I love the taste of lamb and until now I have only ever eaten lamb shanks in a restaurant or pre-cooked from the supermarket until I received my Lakeland slow cooker along with their fabulous book of 50 recipes.
Wow! I thought to myself, you can cook lamb shanks in a slow cooker!
The Lakeland book does Mexican Slow Roasted Lamb Shanks which sound delicious but then in March Good Housekeeping did a piece on Lorraine Pascal and she presented a recipe of Braised Lamb Shanks with Chorizo and Garlic so I thought – How about combining them and see what I come up with?
Lamb shanks are quite expensive (I paid £4.50 odd per shank) and of course being on the bone you have to be sure you’re going to get enough meat, so I have allowed one shank each and I’ve topped up my dish with lamb chops that were on special offer 
The leftovers will make another meal for us, here’s what I did
Lamb Shanks with Chorizo and Garlic slow cooked
Ingredients
Method
- Season the lamb shanks well and brown off in a frying pan, place in the slow cooker turned on low setting.
- Add the wine and vinegar to the slow cooker
- Add the garlic, bay leaves, paprika, peppercorns, stock and two sprigs of rosemary
- Add onion and chorizo after removing the hard skin
- Add 1 aubergine cut into small bite size pieces because it was in the fridge!
- Cook for 7 hours on low stirring occasionally
Observations and tips
On the whole this trial recipe worked. My fear of not having enough meat was wrong, one lamb shank per person is sufficient so we have a meal for another night too with all the extra chops I put in!
By adding the extra chops I also added a lot of extra fat and so I skimmed off a good 1cm of fat from the top of the casserole before serving.
We found the balsamic vinegar quite strong and thought it took over the dish. I added half of Lorraine’s suggestion of 250ml and we think it was still too much so I’d put less in next time (50ml) and add the extra in beef stock but this could be personal taste.
The chorizo also added fat to the dish, I’m not sure I would add it again to a slow cooked meal, the finished slices of chorizo had tiny holes where the fat had melted into the sauce. Delicious still but not pretty to look at.
