The Simple Carving Trick That Gives You Perfectly Even Lamb Chops Every Time

Carving a rack of lamb, whether pan-roasted or sous vide, isn’t as simple as sliding a knife between the bones. Whether you’re dividing a larger rack into smaller racks before cooking (like, say, turning one eight-bone rack into two four-bone racks) or cutting individual ribs after cooking, you need to pay attention to how the rib bones and loin meat line up in order to divide them evenly.

Looking closely at a rack of lamb, you’ll notice that the ribs curve at an angle, meaning they curve along the loin in a way that makes dividing it evenly more difficult. If you’re not careful, you risk dividing the rack incorrectly and ending up with some rib bones that have almost no meat attached and others that have too much.

In the photo above, the yellow circles indicate where each rib ends; as you can see, the bones are not aligned in a straight line. Whether the bones curve to the right or left depends on which side of the lamb the square is coming from. In the example above, you can see that the bones curve down and to the left, leaving the loin offset to the right in relation to them.

Look at the rightmost rib: you can see that the meaty loin extends to the right. This also means that the leftmost rib has little to no additional meat to its left. If you divide this rack into individual chops by cutting between the bones and bring the knife closer to the bone to its left, that rightmost rib will end up with a very thick medallion of meat, while the leftmost rib will have a thin flap hanging pitifully.

Therefore, the best way to carve the support above is to run the knife along the bones to the right; this will leave enough meat attached to the leftmost rib and an equal portion on the rightmost one. Remember that these directions will be reversed on the racks on the opposite side of the lamb.

The same logic applies if you split a rack of eight bones in half. If you run the knife along the wrong bone, one of the four-bone racks will end up being a little bigger than the other, even though each has four bones.

The lesson here is that since lamb racks are not labeled with the side of the animal they come from, we must first determine the curvature of the bones before making our cuts. This way, no one will feel like they’ve been… uh… scammed.

May 2019