After a two-week hiatus, ‘Blow the Bank’ is back.

And, just as it has for the last five months, each Friday InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of its own recipe for Lamb Shank with Breakfast Mushrooms and Mashed Potatoes.

Shanks are tough, lean, temperamental cuts of meat from the tibia that require a great deal of attention, time, and cooking in order to become the big softies everyone loves. Cook them right and they reward you with a soft, tearaway flesh that falls of the bone onto your fork and almost dissolves in your mouth. Cook ‘em wrong and you forget what all the fuss is about.

To better illustrate the point, if you’ll forgive what is likely one of the most bizarre of food metaphors, shanks are pre-Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (You remember him, don’t you? He was that great actor from such tour de forces as Jingle All The Way and that film about male pregnancy that must have seemed like a good idea to some since-replaced studio bigwig, Junior.)

Uncooked, the shank’s just like Arnie à la the first Terminator — all relentless and badass, but, if you can hold out long enough, it’ll come back out of the oven re-wired and on your side just like Arnie the Protector in T2. It’s all about patience. If you’re impatient, if you rush it by cooking it on a higher heat for less time for instance, it’s game over. The Connors are dead, and the future’s fit only for machines. Good Job, ‘girlie man’. Now, instead of forking through some tender Schwarzenegger, you’re left with piping hot rock-hard heap of Vin Diesel! And let’s face it; no one wants that to happen. Not you; not me.

Sure we could argue for days on end about merits of both men, whose less wooden or whose better at looking tough under the lights, their muscles glistening from a last-minute olive oil rubdown. Yet, whatever the outcome, it’s just cosmetics. We’re talking meat, not musclemen. And, the real fact of the fact of the matter is we’d all rather watch a limp Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop over a cloying Vin Diesel in The Pacifier. Don’t deny it (Especially you, Gaffney — I’ve seen your video collection: It’s all Raw Deal, Red Heat, Last Action Hero, and Batman & Robin with you. Not a single copy of A Man Apart or Find Me Guilty in the bunch.)

And so it is with lamb shanks, it’s about the meat not the muscle — better an overcooked softie than an undercooked tough guy, which is exactly what happened with this week’s dish.

InterWined had high hopes that it’s breakfast mushrooms with onion, pancetta, and red wine would serve as the perfect jus for a soft, fall of the bone, lamb shank. And it would have paired beautifully too, had Sean proved more patient. Instead, the shank hung to bone far more than it should have done, coming in somewhere between Vin Diesel in XXX and Arnie in True Lies. If only it could have been Twins — where’s Danny Devito when you need him…right?

At 14.5% alcohol, the 2005 Chilean Matetic ‘Corralillo’ Merlot Malbec packs a punch. This is a muscle wine for a muscle shank, or so that was the thought when it was selected to accompany the lamb shank. It’s deep red in colour wine bouquet that’s falls somewhere between a campfire and a petrol station forecourt. For obvious reasons, one suspects most reviews would highlight the campfire over the forecourt. After all, the only people likely to get excited by the words “petrol station forecourt” probably drink a very select number of beverages that begin with White Lightning and wholly approve of Mark Vincent’s decision to change his name to Diesel.

For Vin Diesel fans and gasoline fetishists: 10 points.

For the rest of us: given the £11.99 price tag at Oddbinns, a-nothing-to-write-home-about 7.7 — too much alcohol, too little finesse.

InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Lamb Shank with Breakfast Mushrooms & Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients:
4 good-sized potatoes, peeled and cubed
200ml tub of crème fraiche (similar to soured cream)
2 Lamb Shanks
1 red onion
7 cloves of garlic
Cubed pancetta
1 pummet of breakfast mushrooms (large-sized chestnut mushrooms)
2 cups of red wine
Olive Oil
Black Peppercorns
2 cup vegetable stock

Instructions:
1. Pre-heat the oven to 160°c
2. Season the lamb shanks with crushed black pepper, and lay them in an ovenproof dish and cover with stock
3. Cover with kitchen foil or a lid
4. Cook for approximately 1.5-2 hours
5. Towards the end of cooking, remove the lid to ensure that the liquid reduces
6. Once done, remove the dish from the oven and transfer the shanks to a roasting tin
7. Mix the remaining juice from the ovenproof dish with ½ of the red wine, and pour over the lamb shanks, before returning them to the oven
8. Roast until the lamb begins to fall from the bone
9. As the shanks roast in the oven, boil the potatoes until cooked and soft
10. While the potatoes boil, chop the garlic and onion
11. Heat the oil in a large saucepan (Start on a high heat and them take the temp to medium)
12. Add the garlic and onion and butter and sweat them. The onion should start to turn clear
13. Try not to let the garlic turn too brown and stick to the pan
14. Add the pancetta and cook for 2-3 minutes
15. Deglaze the pan with the remaining red wine
16. Allow the liquid to boil and begin to reduce, before adding the mushrooms
17. Cover and cook until the liquid has reduced by half
18. Take the cooked potatoes and drain any remaining water from the pot
19. Add the crème fraiche and ground black peppercorns and mash until smooth
20. Place the mashed potatoes on the plate, before adding the lamb shanks and covering both in the reduced mushroom and pancetta jus

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