Tawa (Griddle) mutton chops

 

When we were in period of courtship, our food habits hardly matched. I grew up eating mutton (goat meat) and she would hardly discuss anything mutton. She would swear by fish and I would shun away.

Before we got married, we had a middle ground agreement in form of chicken. Yes, Chicken was our savior after marriage for few months. After, few months when we started experiencing culinary boredom, we realized it was about time when we need to make some uneasy culinary choices, and start exploring mutton and fish recipes.

I must admit that though we were initially reluctant with our choices, but as it happens, over next few days we had developed new liking. I have realized that many times we are stuck in our routine, and are happy to continue with the same drill ad infinitum. We resist any new changes in our professional life, personal life or even in our food related choices. But when we are forced to break that mold, we learn that it is not so bad after all.

Coming back to us, missus and I started exploring new recipes of mutton and fish quite often with chicken interspersed in between. We however faced a problem of different kind when it came to Mutton. I had no knowledge of buying goat meat from butcher shop. Many times the purchase that I made turned out to be of inferior quality and hence recipes made from them were less palatable and resulted into disappointment. So despite having quite a number of mutton recipes in our food diary, we were not much enthused while preparing them. Few months ago, we came across a wonderful online service http://meatroot.com/ that sells all kind of non-veg food items in raw form and best part is if you are in Pune they provide free home delivery. I was thrilled to try their service and was mighty pleased with their service.  Now before you guys, think this as some kind of promotional post, let me come back to our recipe. Last week, Missus decided to make Tawa (Griddle) mutton chops. In this recipe, chops are marinated in yogurt, green masala paste, powdered whole spices for 2-3 hours. Post marinating chops are cooked in a pan until we get rid of excess water. When it is completely cooked and well coated with the masala, it is cooked for few more minutes on griddle at high flame on both the sides till they become brown and crispy (searing). We were searing them on griddle in batches and by the time second batch was getting cooked, we had almost finished chomping over first batch. It was tender, juicy, and absolutely delicious.

An important point to remember here is that we are using goat meat (chevon), which is very different from lamb meat. Lamb meat usually is cooked rare to medium for getting the juiciness and tenderness. However, we must not follow similar cooking method for goat meat. On the contrary goat meat would become tough and unappetizing if same strategy is adopted. Goat meat must be allowed to cook slow and long. Collagen (long stiff structural protein) when it is cooked slowly with moist heat, it breaks down and becomes rich liquid, gelatin. This gives meat a lot of flavor and a wonderful silky texture.

So when you make recipes using goat meat, always prefer slow and long cooking method. I hope you would make these delicious chops for your family. You can use the comment section below to share your feedback with us.

Click here to watch recipe video