mixture of ground spices (cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander seeds, dried chillies, turmeric) then added to it some chopped garlic and ginger. I fried the mixture in a little oil in a large casserole dish, threw the lamb in with it and coated the meat pieces with the mixture. After a quick ‘stir fry’ I added enough coconut milk to cover and put the casserole dish into the oven with the lid on to cook for an hour. After that I removed the lid to allow sauce to concentrate down and returned it to the oven to cook for another half hour. The lamb was then beautifully tender. I added a little lemon juice at the end – I find that adding acid before this stage can dry meat out – and sprinkled over chopped fresh coriander to serve. There wasn’t much left after we’d finished:

25 Sept 2012
I also tried cooking this at 100 degrees covered for 2 hours. The lamb was cooked so I removed the meat from the sauce and poured the sauce into the OXO fat separator. After waiting for the fat to come to the top, I poured out the defatted sauce and reduced it before adding the meat pieces back in to warm through to serve. I didn’t add any lemon juice this time as I was serving it with (acidic) curried green beans in tomato sauce. Perfect.