You know when you make a lovely stew or a soup and you have carrots in it? What they do is they absorb the stock and all the lovely flavours around them to leave you with a carrot shaped sponge of lovliness, with still a hint of carrot flavour. Then imagine doing the same, but instead of stock, you used milk…..and instead of leaving the carrots in for a couple of hours, you left them in bubbling milk for 7 (seven) hours. Then imagine tasting the carrot, which looks like a normal carrot, but has a white tinge (because it’s full of hot milk), oh and its covered in curdled milk. You like that? I bloody didn’t. In the picture above, study them . They are offensive.
Anyway. Here is what the dish looked like when I was cooking it. See the curdling milk?
The dish is called Brav u Mlijeku. It’s lamb, cooked in Milk. In the pan is a lamb shoulder, bay leaves, pepper corns, carrots (ugh) and loads and loads of milk. You turn the pan on, get it to a simmer and then let it go for 7 hours. At the end you get some food which is edible, some which is not and as a bonus you get a pan which has got milk baked so hard onto the base that you have to clean it for about 3 hours. What’s even better about that is that the smell from the cooking milk is intense and having your head over the pan to clean it fires the smell deep into your head, to a place where you can’t get it back out. I can still smell it now.
In summary. There were some positives from the dish. Firstly you serve it with potatoes which have not been anywhere near milk. This is good as it means you at least don’t feel you have to eat the carrots for sustenance. The lamb, fortunately, is not as absorbent as the carrots and after I had poured about 40 litres of boiling water through a sieve with the lamb in – to get the curdled milk off – it actually tasted fine. Fine. Not good.
My wife refused it. She said she had eaten a sandwich earlier and wasn’t hungry. I think she was lying and decided hunger was far preferable to this abomination.
Sorry Montenegro. Perhaps I cooked it wrong, or don’t culturally understand it, but this meal was borderline dangerous.
Riverbank & Badger 