Skip navigation

Lamb with Marjoram and Potato Gnocchi

4 SERVINGS
Under an hour

Buy all ingredients right below the recipe

MEAT

  • 1 kg lamb leg
  • 260 g peeled onion
  • 120 g butter
  • 1 l chicken broth
  • 200 ml cream, min. 31%
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 2 tablespoons fresh marjoram leaves
  • pepper
  • salt for meat and gnocchi

GNOCCHI

  • 1 kg potatoes – cooking type C
  • 250 g coarse flour and for dusting the dough
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon potato starch
  • 2 tablespoons lard for coating gnocchi

DISH PAIRING WITH BEER

  • This dish is best enjoyed with a glass of well-chilled beer.

MEAT PREPARATION

  • 1
    Finely chop the onion. Peel and crush the garlic. Trim the meat, remove larger pieces of fat, and cut into 1.5 cm cubes. Season thoroughly with salt and freshly ground pepper.
  • 2
    In a saucepan over high heat, melt 60 g of butter and sauté the onion until golden, stirring frequently. Add the meat and sauté until all the juices released by the meat have evaporated. Stir often. Once the meat juices have evaporated and only fat remains at the bottom of the saucepan, sauté the meat until golden. Then add the garlic and sauté for 1 minute.
  • 3
    Pour in enough broth to cover the meat by 1 cm. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to minimum, cover with a lid, and simmer until tender, about 1 hour. Stir occasionally and add hot broth as needed to keep the meat covered by 1 cm. Once the meat is tender, pour in the cream and add the chopped fresh marjoram leaves. Bring the sauce to a boil and cook for 2 minutes. Stir and remove from heat.
  • 4
    Cut the remaining chilled butter into small cubes and gradually stir into the sauce. Season with salt and pepper, mix, and let rest for 10 minutes.

GNOCCHI PREPARATION

  • 1
    In a pot of well-salted water, cook the potatoes in their skins until semi-soft. Once cooled, peel them and grate finely into a large bowl.
  • 2
    In a larger pot, bring at least 3 liters of water to a boil. Add 2 level tablespoons of salt.
  • 3
    To the grated potatoes, add starch, flour, eggs, 10 g of salt, and quickly mix with a wooden spoon to form a soft but compact dough. On a floured surface, roll the dough into a cylinder 2–2.5 cm in diameter, then cut it into gnocchi 2–3 cm long.
  • 4
    Immediately drop the gnocchi in batches into the prepared boiling water and cook for 6–7 minutes. Transfer the cooked gnocchi to a bowl with melted lard and toss them to prevent drying out. Process all the dough this way as quickly as possible.
Tip
Instead of fresh marjoram, you can use 1 tablespoon of dried marjoram, but don't forget to rub it between your palms. It will be more fragrant. After adding the chilled butter, the sauce must not boil anymore. This technique will refine and thicken the sauce. The final quantity of 1 kg refers to the amount of potatoes cooked in their skins, peeled, and chilled. So, it's better to cook 100 g more potatoes. Before you start preparing the dough, the potatoes must be completely chilled. Do not cook the potatoes completely soft – the dough would then be too thin. The dough should not be too thick or too thin. Therefore, add flour gradually to achieve the ideal consistency. Potato dough tends to thin out, so you must work quickly. Remember that boiling water must be waiting for the potato dough. If you prepared the dough first and then started boiling the water, the dough would become too thin. Therefore, the dough needs to be prepared as quickly as possible, and the gnocchi cooked as quickly as possible. Before serving, you can pan-fry the gnocchi until golden over high heat in a pan with lard. Cooked gnocchi can be frozen.
Roman Vaněk
Together with Rohlik, we've put together a selection of the most popular recipes from my cookbooks and paired them with the right ingredients. Let us know how your meal turned out #rohlikchef

MEAT

GNOCCHI

DISH PAIRING WITH BEER