Ingredients

1 leg of lamb (2kg)

15 g oregano leaves

1 tablespoon rosemary

4 garlic cloves

1 lemon, zest of

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 orange, zest of

2 tablespoons orange juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons flaked sea salt

Directions

Sit the lamb in a roasting tin, skin-side up, and make many plunging incisions all over the skin side with the tip of a sharp knife.

With a stick blender, blitz the oregano, rosemary, garlic, lemon and orange zests and juices, olive oil and sea salt flakes to a herb-flecked runny paste. Pour or spoon this over the lamb and use your fingers to help get it into the meat where you’ve made your incisions. A lot of the paste will run off down into the tin: rub this into the sides, where the meat is exposed, and spoon over the top on the skin. Leave for 45 minutes or so until the lamb is at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 180oC/160oC Fan.

Pour enough just-boiled water to come up about 1⁄2cm in the tin, and roast for 1 hour 40 minutes, though take a look at it after an hour or so to make sure that the water hasn’t evaporated (if it has, add more) and the top isn’t burning – if it is, cover loosely with foil – though it should, by the end of its cooking time, be darkened in places. I have never found it to burn in my oven, but some ovens are fiercer than others.

Before the time is quite up, remove from the oven and measure the temperature. Otherwise pierce with a knife and peek inches.

Remove the cooked lamb from the oven, cover loosely with foil, and let rest for 15–30 minutes, checking on it every now and again, before transferring to a board to carve.

Nigella: At My Table - Series 1 : "© 2017 Nigella Lawson".