Lambchops, which are essentially little T-bone steaks, are pretty expensive. Costco has great deals on them.
But if you get a shoulder-blade chop with the round bone, it’s cheap as hell and the bone is full of delicious marrow. Cook it like a steak, but prepare one level of doneness more than beef. So if you like a medium-rare steak, go medium.
Almost all lamb in the USA is imported from New Zealand. Local lamb is much more expensive, paradoxically. They slaughter very young in New Zealand so a reasonably sized meal is like 4 to 6 lambchops. American lamb is allowed to get much older so more like 2-3.
Yeah, lamb doesn’t need to be super pricey. Lamb chops, rack of lamb, lamb medallions, etc., are dishes that I’d guess most Americans would identify with fancy restaurants. What’s missing is a mainstream home tradition like a Sunday roast.
Where I do most of my shopping, beef is considerably cheaper at the low end—e.g., ground chuck vs. ground lamb—but can actually get more expensive per pound when you get to the premium cuts like porterhouse and aged tenderloin.
I’ve never seen an equivalent lamb cut being cheaper than the same cut for beef, per pound. Yes, there’s cheaper cuts of lamb, but the same cheap cut of beef (e.g., round, london broil, chuck) is even cheaper than the cheap cut of lamb.
You would never buy a beef shoulder (chuck) chop to cook like a steak, because it’s way too tough and that cut needs to be cooked slowly or mechanically tenderized to be palatable. So while it’s true that beef chuck is cheaper than lamb shoulder, and beef shanks are vastly cheaper than leg of lamb, they eat completely differently.
My biggest challenge with these meats is I didn’t experience them, or if I did my parents lied about it. It’s hard to cook something you have no experience with on what it should actually taste like. The only time I’ve knowingly had mutton was an Indian restaurant on the east coast… once.
Sure. But at least here in California, you can get a NY strip of beef for the same price as lamb shoulder. For most Americans, that math results in buying the NY.
You’re thinking of a “lamb chop”, which the same cut as a porterhouse steak with the loin (NY strip/shell) on the right and tenderloin (filet) on the left. Lamb shoulder chops are very cheap.
Unless California is completely different than NYC, where a shell steak costs me maybe $13-$25/lb depending on quality and web/dry age and a lamb shoulder chop is somewhere between $7 and $9/lb, maybe $1-$2 more for the round bone if I feel like it.
If we had any number of sheep here I wonder if Gigot chops would be cheaper than a t-bone or ribeye. Those better cuts of beef haven’t been affordable for a while now unless clearanced due to going off. So always looking for an alternative. The Gigot chops in the video look really delicious and apparently you can grill them. Pork Chops are affordable, but just not the same as I’d imagine a similar cut from other Bovinae familae
Here in the SF Bay Area, a choice NY (i.e., shell steak) goes for $6-$10 at retail. For example, Safeway and Costco both have boneless choice NY right now at $8 boneless. Those same places sell lamb shoulder at around the same price. Lamb chops, much higher.
I’m not sure why it would be fair to compared aged beef to straight cuts of lamb.
For me, it’s because beef needs aging to get comparable flavor. TBH though, I’m not eager to see lamb suddenly take off in popularity. There are sweet spots where lamb is competitive on price, and it’s OK by me if it stays that way :)
I’ve never seen lamb reach the price of the steak sales here or the good roasts. I don’t even know where to buy mutton. Venison and buffalo is easy though.
$8/lb definitely is cheaper. I’ve never ever seen shell steaks below $10/lb here. If lamb shoulder costs the same price as shell beefsteak I’d get the shell 100% of the time.
I listed wet-aged beef. All meat is aged, wet aging means they pack it in plastic after breaking down the primals and the internal enzymes get to work. Lamb and pork is wet aged also. If you eat any type of meat immediately after it’s slaughtered but after rigor mortis goes away, it will be extremely tough. So you age it, either wet or dry. Almost always wet. Wet aging does not affect flavor at all, just texture.
Some beef, usually prime grade, is dry-aged, which is much more expensive as it takes a couple weeks of hanging in a temperature and humidity-controlled room and the product loses some of its weight to water evaporation and edge-waste, as the outsides get nasty and are inedible. Dry-aged beef starts at $25/lb or so. It’s what high-end steakhouses sell. It is much more tender, has a more intense beefy flavor, and a mineral, almost cheesy quality to it. Delicious stuff, but I usually don’t spend the money.
Real mutton is nearly impossible to find in the USA. It simply isn’t sold here. If you live in an area with a large muslim population try to find a halal butcher, may have some luck there.
Choice bone-in strip steak is actually $5 a pound right now at Safeway in the SF Bay Area. That’s lower than their regular sales, but it’s on sale for the $6-7 range on a regular basis. Our Costcos pretty much have it pegged at around $7-$8 all the time for boneless. Which leads to my dilemma on lamb: I’ll splurge on some chops every once in a while, but it’s hard to pass up good beef steaks for some lesser cuts of lamb, at the same price.
As an aside, I found it very strange when I first moved to Manhattan that NY seems like the one place in the country where it isn’t called a NY strip. “What’s this shell steak thing that looks so much like a NY?”
Wow, that’s insane. You can get a half-pound strip steak for less than a big mac.
The short loin muscle is usually called a strip here. The real term is a shell. I guess we don’t call it a NY strip for the same reason the french don’t call them french fries.
Mutton cools thy humors. Beef heats them. Thou may be choleric and so thou shall eat of the mutton. But if thou beist phlegmatic, a beef may heal thy body.
