Garlic and pepper sauce for roast lamb

The other day I had ordered a leg of milk-fed young lamb at the butcher’s for Easter, but he provided an older and heavier animal and I ended up with 2,5 kilos of meat.

We decided to invite four people over for an impromptu Easter Sunday lunch where I served a roasted lamb from the oven where it had cooked for over an hour with just some of the olive oil it had been basted in, some unpeeled garlic and a sprig of rosemary around it. I first cooked at very hot to seat the meat, then continued at a lower temperature while basting with white wine and later let the leg rest in a turned-off oven.

I accompanied it with a sauce. First I cut up some shallots, a celery stick and a carrot and cooked it in a bit of butter, then I added some sliced fresh garlic and some rosemary. Later I added some veal stock and started to reduce the volume. Then I added some ground Sichuan pepper and wild garlic. I topped the sauce with Madeira wine and let it reduce for at least 30 minutes.

Then I let it cool, put it through a blender and then a strainer.

It was good.