Adapted from an old family recipe, my easy peasy take on a Lancashire lamb hotpot can be done in one pot and only uses 5 ingredients…the perfect way to celebrate #LoveLambWeek.
So this week is #LoveLambWeek – a week which highlights what a delicious and versatile meat lamb is and encourages us all to eat it a bit more often to support our farmers and this brilliantly sustainable industry. You can find out more by following #LoveLambWeek on social media and if you cook up a lovely lamb recipe this week, do share it on social media with the #LoveLambWeek hashtag – if you copy me in on Twitter (I’m @easypeasyfoodie) I’ll most definitely retweet it!
As you know I am hugely passionate about lamb and just love cooking easy peasy meals with this fab meat. I have been working all year with the folk at the ‘LAMB. Tasty Easy Fun’ campaign and when they challenged me to make a lamb dish for Love Lamb Week using just 5 ingredients – I knew just what to make!
Recently Jamie Oliver has been championing his latest book “5 Ingredients” (so my kind of book!) and in it he shares his recipe for 5 ingredient Lamb Hotpot – and well it reminded me that I just so happen to have my own recipe for a 5 ingredient lamb hotpot….though admittedly mine is totally different from Jamie’s recipe – as mine is as traditional as they come…
Handed down from my Lancashire great grandma (who sadly I never got to meet), to my grandma and then to my mum and finally to me, this is a pretty authentic Lancashire hotpot recipe – my Lancashire forebears would certainly not have been putting umami paste in their hotpot (as Jamie does), but I can guarantee this hotpot is still fabulously tasty – the meltingly tender lamb and crispy, lamb flavoured potatoes are too die for!
In fact my Lancashire lamb hotpot comes with a lovely story attached: apparently in days gone by, the various members of the family might come home at different times…the hotpot would go into the oven in the morning and then, as the family returned for their dinner, they would help themselves to some hotpot, add a bit more water and return it to the oven to cook on a low heat until the next person came in – what a genius way to solve the problem of different family members eating at different times!
The 5 ingredients in this Easy Lamb Hotpot are simply onions, carrots, lamb, lamb stock and potatoes – all good traditional British ingredients, which when put together produces the most fabulous dish (well OK plus a little oil, salt and pepper, but they don’t really count do they?). If you want to get a bit more fancy (and I often do), you can also add in some swede and some herbs (bay and thyme work really well) – but this is strictly optional.
The trick to making a good lamb hotpot is to ensure the lamb and potatoes are cooked to perfection – the lamb needs a good slow cook to get it really tender and to ensure the potatoes are cooked through properly I cover the dish with a lid to begin with (the steam helps the potatoes cook), and then for the last half an hour, I turn up the oven and uncover the potatoes to ensure they are super brown and crispy on top.
I prefer to use a wide, shallow dish to make my hotpot – this means you get a really good ratio of potato to lamb and the top gets really crispy. However if you want to double the quantities below, and therefore need a deeper pan, I suggest you put a layer of potatoes halfway up as well as on top – this ensures everyone gets a good amount of potatoes, but the layer on top cooks well and isn’t too thick.
And just a quick note on cutting the potatoes – there is absolutely no need for a mandolin or food processor to cut these potatoes finely (another thing my ancestors wouldn’t have had!) – in fact, if you follow the recipe below, you really don’t need to cut them all that finely – I find a thickness of roughly 3mm to be about right, but it doesn’t need to be perfect – quite a few of mine ended up thicker or thinner in the one I made for the photos and all the potatoes were cooked just perfectly!
To make this hotpot super duper easy, I’ve adapted the recipe so you can make this all in one pot. So long as you have a wide, shallow casserole that can go on the hob (I have a lovely cast iron pot which is just perfect for this kind of thing), or a similar shaped saucepan that can go in the oven, you can cook everything in the same pot – start it off on the hob and then pop it straight into the oven. If you don’t have a suitable cast iron pot/oven proof saucepan, then simply start this in a saucepan or frying pan on the hob and then transfer to an ovenproof dish for the oven part.
Easy Lamb Hotpot
Ingredients
- 1 large onion diced
- 2 large carrots cut into bitesize pieces
- 600 g diced lamb leg
- 500 ml lamb stock from a cube is fine
- 3 large potatoes (roughly 500g / 1lb), cut into 3mm slices
- Plus a little oil, salt and pepper
- Vegetables to serve optional
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 180C / 160C fan/ gas mark 4 / 350F.
- In a large ovenproof pan (or hobproof casserole dish), add a little oil plus the onion and carrot. Cover with a lid and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes or until soft but not brown.
- Turn the heat up and add the lamb, cook for 2-3 minutes until nicely browned. Add the lamb stock, plus a little salt and pepper and bring to the boil.
- Turn the heat off and arrange the potato slices on the top so they slightly overlap. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper then cover the pan with a lid (or foil) and place in the preheated oven for 1 hour.
- After 1 hour turn the oven up to 220C / 200C / gas mark 7 / 425F and cook for a further 30 minutes or until the top is brown and the potatoes are completely cooked.
- Serve just as it is or with extra vegetables.
Notes
This is a collaborative post with the ‘LAMB. Tasty Easy Fun’ campaign. ‘LAMB. Tasty Easy Fun’ is an EU funded campaign which aims to increase the use of lamb in everyday cooking. Lamb is often considered difficult to cook, expensive, or something to be saved for Sunday roasts. The aim of the campaign is to demonstrate just how tasty, easy and fun lamb is to cook with every day of the week!
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Easy old school tasty food, nothing wrong with that!
Exactly Catherine! I love experimenting with new and different things, of course…but I also love the old school classics…and they don’t come much more old school than this one!! Eb x
Hi Eb, I love your ideas, and the family story behind this recipe makes it captivating as well as tasty. However, I reckon your Lancashire forebears must have been posher than mine, where leg of lamb would have been an absolute rarity and would have been roasted not diced and stewed. I use best end of neck and leave the bones in. This adds masses of extra flavour and gives a bit of extra body. If I’m buying the chops from a proper butcher, which is not so easy to find these days, I’ll get a lamb’s kidney while I’m there and chop that in too. As with your version, there’s no need to fry the meat – and the kidney really is optional. This is a much more “peasant food” version of a Lancashire Hotpot but it is no more work, and it’s tastier, less expensive and more fun to eat. This for information and conversation not criticism. Your recipes are fab!
Haha – good point, I think my Lancashire forebears probably did use cheaper cuts back then! I have used leg as it’s easier to get hold of these days and is lovely and tender without having to cook it for too long. But I love the idea of using neck with bones in and lamb kidneys for extra flavour! So pleased to hear you like my other recipes too. Eb 🙂
The fact that in the past your family would have taken this out of the oven then put it back in for the next person really does make this a great #CookOnceEatTwice meal Eb! I’ve never made a hotpot and didn’t like the meals my mum occasionally made when I was younger that had sliced potatoes on the top. The potatoes never seemed quite cooked enough and unfortunately it’s put me off. Like all these things though I should probably revisit it as your potatoes look beautifully cooked. Thanks for sharing with #CookOnceEatTwice x
Haha, yes – kind of an cook once eat many times kind of a meal 😀 And I assure you the potatoes in my hotpot are very much properly cooked…lovely and soft (but not falling apart) and deliciously crispy on top!! I do encourage you to revisit it, when the potatoes are cooked properly they are AMAZING!! Eb x
Such a wonderfully warming dish, and so few ingredients, which I love – sometimes less is more:)
Oh I heartily agree…I love playing with herbs, spices, chilli etc. but sometimes there is a time to pare it all back and let the flavours of the key ingredients shine through! Eb x
Love tis recipe. I have a very similar hand me down recipe which goes one step further in easy peasy ness and doesn’t even involve browning the onions and meat. Just layering it in the dish and into the oven. It also has an extra potato layer, which absorbs some of the stock and breaks up a bit but I love it.
These classic simple dishes are often the tastiest. and really umami paste in a hotpot! I doesnt need it.
Thanks for linking up to this weeks #CookBlogShare
Oooh I would be very interested to do a side by side comparison of our two hotpots…I have always felt that the onions especially need that little bit of browning before going in the stew pot, but since I never try do it your way, I guess I don’t know for sure. With a long slow cook like this, they would certainly be soft enough (nothing worse than an undercooked onion – bleurgh!) I will have to try your way and see! I have definitely come around to the idea that, when slow cooked like this, meat doesn’t always need browning first. I have been doing a little bit of recipe testing with a chicken pie recently and discovered that I actually prefer the chicken unbrowned…it has a much better texture in the finished dish (think poached chicken) and the flavour is actually very similar. Eb x
Ooh this looks delicious Eb, I know my family will love this recipe, we’re all lamb lovers too.
Thanks Rebecca…it’s such a family friendly recipe – my two wolfed it down. Brings back memories of when I was a kid and my mum made this…always looked forward to it!! Eb x
This was the most incredibly simple but flavorsome dish I’ve cooked in 35 years of marriage both my wife and my mother send their thanks xx
Oh yay! I’m so pleased – thanks so much for this wonderful review 😀 Eb