These baby racks of lamb will impress you and your guests alike. Beautifully roasted, slathered in honey and pumpkin seeds, perched in a pool of of a thick, rich, pasilla sauce, and accompanied by delectable chorizo potatoes.
Baby Racks of Lamb with a Pumpkin-Seed Crust
Course: Dinner3
servingsIngredients
- For the roasted tomatillo sauce:
1 lb. tomatillos, husked and rinsed
2 serrano chiles
1/2 cup (packed) cilantro (about 1 bunch, stems chopped off and discarded)
1 tsp salt
- For the pasilla-tomatillo sauce:
8 pasilla chiles
4 large cloves garlic, crushed
1½ cups water
(Roasted tomatillo sauce)
- For the chorizo potatoes
3 unpeeled, very large baking potatoes
Salt
8 oz. Mexican chorizo (soft type, casings removed)
Flaked sea salt
- For the lamb
1 cup shelled, raw pumpkin seeds
1 rack of lamb (9 ribs)
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup honey
Directions
- Seed and devein the pasilla chiles. Toast them in a dry, cast-iron skillet over medium heat until fragrant, 3 minutes. Move to a plate and set aside. Toast the pumpkin seeds in the same skillet, over the same heat, stirring constantly until browned and fragrant. Allow to cool. Pulse them in a food processor until coarsely chopped. Set aside. Transfer the pasilla chiles to the food processor. Add garlic and water, and process until the solids are as broken down as you can get them, 1 minute. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a saucepan. Repurpose the solids (see notes). Set aside. Thoroughly rinse out the food processor, but don’t wash or dry it.
- Make a roasted tomatillo sauce.
- Place the tomatillos and serranos into the (unwashed) cast-iron skilled you used for toasting. Place it under a broiler, 6 inches from heat. Broil until the tomatillos are a deeper green and just beginning to show signs of charring, about 10 minutes, checking and shaking the pan every 2 minutes. Remove tomatillos and serranos from pan and allow to cool, 5 minutes. Slice the serranos open; reserve the veins and seeds. Place the tomatillos, one of the serranos, the cilantro, and salt into the food processor. Process to a liquidy sauce. Add as much as 1/4-cup water, if needed. Taste for heat. Process in the second serrano if more heat is desired. Process in some or all of the reserved ribs and seeds, if even more heat is desired. (Note that the heat will come down several knotches in the final dish.)
- Make the a pasilla-tomatillo sauce.
- Add the tomatillo sauce to the saucepot with the strained pasilla mixture. Bring to a boil over very high heat. Reduce heat to medium. Boil until the mixture reduces to a thick sauce that will mound when plated, stirring rarely at first, and constantly in the end, about 45 minutes. Add salt, if needed.
- Make the potatoes.
- Submerge the potatoes in lightly salted water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and cook until until knife tender, 30 minutes. Soak them in cold water until cool enough to handle, then rub off their skins. Slice them into 1/2-inch chunks. Set aside. Cook the chorizo over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the water boils off, 14-15 minutes. Off heat. Add the potatoes to the chorizo and gently toss. Cover.
- Make the lamb.
- Preheat the oven to 450°F. Slice the lamb rack into three, three-rib pieces. Salt and pepper moderatly, or to taste. Heat a cast-iron skillet over a medium flame. Add the oil, wait a few seconds until it shimmers, and then add the lamb, meaty-side down. Brown for five minutes. Then, turn the baby racks on their side for 1 minute. Opposite side for 1 minute. Place on a rack in a shallow roasting pan, skewer one of them with a meat thermometer, and bake until 130°F. Remove from the rack and tent under foil for 8 minutes.
- Meanwhile, pour the chopped sunflower seeds into a shallow bowl and place the potatoes, pasilla-tomatillo sauce, and honey on separate burners, lowest flame to warm them up. Mound a pool of pasilla-tomatillo sauce on each of three plates. Using tongs if needed, hold a baby rack over the honey pot, and use a pastry brush to lavish the chop with honey. Roll in pumpkin seeds. Place each baby rack on a pool of sauce. Add potatoes to the plate and garnish them very lightly with flaked salt.
Notes
- The solids leftover from the strained pasilla mixture, place in a tightly sealable container and refrigerate. When you’re ready to deal with them, blend them with a brick of softened cream cheese. The result is beautiful on a sandwich, or paired with raw vegetables.
Intro
This is an absolutely fabulous dinner, worthy of even the most exceptional guest. The lamb is perfect. The sauce compliments it in the most wonderful way. The cilantro really comes through in the sauce, and the chiles give the sauce a incredible depth. It looks spectacular on the plate. The potatoes round everything out nicely. It’s an extremely satisfying meal, but not heavy, leaving plenty of room for an appetizer, a salad, and/or dessert.
Social Learning
In terms of timing, you’ll need at least three hours of prep, during which time you should complete everything but the lamb. I suggest that you give yourself at least an hour in between prep and guest arrival. Start the lamb as soon as your guests arrive, put someone else in charge of cocktails, and dinner will be ready at the perfect time.
If you’ve ever cooked diced bacon or made caramel, cooking the chorizo is similar. It releases a lot of liquid, and the liquid has a high water content, so it boils. Once the water boils away, the remaining liquid will continue to boil, but there’ll be a very clear difference in the way it looks. It will boil with a glassy, satiny, volcanic-looking shimmer. It’s ready at that point.
The Lamb
I paid $100 for the nine-rib rack I used for this dish, so this turned out to be quite an expensive meal. But it is at least as delicious and spectacular as it is expensive. At that price, you don’t want to screw this up, so it’s imperitive to use a thermometer for the lamb. I use a probe that reports the temperature to a remote readout, with an alarm that warns you when you’re nearing your set temperature.
If the lamb seems to have a lot of fat on it, don’t trim it off. Much of it will render, and what stays with the lamb, you will absolutely want to eat.
When it came time to sear the lamb, I had a hard time deciding what the “meaty side” is. I ultimately chose to go with the side opposite the ribs. Seems obvious in retrospect.
One small issue is that there’ll be a ton of smoke the lamb while the lamb’s in the oven. You’ll worry that you’ve done something wrong. If you have a fan that vents to the outside, turn it on full blast. Otherwise, in addition to turning on your HVAC fan, maybe put a fan in a nearby window, blowing to the outside. I think you may be able to reduce some of maybe even all of that smoke if you were to pour a half-inch of water into the bottom of the roasting pan, so long as your rack holds the lamb out of the water.
Servings
The recipe that I modeled this after was intended to serve four, with one three-rib “baby rack” per person. My butcher sells nine-rib racks and won’t sell partial racks. So my choice was to buy one rack, split it into three-rib baby racks, and make dinner for two with leftovers, or for three without leftovers. Or, I could buy a second rack and double the number of servings.
I decided to serve three, but other than that, I kept the proportions of the orginal recipe the same, and wound up with leftover sauce which I used to dip cold chicken breast medallions in a few days later. So if you are able to come up with four baby racks, this recipe will still work for you.
The Sauce
The tomatillo sauce is great on its own. It’d be fantastic for dipping tortilla chips or serving with tacos. Sauces like this are commonly liquidy, but I thought the full quarter cup of water made it too liquidy. For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to boil most of the water off.
I went to great lengths in the recipe to allow you to adjust the serrano heat. I perfer both serranos, with no ribs or seeds. This results in a heat that seems to border on punishing in the early stages of prep. However, the long cooking time will bring it down a few notches, and on the plate with the honeyed lamb, it will be what I consider perfect: clearly spicy but not over the top.
You’ll know that the pasilla-tomatillo sauce is thick enough when you can slowly pull a spatula from the edge of the pot to the center, and the sauce will part like the Red Sea and gently flow back together. Because you’ll serve it warm rather than boiling, it will be only slightly thicker when served.
Baby Racks of Lamb with a Pumpkin-Seed Crust and Chorizo Potatoes
Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! unless otherwise credited. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. Thank you, Kesor and ⌘+C. References: Priscila and Vincent Satkoff, “Baby Racks of Lamb with a Pumpkin Seed Crust” and “Potatoes with Chorizo,” in The ¡Salpicón! Cookbook: Contemporary Mexican Cuisine. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008), 127, 165. Make It Like a Man! is ranked by Feedspot as #15 in the Top 30 Men’s Cooking Blogs.
Keep up with us on Bloglovin’
What a fantastic recipe, Jeff! Living in the Southwest, these flavors really speak to me. I am saving it to make this summer – maybe for my birthday!
Oh, it is such a great meal. You will have a spectacular birthday!
wow I want some too! This looks droolworthy :-))
Thanks, Angie!
What a wonderful sounding very special meal. I love lamb and chorizo, but love the Mexican-inspired way you cooked the potatoes. Sauces are wonderful.
Thank you, Mimi!
I love lamb, and always keep a rack of lamb in the freezer. Do you buy yours Frenched of do it yourself?
I am going to be making this. It sounds delicious and is so attractive on the plate
The place where I buy them always has them Frenched.
Jeff, that is a magnificent looking meal. Wow, I thought lamb was expensive here. $USD100 for a 9 rib rack is a lot of money.
Here a similar rack might cost me between $AUD25 and 30.
That was a lot of money! I did go to a very fine butcher; I’m sure I could’ve found it cheaper elsewhere.
A good butcher, for special occasions is worth his or her weight in gold 😊
Agreed. And this shop is exceptional. I go there regularly, though I try to shop there as economically as I can with the occasional splurge such as this one.
I don’t eat lamb but potatoes are always a winner!!
cheers
sherry
Thanks, Sherry!
Lamb is crazy expensive here too! I haven’t bought a rack of lamb recently but spiedini work out to just over $1 each and shanks are about $14-18 each! Like I said, crazy. The dish sounds fantastic and so showy too. Thanks for the warning about the smoke, it’s not often I set off the smoke detectors so it’s good to know I didn’t screw up. Will check pricing for this and perhaps I’ll make it on the grill outside so smoke is not an issue!
This would probably be perfect on the grill. I hope you do make it, because I’d love to know what you think of it. I thought it was terrific.
We don’t eat a lot of lamb, it’s a very expensive meat here in Texas. The photos are lovely in this post and you had me at “pumpkin seed crust”. The lamb looks delicious!
It’s an expensive meat here in Chicago, too!
Wow, now THAT is an impressive meal, Jeff. As nice as it is to have quick meals at your fingertips, I do occasionally enjoy tackling larger endeavors such as this. I’ve never cooked rack of lamb at home though. This would be new to me – so I appreciate all the tips and tricks you learned. Well done, sir. Well done.
Thank you so much, David!
I’ve had pistachio crusted lamb (delish), and now I’m intrigued by the use of pumpkin seeds. And these chorizo potatoes? Terrific!
Thanks, Ben!
I love this recipe so tasty. Looks delicious!!
Thank you, Javier!
Love this Baby Racks of Lamb with a Pumpkin-Seed Crust and Chorizo Potatoes recipe Jeff, looks absolutely mouthwatering! Perfect for impressing guests too!
Thanks, Neil!
I love lamb. Often in the summer I’ll make chops on the grill. interesting, your addition of that spicy heat.
Thank you, Karen!
I am completely sold on this. The combinations of ingredients is so interesting, with amazing flavors in every bite. I always seem to “crust” rack of lamb with a pesto of sorts. It’ll be so fun to mix things up with this. Just lovely! 🙂 ~Valentina
Thank you, Valentina!
Wow, this dish sounds like a total showstopper! The lamb with that pumpkin-seed crust and the chorizo potatoes must be absolutely decadent.
Thanks, Raymunc!