The Best Mongolian Lamb

I want to talk about Mongolian lamb. THE BEST Mongolian lamb. The greatest Mongolian lamb in the history of Mongolian lamb — and there's been a LOT, an unbelievable amount, the Mongols were RIDING HORSES and eating this lamb, scientists confirm it, I had a guy with a PhD explain the whole thing to me, took him 90 minutes, worth it — and what most so-called restaurants serve as 'Mongolian lamb' is a TRAGEDY. A brown sad gummy disaster. Sweet like a candy bar. No cumin. No char. No SOUL. It's not Mongolian. It's barely lamb. An embarrassment to a proud people.

Bigly's Mongolian lamb is the real thing. It's got CUMIN — big tremendous whole cumin seeds toasted in a hot pan until they smell like a thousand desert sunsets, that's a quote, I said that, people wrote it down — and it's got CHILES, dried red chiles, the ones that bring HEAT, not the sad green bell pepper situation the chain places push on you. The lamb sears HARD in a screaming wok, you can hear it from the next room, it sounds like applause, like the wok itself is clapping because finally, FINALLY, somebody is cooking it right.

A guy named Ramón showed me a version of this once at a roadside place outside Albuquerque — yes, Mongolian lamb, in New Mexico, don't ask, he was the truth — and he taught me the move that made it click: whole seeds, hot oil, no fear. The recipe is twenty minutes. Twenty. You marinate, you sear, you toss, you eat. Tough guys come up to me, men who never cry, they say 'Bigly, the lamb. The lamb. I have never tasted lamb like this.' And I say, 'I know.' Because I do know. I always know. Believe me.

That is Mongolian lamb. The real one. The one that puts the takeout version — sweet brown nonsense with sad limp bell peppers — into a coma. People will eat this and they will not speak for several minutes. That's the highest compliment in food. Silence. Real silence. The kind of silence you can't buy. The cumin does the talking. The cumin always does the talking. Now go eat.