Agneau de Sisteron

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The Agneau de Sisteron—bearing the coveted Label Rouge and IGP designations—is Provence’s most celebrated meat, a lamb raised on the aromatic garrigue hillsides of Haute-Provence where wild thyme, rosemary, savory, and lavender perfume the pastureland and, by extension, the lamb itself. The animals are born and raised outdoors on the limestone plateaux between the Alps and the Rhône valley, fed on their mothers’ milk supplemented by the wild herbs they graze, slaughtered between 70 and 150 days at 13-19kg carcass weight. This produces a meat of exceptional delicacy: pale pink, fine-grained, with a thin layer of pearly white fat that tastes of the garrigue rather than of lanolin. Cooking Sisteron lamb demands restraint—the meat’s natural quality should dominate, not the chef’s technique. The canonical preparations are: gigot rôti (roast leg, studded with garlic and anchovy slivers, cooked at 220°C for 15 minutes then 180°C to a core temperature of 54°C for rosé), carré rôti (rack, simply seasoned with sel de Camargue and roasted to 52°C), and épaule confite (shoulder braised for 7 hours at 130°C until it falls from the bone in silky shreds). The gigot’s garlic-and-anchovy studding is a Provençal signature: thin slivers of garlic and anchovy fillet are pushed deep into the meat with a larding needle, where they melt during roasting and season the lamb from within. The pan juices are deglazed with white wine and a splash of water, never thickened, to create a jus that is pure essence of lamb and garrigue.

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