Divya Gunani: Hi! I’m Divya Gunani and we’re at the breast taking 360 degree views of the city at Five-Sixty. This Wolfgang hot restaurant is the latest and greatest addition to the Dallas, Texas. Whether you come for the Asian inspired cuisine, extensive wine list, you’re in for an unforgettable experience. So let’s go Behind the Burner and meet the chef.

I’m here with the executive chef, Sara Johannes. Sara, what are we making?

Sara Johannes: Today, we are going to do a Mongolian Grill Lamb chop that we serve with our eggplant salad. It’s one of most popular things in the menu. It’s actually pretty easy to make at home especially if barbecue season is coming.

When you buy lamb, you want to go to your butcher and you want to ask for a wrap of spring lamb or a young lamb, not a mommy. There’s a big difference in flavor there. And you want to ask for the racks of your French and that means that they’re going to take off all of the tissue that’s in between the bones. So it’s a little bit cleaner, it presents more nicely. You’re going to take out what that called the cab. It’s a big slab of fat in here. So make sure you have a good, sharp kitchen knife and take this whole thing out because all it is really just fat that’s going to make the lamb not taste so great.

I personally like to roast the whole racks of lamb because it keeps a little bit more moist and a little bit more juicy, clean up the bones a little bit if you want to really take your knife again, you can scrape them all up. And you want to get a little bit of that off. Just so it doesn’t burn and that presents a little bit more nicely.

What I like to do is take thin foil and wrap each of the bones because this way, they’re not going to burn when you put them on the grill. So you’ll get nice, white, and pretty bones out of it. And the silver skin is literally silver and there’s a honey outside of the muscle. It incases the muscle, it just makes your meat a little bit more tender.

We’re going to make a little bit of an Asian marinade and the restaurant marinade in mushroom soy, and mirin. And mirin is a sweet rice cooking wine. It’s a mushroom soy.

Divya Gunani: Mushroom soy.

Sara Johannes: It’s a dark flavored soy here. It’s got a little bit more flavor than like light Kikkoman soy it normally would. I’m going to grab a fancy container that I already had some marinate on it.

Divya Gunani: Okay.

Sara Johannes: And then we’re just going to throw that in. So we’ll pour that all over and I want to be very careful to not get any of the marinade on the bones. So I’m going to let this marinate for at least half an hour. So once we’ve got that all marinated, and we’re going to pour some peppers before it goes on the grill.

The most important thing you can do with this, don’t touch it.

Divya Gunani: I know.

Sara Johannes: You want to take the thin foil off while the meat is hot and we’re going to put all of the eggplants in there. It starts probably away. So I’m using peanut oil. The reason I use peanut oil because the peanut oil has a very high—I’ve got some garlic here that I’ve sliced up really thinly.

I’m putting on some baby spinach or you can use greens, whatever is in seasoned. The—works really well like this and the spicy baby arugula. It’s whatever you got around you that you love. I’m going to put the warm eggplant right on top of the greens and I’m going to knot the scar to put some of the sauce in there. So that’s kind of being our vinaigrette. We want all that garlic, we want all that chili, we want all of that get stuffed.

The way that you cut a lamb right is to go right between the bones here. Sometimes, you’re going to hit off to the side because you got to kind of cut it in angle. I’m going to get people a double chop. So I’m going to cut straight down. You just melt some butter with a couple of cloves of whole garlic in there. You can put this in your fridge and keep it there forever. And every time you grill something on the grill cut a steak open. Add a little bit of garlic powder.

The finishing touch is stir it with whitesman shoes. And then the sauce that we serve this with at the restaurant is our Cilantro vinaigrette and that recipe can become a—

The cilantro in the lamb is so great. You’ll get a little bit of the nuttiness with the cashews that are in there. The lamb which is pretty sublte and very tender. I mean you’ve got a lot of the mid going on but the cilantro kind of gives it that and I expected that you were used to with the lamb. A mint jelly that you probably—I grew up on.

Divya Gunani: Sara thank you so much for having us.

Sara Johannes: Thank you so much.

Divya Gunani: Stay tuned to Behind the Burner where we give you the tips, tricks, and techniques that are lighting that culinary world on fire.