Cordero al Chilindrón

Chilindrón is a sauce, not a single dish, and is claimed across the neighbouring northern regions of Navarre, Aragón and La Rioja (and into the Basque Country). It is built on the dried choricero pepper — a sweet, non-spicy red pepper that, like all New World peppers, entered Iberian cooking after the 16th century and took hold along the Ebro. The same sauce dresses chicken (pollo al chilindrón, the Aragonese version) and, in the lamb-raising uplands of Navarre and La Rioja, milk-fed or young lamb, which is the version here.

Tender lamb that pulls cleanly off the bone, coated in a glossy, brick-red sauce. The choricero pepper gives a deep, sweet-savoury, faintly smoky flavour with no chilli heat; onion and tomato round it; the lamb's own fat enriches the sauce. Rich and warming, the sauce thick enough to cling to the meat and to bread.

Two stages carry the dish. First a hard sear browns the lamb through the Maillard reaction, building the meaty base note and rendering some fat. Then a long, gentle braise does the rest: connective tissue in the bony lamb pieces slowly converts to gelatine, which is what turns the meat fork-tender and gives the sauce its body. The flavour core is the choricero pulp — the dried peppers are rehydrated and their flesh scraped out, rather than using powder, for a fuller, sweeter pepper taste that deepens as the stew reduces.