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If you listen to our episode on Babette’s Feast, you will understand why Jesse felt compelled to create a recipe for something called “Boulet du Mouton”. We don’t want to spoil it exactly, but Babette might say “Il a fait du mensonge une vérité.”
Jesse INVENTED this recipe, although it has its inspiration in French cooking, particularly Babette’s Caille en Sarcophage, and other roasted minced meat pastries.
Boulet du Mouton is rich, and probably best as a heavy appetizer, or side dish or course to accompany a French style dinner, with several smaller dishes.
The first time I made this, I felt that the pastry puffed up quite a bit, leaving a lot of air space within the balls. I want to experiment with thinning the pastry by rolling it out more, before rolling it into the balls for future iterations.
Ingredients
1 lb of lamb (chops or shanks)
2 cups sherry or Marsala
2 sheets of puff pastry, frozen
½ yellow onion
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 oz butter
Optional: 1/4 cup goat cheese, 1/4 cup honey
Salt, pepper, and other spices to taste
Preparation
Preheat oven to 300
Warm a sautee pan to browning temperature
Chop onion and add half to pan, with olive oil
When aromatic, add lamb to pan to brown
Brown each side for no longer than a minute. Remove lamb.
Add marsala or sherry to cooking pan, and scrape cooking residue into a demi glaze. Allow to simmer.
Place lamb in a 13 inch baking pan, add to oven, and continue roasting lamb to rare or medium rare temp. 1350
Set lamb aside to rest and cool
Add scrapings from baking pan to demi glaze, cook until it begins to thicken, and then set aside.
Once lamb is cool enough to work with, trim from bones, and mince, with a carving knife or blender, until cooked lamb is in pieces smaller than a centimeter across. Add to a bowl.
Preheat oven to 350.
In the bowl, mix the lamb, brown sugar, spices to taste, with the remaining onion, and ½ cup of the demiglaze mixture. Optionally, you can add small dollops of goat cheese and honey for a bolder flavor.
Roll out the puff pastry, and then cut into several small squares.
Spoon out about a tablespoon of the minced lamb mixture onto each square. Add a pat of butter to each square.
Roll each square around the lamb into a round ball, between 1 and 3 inches in diameter. If you wish, you can baste the balls in an egg white wash for a nice glowing texture.
Place the balls on a greased baking sheet and bake until golden brown.
Bake until puff pastry is golden brown.
Allow to cool for 5-10 minutes before serving.
Serve with demi glaze on the side for dipping.
Makes 7-15 balls depending on size.