Astypalaia Easter Stuffed Lamb (Lambriano)

On Astypalaia, Easter Sunday does not smell of charcoal. While the mainland turns a whole lamb on a spit, the Dodecanese stuffs one and puts it in the oven, and in the villages that used to mean carrying the tray to the communal bakery on Holy Saturday and collecting it the next morning.

The stuffing is the dish. Rice, the lamb's own liver and heart chopped small, onion softened in oil, tomato, and a great deal of parsley and dill. It cooks inside the meat, absorbs everything that runs out of it, and by the end tastes more of lamb than the lamb does.

The full version uses a whole young animal and is not a domestic proposition. What follows is the way island households scale it down: a boned shoulder or a breast with a pocket cut into it, stuffed, tied and given three unhurried hours. On Astypalaia the same dish reappears on the fifteenth of August for the feast of the Virgin.

Key preparation steps

1. Cook a rice stuffing with the lamb's liver, onion and herbs.
2. Stuff a boned shoulder or a breast pocket and tie it.
3. Bake covered and slow for two and a half hours.
4. Uncover to brown, then rest before slicing.

What cut can I use at home?

A boned lamb shoulder is the easiest. Ask the butcher to bone it and leave it flat, so you can spread the stuffing over it and roll it. A breast of lamb with a pocket cut along its length is the cheaper and more traditional island option.

In both cases keep some fat on the outside. Over three hours that fat renders down through the stuffing and is a large part of why the rice tastes the way it does. A trimmed lean joint gives a dry result.

Do I have to use offal in the stuffing?

It is what makes lambriano lambriano rather than a rice-stuffed roast. Liver and heart, chopped to the size of a pea and browned hard before the rice goes in, give the stuffing a deep mineral savour nothing else replicates.

If offal is genuinely not going to happen at your table, use 200 g of minced lamb browned the same way. The dish will be good, but it will be a different, milder thing than what comes out of an Astypalaian oven.

Why is the rice only half cooked before it goes in?

The stuffing finishes inside the meat. Rice cooked through beforehand has nothing left to absorb and turns to paste over three hours, while raw rice cannot take up enough liquid in time and stays chalky at the centre.

Cook it in stock for about seven minutes, until the grains have swollen but still have a hard core, then stop. Inside the joint it will drink the lamb juices and finish exactly right.

How slow does it need to go?

Low and long. Two and a half hours covered at 150C fan does the work, and the overnight bake of the old wood ovens was simply a lower temperature for far longer. Rushing it at a high heat browns the outside while the stuffing is still cold in the middle.

The last thirty to forty minutes go uncovered to colour the surface and reduce the juices in the tin. Then rest it properly, at least twenty minutes, or the stuffing will spill rather than slice.

What matters in this dish