I made this for dinner tonight. Oh, my gosh! The lamb just fell off the bone. My husband said this is definitely company food. Even if someone didn't care for lamb, they would like this dish. I did use half of the vinegar & it was just the right amount. I served sauteed asparagus, red potato mashed potatoes & spinach salad with the shanks. The sauce from the meat was really good on the potatoes also. Next time, we decided, we will try this recipe with beef shanks.Edit 6/05: Made this recipe again.I realized that I left something out of my previous review. There was a lot of sauce left over so I put it on some pasta a couple of days later. It was absolutely delicious!

This is a great recipe! A little brown sugar will also cut down the sourness. I found that this worked really well in a crock pot as well as the oven. I've also used diced leeks and zucchini on the bottom layer.

This is so fantastic!! I loved not having to brown the shanks. I used about half the balsamic vinegar but would not change a thing otherwise!

Thank you for posting this recipe! We made it for Christmas dinner this year with a few changes. We only used 2 shanks so we used the calculator to adjust the recipe and cut the vinegar down to 1/4 cup based on everyone's reviews here. We put everything in the dutch oven and put that in the oven at 350 for two hours, flipping the shanks after hour 1 just to make sure they didn't burn since we didn't have a lot of onion protecting the shanks from the bottom of the dutch oven. Served the shanks with Greek lemon garlic roasted potatoes that we found a recipe for at About.com's Greek food section, putting the potatoes in the bottom oven tray at the end of hour one and then taking both the shanks and the potatoes out at the end of hour two, ready to serve. The sauce for the lamb shanks was amazing. We used a good wine and were not disappointed at all. I saved the leftover sauce for pasta (conchiglie) the next day and it was phenomenal. Will definitely make this recipe again. My dad, who was visiting, insisted on having a copy to take home so he could do it again too. We both felt that if this had been served to us at a restaurant we would have been happy to have paid top dollar for it. Even better to be able to say that we made it ourselves! Thank you.

This was absolutely amazing! I made it for dinner last night, followed everyone's advice and cut the vinegar by half. My husband was very impressed, and he loves lamb. I can not wait to make this recipe for company- it is simple to prepare and the end result is just superb. This one is definitely a keeper, and one that I will make over and over!

I thought the sauce was too sour with all the basalmic vinegar, lemons and red wine. I'd cut way back on the vinegar, and probably leave out the lemons the next time. Meat was great however.

Made a wonderful valentines dinner! Based on other reviews I cut back on the balsamic vinegar. Served it with soft polenta - perfect match! I have set this recipe aside to use with company.

This was really good, and really easy! I didn't have tomatoes so I used tomatoe sauce and it still came out really good.

Unfortunately i only read the first few reviews and not the last ones that commented about too much vinegar! I have tried to add honey, brown sugar, beef stock but its still too vinegary for me sorry!

This was very good. We did add a little brown sugar to the sauce after we removed the meat and thickened it with corn starch to go over our polenta.