Get to the bone

By Steve Bain

Oct 25, 2024

STEVE BAIN says preparing lamb shanks is just a matter of having the right tools — and a tray big enough to cook them in.

This is one butcher-to-cooking scenario where the butcher influences the kitchen. That is, if you don’t have a meat saw, then you may prefer to send full-length lamb shanks into the kitchen.

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The objective here is to separate a lamb shank from a ‘full’ leg. You’ll end up with one shank and one roast from each leg.

Step 1: Start with a pair of legs, a butcher’s knife and honing steel.

Step 2: This allows us to fast track one leg so we can visualise what we want to achieve with our end product.

Step 3: The knife point indicates the tip of the knee (think patella).

Step 4: Now move the knife about 3cm further along (towards the ‘hip’) and cut down between the shank bone and the upper-leg bone (i.e. cut through the joint. There will be a bit of cartilage in here — you can either cut around it or through it, your choice).

Step 5: The same cut, at a different angle.

Step 6: Yet again, another view of the cut through the ‘knee’ joint.

Step 7: Now cut all the way through to sever the shank from the leg roast.

Step 8: Now remove the ‘ankle tendon’.

Step 9: Cut at the ‘calf-muscle’ end of the tendon.

Step 10: With the tendon cut at one end, move the knife to the other end of the tendon.

Step 11: Cut through to sever the tendon.

Step 12: A close-up of the final tendon cut.

Step 13: The tendon removed from the leg shank.

Step 14: Make sure you have a baking dish that is big enough to place the shanks in. You may have to place them diagonally, one per ‘tray’, and have multiple trays in the oven.

By Steve Bain

Steve Bain