Chef Gabriel Claycamp Photo By Coldtruth (c)
You’ve got to wonder why two dozen of the Pacific Northwest’s young-and-beautiful people would spend a Saturday night clustered around a 55-pound lamb carcass, watching a skilled chef demonstrate where the best hunks of meat lie, and how to get at them.
Chef Gabriel Claycamp, trained at the Culinary Institute of America and veteran of numerous gastronomic endeavors, ran his hand over the paper-like membrane atop the lamb. This, he said, while deftly removing it, is why many people just can’t stand lamb. The unpleasant smell and taste that we grew up with comes from the glands in the covering, which good butchers have been removing in recent years.
The attendees each paid $99 to attend the two-hour demonstration in the newly completed kitchen of the Swinery, West Seattle’s bastion of all-things-pork.
The crowd stood around the chef in a half circle, jovial and relaxed as a result of the still-warm bacon-chocolate chip cookies or the wine, microbrews; or wonderfully crafted Mojitos, the Cuban highballs that most students clutched.
Wielding his single knife with ease, Claycamp turned the arrangement of bone and meat into a table filled with cuts most of us would recognize from the grocery cooler: lamb shanks, leg of lamb, a roast and lamb chops. There were also unfamiliar cuts most often found overseas, like kidneys, coveted in the UK and lamb belly, a favorite of many French cooks.
A photo op? Photo by Coldtruth (c)
So why was this the best thing to do on a weekend night?
“All I know about meat is that it comes wrapped in plastic. Before tonight it was hard to associate those pristine packages with a real animal. Now it’s not,” said an architect who was disappointed to have missed the pig-butchering class a month earlier. His neighbor, an audio engineer, said he and his bud might buy a lamb and butcher it themselves.. “Maybe. At least we can get together and grill some of it,” he said.
“Some of us grew up on or near a farm, and this is a bit like revisiting my youth after all these years,” said a nurse practitioner whose childhood was spent on a Montana ranch.
I was surprised to find two vegetarians in the group.
“My boyfriend is a carnivore and I promised him a leg of lamb for Easter, so I thought I’d learn about it from the bottom up, as it were,” said one woman. “I would not do this if I didn’t really love him.”
The other woman explained that her son bringing home someone “very special” for Easter. A “meat eater,” she mumbled, adding, “I thought I taught him better.”
All in all, there was no blood and very little gore. The students seemed unperturbed as the chef sawed and cut away at the lamb.
At the end of class he laid out a goat carcass which seemed okay with the group, but when he displayed the remains of a small veal calf, a couple of the students looked like they’d lost a friend.
Clearly, class was just about over…
