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Lamb French Rack

The Lamb French Rack: 3 Ways

We wrote about the French Rack for box #4 of our Summer, 2023 Meat Club. This is one of our favorite warm-weather lamb cuts because it’s elegant but not fancy. It’s like a really nice bottle of wine that you decide to drink “just because”. Don’t save this cut for weeks or months thinking it’s “too nice” to eat on a weeknight. It’s juicy and steaky but not fussy and doesn’t take long at all to cook, especially on the grill. The lamb rack can be a little intimidating with rib bones sticking out and a slightly unusual shape. Don’t overthink it and consider these three seasoning choices:
  • Classic: coarse kosher salt and pepper. Grill it.
  • Mediterranean: Kosher salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, marjoram, Great Lakes garlic (available in our customer pickup location) and a little fresh mint to garnish. Finish with a generous squeeze of fresh or grilled lemon juice during resting.
  • Argentinian: Grill the chops classic style and top with a “chimmichurri“: an Argentinian finishing sauce or drizzle that packs a massive punch of accompanying flavor featuring fresh herbs, garlic, a little heat and warm oil and vinegar. For a simpler chimichurri, you can find a wonderful dried version at the Spice and Tea Merchant on Front Street in downtown Traverse City.

We season all our meats for at least an hour uncovered in the fridge (we often season our meats the night before we cook them and leave them uncovered in the fridge for up to 24 hours to drive moisture off the surface), start it on the cool side of the grill or oven for a few minutes to start cooking slowly, and then finish it on the hot side (a “reverse sear“) to hit the perfect temperature of around 135 for medium/medium rare. These aren’t huge cuts so make sure your instant read thermometer is handy. After you’re at about 130 degrees, pull the meat off the fire and let it rest for at least 10 minutes before cutting and service. Cut in between the rib bones to serve beautiful, juicy and tender individual pop chops.

Anavery Fine Foods pasture raised lamb
Thank you to all of our returning Members and welcome NEW Members to the first pickup of Fall 2023. Some important news we wanted to highlight quickly. Read more about each of these in our news section below:

Lamb: We’ve increased the size of our favorite quick-cooking lamb cut: the French Rack for the fall to give you even more meaty chops to bite into over the weekend. Our French Rack is now about twice the size that it was over the summer and is perfect for Labor Day weekend grilling and entertaining. We’ve also shared our versatile ground lamb this weekend and lamb loin chops, all great for a weekend of grilling. Read our culinary section at the bottom of this email for more information on cooking our French Rack.

Pork: Just yesterday we picked up our latest batch of bacon from the smokehouse and couldn’t wait to send it out to our pork subscribers this week. We also wanted to start this term off with classic bone-in or boneless pork chops and our sweet Italian sausage. We’re still thinking “grill” all weekend so wake up early, oven-roast our bacon and then hit the grill in the afternoon to cover the full weekend with our heritage Red and Black Waddle pork.

Beef:  We’re kicking off the fall with the grill in mind and we wanted to share our favorite beef steak cut this week: the thick, marbled, rib-eye. Our grass-fed, pasture-raised cows are known for two things: doing a great job at birthing strong, healthy calves in the middle of a snowstorm and for producing incredible steaks, roasts and ground. This week we’re featuring the rib eye steak and ground beef to ensure your freezer is ready for the weekend.

Cheese: Two words: Caraway. Cheddar. We had a great visit with the Boss Mouse Sue Kurta herself this afternoon when she dropped off this batch and she is so excited to share this cheese. This is a new cheese for our subscribers and the warm flavor of caraway (often the seed featured in rye bread) mixed with the sharp tang of cheddar is really special. This cheese, with a slight note of anise or fennel will pair really well with our Sweet Italian sausage.

Flowers are ready!
We’ve got two more flower pick-ups this summer! Thanks to everyone who supported our flower share. Your flowers are ready!

News from the farm and very important information for new Members:

Great Lakes Garlic:

Our close friends and fellow local farmers Kevin and Tiffany from Great Lakes Garlic Farm dropped off a few bushels of beautiful, Certified USDA Organic and Buckley-grown chesnok red garlic for our members to purchase. It’s absolutely amazing.

Huge thanks to our incredible crew this summer. Pictured: Farm Manager Dave Waeltz slinging burgers at our end-of-summer Open House, which took place last Sunday, August 27. It was great to meet so many new Members and visit with returning Members during the afternoon.
We had our first farrow of piglets born this summer. This sow is an amazing mom, with 9 healthy, happy piglets in tow. She’s been a great sow for some of our favorite pigs on the farm. Welcome piggos!
We do a terrible job of taking photos of ourselves on the job, mostly because we’re pretty busy. We want to thank all of our farm crew this summer for the incredible work: Anna, Autumn, Brian, Carson, Dave, Dandan, Duncan, Jeff, Maddy, Phil, and Sophie for never backing down from the hardest task.