Susan Jung's recipe for slow-cooked lamb shoulder with ras el hanout

When it comes to dinner parties, I often cook lamb. It's available year-round (except for the extra-tender, pale pink-fleshed spring lamb) and has so much flavour that it's hard to ruin. I usually roast lamb leg to medium-rare but, with lamb shoulder, which has more fat and connective tissue, I use a moist heat and cook it slowly for a long time, so it's tender but not dry.

If you have time to plan in advance, salt the lamb two days before cooking it and refrigerate it. The next day, rub it with the ras el hanout spice mixture before refrigerating it again. The lamb needs about five hours to cook to make it very tender. If the lamb shoulder you buy has the neck and ribs still attached, have the butcher trim them off as close to the bones as possible (save the bones to make soup).

Ras el hanout means "top of the shop" and is a spice blend that varies from cook to cook. The mixture I give is adapted from a recipe in Paula Wolfert's book Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. She calls for whole spices that you grind yourself in a spice grinder (mine is a burr-type one for coffee beans). Some of the dried spices, such as mace, galangal and ginger, don't grind that well in the coffee grinder, so for these I buy the pre-ground stuff. It's essential that all the spices - whole or ground - are fresh; open the jar and take a sniff - if the scent has faded, so has the flavour; throw it away and buy more. All the spices in the recipe are whole and dried, unless indicated otherwise. It takes awhile to assemble all these spices - I had to search in three shops, including one that specialises in Indian products. You won't need all of the ras el hanout; keep the remainder in a tightly sealed glass jar and try to use it within three months.

You can buy preserved lemons (also called salted lemons) in jars at City'super.

For the ras el hanout:
1 nutmeg
3 rosebuds
1/8 tsp lavender flowers
5 grams Sri Lankan/Ceylon cinnamon stick
¼ tsp anise seed
¼ tsp chilli flakes
2 cloves
6 allspice berries
5 green cardamom pods
1 black cardamom pod
¼ tsp white peppercorns
1 tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp galangal powder
½ tsp ground mace