I picked up some lamb shoulder chops at Pak N Save meat week, figuring that they'd work quite well with black peppercorn marinade (p190). Despite having this plan in mind, I didn't think to check on the marinade ingredients and get them while I was at Pakkers, so I had to make a dash down to Countdown later that afternoon for lemons and peppercorns.
Having acquired all the ingredients, I set about making my marinade. The recipe required "coarsely crushed" black peppercorns, and I thought my grinder would probably grind them too fine, so I bunged them in the pestle and mortar to bash them up.
To the peppercorns I added lemon juice, chopped parsley and crushed garlic. I mixed them up in the same dish I intended to marinate my chops in, since there wasn't much point dirtying an extra bowl. When the marinade was nicely combined, I coated a couple of chops in the mixture, and left them for an hour or so.
When the marinating time was up, I briefly bunged my chops under the grill for about 6 minutes each side, as the meat section recommends for cooking lamb chops to medium (possibly these grilling times refer to use in a grilling pan, not the oven grill - it's not really clear. In any case, I don't have a grilling pan). I found this resulted in chops that were far too rare for my liking. It's funny that I like beef medium rare, but prefer lamb well-done.
As for the marinade, well, I can't really knock it since it did what marinades are supposed to do - the meat was well tenderised and it certainly added more flavour. My complaint was that it added too much flavour: in fact, you really couldn't taste anything but pepper.
I was all ready to write about how the recipe states you should serve the meat with the peppercorn coating, and that this really doesn't taste too pleasant. Except that when I look again at the recipe, I see it says to cook the meat in the peppercorn coating - it doesn't say to serve it like that! So once again, my not paying attention has led to a less enjoyable meal. I had the second one today - with the marinade scraped off - and it was quite tasty. So as long as you get rid of all those peppercorns once the meat is cooked, this is a pretty good marinade.
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