I’m not sure about you, but I Love smoked lamb! In general, I like lamb cooked with charcoal, whether it’s a whole lamb on a spit, a few shoulders cut up into Greek-style gyros, cutlets over the grill, or a shoulder or a leg cooked low and slow in a smoker.
Lamb, in my opinion, is frequently overlooked in favor of more popular cuts such as brisket, pork ribs, and pulled pork. If you’ve never tried smoked lamb, I’m hoping this will persuade you. You’ll need a thermometer, a lamb, and a smoker to get started.
But before we get started, I wanted to go over the fundamentals, especially if you’ve never smoked anything before. Cold smoking and hot smoking are the two types of smoking. To be clear, I’m referring to hot smoking, in which the smoker’s body temperature is at least 100 degrees.
If you’re just starting out, you could use a gas smoker and add wood chips to get the smokey flavour, but I prefer to use charcoal and wood in what’s known as an offset smoker or a stick burner.
Once everything is in place, the key is to keep an eye on the temperature of the smoker as well as the internal temperature of the lamb. There are numerous variables that influence how long it takes the lamb to cook (how many kgs it is, the outside temperature, etc.), but here is a rough guide to get you started.
Tips: Lamb Leg
Lamb leg should be cooked for 8 hours at 225 – 250 °F smoker temperature. You should not remove your lamb until it reaches a temperature of around 80 degrees Celsius, which you can check with a meat thermometer. Technically, lamb is perfectly safe to eat at 60 degrees, but what you want is for all of the connective tissues in the lamb to simply melt and become extremely moist.
Tips: Lamb Shoulder
It takes about 7 hours to cook a lamb shoulder at 225 – 250 °F in a smoker. You could use a boneless lamb shoulder, but I prefer it cooked with the bone in.
Also, before cooking, remove any excess fat from the meat and rub it with your preferred mixture or paste. Stick your knife into it to see if it’s done, and make sure to spray it every now and then if it’s not.
How to measure the temperature?
To check the temperature, you’ll probably need to invest in a good digital meat thermometer. The EZTemp thermometer comes highly recommended. It has two probes, one for piercing the lamb and the other for piercing the grill on your smoker.
The beauty of this thermometer is that you can set minimum and maximum alarms so that you are notified when the temperature of your smoker drops/rises and also when your meat is done. A digital thermometer is more accurate than a smoker’s gauge, which gives you a “guesstimate” of the ambient temperature inside your smoker.
Remember, this is just a general guide. Other factors can affect how your meat is cooked in the smoker, such as
- The thickness of the meat
- Whether the meat has been deboned
- How much fat the meat has
- How hot/cold it is outside and how well insulated the smoker is
- The type of smoker ( Click here to help you choose the best smoker for you)
- Using wood charcoal, as well as the type of wood you use, affects the flavour of the meat.
- Whether the meat was brought up to room temperature or not
To see some delicious recipes, Click here. To see how to cook a whole lamb on a spit, click here.
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