Seven-hour lamb shank and date tagine

This is my second tagine recipe in a week, some of you may have noticed. I’d not made one for ages, but once I got the taste for it again with this chicken tagine last week, I remembered just how amazing a tagine dish can be. This was, excuse me for saying so, pretty bloody marvellous.

There are three elements that make for a good tagine recipe: meat, fruit (often dried), and spices. Citrus can also be an integral part of a dish, and nuts are almost invariably used.

Combined, all of those elements add up to so much flavour, bite, crunch, texture — just so much of everything. I adore food cooked in a tagine.

This dish is pretty luxurious, thanks to the price of lamb, and this is not a cheap cut either. 

Strange, that — before the 80s and 90s, shanks were little used as a core ingredient, usually found in stews and curries. For an old-fashioned leg of lamb roast, a portion of the shank was left on the leg, and family would vie for a bite or two of that part, shank meat being so different in texture and so deep in flavour compared with the leg meat.

If you made my harissa paste for that chicken tagine recipe, just use two tablespoons of that for this dish. Otherwise, the harissa recipe is repeated below. Or you can of course buy harissa in jars.

Tony’s lamb shank and date tagine

(Serves 4)

Ingredients

For the harissa:

1 heaped Tbsp each of these seeds: coriander, fennel and cumin

1 medium red onion, chopped

1 large red pepper, diced

20 garlic cloves, crushed, husks removed

20 red chillies, whole

100ml olive oil

For the tagine:

4 lamb shanks

3 Tbsp olive oil

1 x 400g can chopped tomatoes

A can of cold water (use the tomato tin)

2 Tbsp harissa paste

250g dates, chopped

1 tsp each dried cumin, coriander, and fennel

½ tsp ground turmeric

2 tsp crushed dried garlic

1 cinnamon quill

Water

Salt and black pepper

50g almonds, toasted, for serving

Method

Method for the harissa paste:

Trim the red pepper and red onion and chop up roughly.

Trim the stems off the chillies.

Crush the garlic with the flat end of a heavy knife and discard the husks. Leave the cloves whole.

Add the seeds to a dry pan and toast over a moderate heat until they begin to smoke, then turn off the heat. Process them to a powder in a grinder or with a mortar and pestle.

Put everything in a food processor, pour in the olive oil and blend until it is as fine as it will ever be. There will be a little texture at the end.

For the tagine:

Preheat the oven to 200°C, with the rack low enough down for the pot and its lid to fit in. I used the lowest rack.

Make sure the shanks are at room temperature.

Heat olive oil in a tagine and brown the shanks on all sides. Turn off the heat. When the shanks have cooled a little, arrange them so that their bone ends point upwards into the conical lid. So, they are placed flat end down.

In a large jug, add the chopped tomatoes and water and stir in 2 Tbsp of harissa paste. 

Add the chopped dates, the ground cumin, coriander, and fennel and the turmeric, as well as the chopped garlic. Season with salt and black pepper and stir.

Pour this into the tagine around the shanks. Add the cinnamon quill.

Put the tagine in the oven for 20 minutes at 200°C, then turn the heat down to 160°C and cook gently for 6 to 7 hours or until the shanks are fall-apart tender. There’s no need to stir or upset the tagine and its contents in any way — just leave it alone until the time has passed.

Before serving, make some couscous and toast the almonds. Serve a pile of couscous with a shank placed jauntily on top, garnished with toasted almonds. DM

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award, in 2021 and 2023.

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.