Make Your Own Lard (Believe it or not, it's good for you)

The New Homemaker ^ | 2007 | Lynn Siprelle

[Red_Devil 232]

You WHAT?!" said my friend, making the most disgusted face I've seen someone make in some time. I rendered some lard over the weekend, I repeated. "WHY on EARTH would you want to do THAT?!" she cried.

I wasn't surprised. North American culture is so fat-phobic we demonize some of the very foods that are best for us, and among those foods is homemade lard. The store stuff isn't worth bothering with; it's hydrogenated to make it shelf-stable. What I'm talking about is lard from the fat of well-raised pigs, not factory farmed pigs. To get it, you're going to have to make it yourself. Luckily, that's not hard.

What you don't know about lard
Not only does lard make the best pie crusts, it's lower in saturated fat than butter--if saturated fat bothers you. It doesn't bother me, in fact, the plaque levels in my heart have actually improved since I've started eating good saturated fats. (They've actually gone and looked, so I feel safe in saying this.)

Technically lard isn't even a saturated fat; it's a monounsaturated fat. And it's one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D. It also contains no trans-fats. If there's fat to be avoided, trans-fats are the ones.

Finding fat
The hardest part of making lard is finding a good source of pork fat. You're going to have to do a little digging, and it's important that you not just use any pork fat you find; you want to make sure the pig was properly cared for and fed right. Your average supermarket "butcher," and I use that term loosely, isn't going to have it; that pork is all factory farmed, and very few supermarket butchers cut whole carcasses any more. You may have more luck at a specialty market like Whole Foods, Wild Oats or the like, but be sure to inquire after the feeding practices.

If there is a farmer's market near you, look around and ask questions. That's how we stumbled onto our farmer, who is really in the goat cheese biz; he raises pigs on the leftover whey. We've bought two (incredibly delicious) pigs from him in as many years, and surprised the butcher by asking for all of the fat--and as much of the offal as we could get, but that's another article. Hey, we were paying for it. If you don't have a farmer's market, try EatWild.com where you can find farmers with good growing practices, and not just for meat.

Making it
Once you've found your fat, decide what you want to use it for. If you want it for pastries, try to find and use only the fat from around the kidneys--what's called "leaf" lard. I don't make much pastry, so I don't care about that.

Chop the fat into at least 1" cubes, taking any meat chunks off in the process. Some folks put it through a meat grinder. In any event, you want small pieces; otherwise you won't get as much fat out.

Heat your oven to 225°F. I use my cast iron dutch oven to render lard in. Put about a quarter-inch of water at the bottom of the pot; this keeps the fat from browning too much at the beginning, and it'll burn off in time. Add your chopped-up fat. Pop it in the oven for at least a couple of hours, stirring now and then. Eventually the chunks won't give up any more fat--it'll become obvious, the chunks will look the same after an hour as they did before.

As you're doing all this there will be a distinct smell. Some people like it, some people don't. It's a little too intense for my comfort, frankly, which is why I try to do a bunch of lard at once. If you can do this outside, or in a canning kitchen if you have one, so much the better.

Let the lard cool to lukewarm; while it's cooling is a good time to gather up your jars and lids and make sure they're clean and ready to go. There are various methods to filter out the bits of meat and unrendered fat--the cracklings--from the lard, but what I use is a paper coffee filter and cone. Ladle the still-liquid lard, skipping the bigger chunks, into the filter.

Refrigerate the lard and use it within a month. If you've made more than you can use in a month, it freezes well.

Using it
Use it anywhere you'd use butter or shortening: To pop popcorn (the best!); to make pie crust; to fry eggs. In some cultures it's even spread on bread, topped with onions and salt, and called a sandwich. As for the leftover bits, the cracklings? Salt them and put them on salads or just munch on them. Josie loves them. We got more cracklings than we could eat, so we fed a lot of them to the chickens and used them as doggie and kitty treats.

[jstaff]

It still is a fav of mine. There’s a small cafe in town that has fatback biscuits on the breakfast menu everyday, and they sell a bunch. But to my taste the best flavored lard is goose lard, smeared on a thick slab of heavy dark rye bread, a little salt and black pepper, and maybe a very thin slice of fresh onion. I found it on the menus of several small gasthauses during my 12 years in Germany.

[Yardstick]

What’s the difference in lard and tallow?

[maine-iac7]

It’s actually impressive how you managed to fit so much disinformation into one small space.

Actually the opposite. Very informed information.

Take, for example, olive oil. as long as it's fresh, fine for salads. for cooking, it turns rancid - also goes rancid quite soon in the bottle. Very unhealthy.

Coconut oil is super healthy, doesn't go rancid and has a higher burn point.

It's also great on your skin...

Of course, you will pooh pooh my post as well, but if you're honest, you'll do some open minded research. Google is at your fingertips.

[maine-iac7]

ummm, nummy sounding.
I love a big bowl of pinto beans with sauted onions, garlic an green peas. I make a meal of it.

but your “light roux with lard and flour and add to the beans” sounds REALLY good - maybe with bacon fat if you have no lard on hand? or some fried salt pork bits?

[maine-iac7]

I used to farm sheep. After eating lamb stew in the winter, I never needed to apply chapstick to my lips.

Might also be from handling lanolin laden wool?

I make a great skin cream using coconut oil and lanolin.

[maine-iac7]

What you said ;o)

[goat granny]

Thats the reason people only took baths infrequently, a lot of trouble to cart the buckets of water into the back room from the outside pump, put in on the old coal fired stove to heat, carry it back into the back room, pour into tub and add enough water to cool it down, wash and the dispose of the water....there was no turning on the tap and filling the tub....we are a soft people now :O)

I still remember my grandma's farm, with a parlor and a piano in it...children were not allowed in the parlor. The upstairs bedrooms would hold 3 full size beds and each had a chamber pot under it...you were careful using the chamber pot in case someone else had used it, you didn't want pee dumped on your feet.....ah, life was good in the good old days.....

[Hardastarboard]

"Praise the Lard"

Bill Cosby (yes, he actually did say that).

[maine-iac7]

Who did the the kill, scald and scrape, and gutting?

Grampa and Uncle Milo!

they kill the pig, dump into barrel of boiling water and scape off the bristles - then sled it up past the house to the work shop - hang er up to gut and bleed out and then came to butchering - and grammie would make the sausage.

I stayed inside the house!

I could do chickens and rabbits - but not beef and porkers.

[Free Vulcan]

Grew up on it and use it today. It’s similar to cooking in butter. Better actually, more like 1/2 butter, 1/2 vegetable oil and doesn’t burn as fast.

[ladyvet]

I love and use virgin Coconut oil...even for my skin!

[metmom]

I do for the old family anise Christmas cookie recipe.

It makes coolies to die for.

I use it for pie crusts and biscuits, etc.

I haven’t had a can of hydrogenated vegetable oil in the house in years.... rather decades.

[metmom]

A note on cooking oils.

Olive oil can be heated to a higher temperature than other oil and does not create the “varnish” on the pans that other oils do.

As an aside, the way paint varnish is made, the factory takes about 500 gallons of some sort of oil, like corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil for example, and heats it to about 500 degrees for 8 hours. The end result is varnish to which they only add some dryers so that it will harden. It is then used to make paint or with the addition of more dryers and some other ingredients, something to varnish bare wood with.

Next time you take a look at that old frying pan with all that sticky *varnish* on it, think about that. And if you want to clean that sticky mess off your frying pan, use some lacquer solvent.

Once I realized what the *varnish* on frying pans was; I stopped using all those other oils for frying. Now it’s only olive oil.

I understand that peanut oil is very good for high temperature frying as well.

[SoothingDave]

I always make my own lard, when I’m not busy scutching flax.

[LatinaGOP]

Bacon fat works most excellently as I believe salt pork bits would. Just heat the fat and add an equal amount of flour (3 TBS. of each works well), but it depends on how big of a pot of beans you’ve cooked. Once beans are cooked through and seasoned with salt to taste, you cook your light roux and in order to make it not lump in the pot, add broth from the beans into your pan with the roux by the ladle full and whisk then add all at once into the beans.

[krogers58]

Nothing compares to french fries cooked in lard, nothing!

[bigheadfred]

I stayed inside the house!

Probably just as well. A local guy wanted to have a whole roast pig at his wedding at my parents'. He brought a pig and stayed to help get him ready for me to cook. My dad has a low platform we use to scald and scrape. Anyways the pig is in the pen and my dad shoots it in the head with the .22. It drops like it is dead and my dad goes in to cut it's throat. Standard practice is to slide the knife through the front of the shoulder into the heart to bleed it. But cutting the jugular while the heart is still fibrillating works fine. Anyways this pig gets up and heads out of the pen. WTH? J grabs an ear and my bro says "aim him for the platform". They guide the pig over and one more tug on the ear and he jumps up on the platform. The whole time J is saying " comon pig help us out, you can do it". Keep in mind this pig is gasping, staggering, and bleeding like a stuck pig. When he hopped up on the platform I had the .22 and popped a cap in his brain. My dad was appalled. It was bizarre to the point of funny. I still laugh.

From there everything went all right. ;-)

[Hoosier Catholic Momma]

I concur!!!!

[TheConservativeParty]

When I was a kid and we raised pigs (and beef cattle and chickens), my mother used the lard to make the most delicate and delicious oatmeal cookies EVER. So good that I still remember them, and I am 48.

I cook and bake with butter now. I hate margarine.

[krogers58]

“It is also not exactly practical to make your own lard, especially if it is considered so important to monitor the diet of the pig. Lard itself is available. This article is touting the merits of lard (debatable to say the least) but also suggesting that for the best lard you need to make your own. That’s just not practical.”

We know every bite our hogs have ever taken. And after we butcher one behind the shed, we render the lard. The original article seems pretty optimistic in the time involved, we usually let it render overnight at least. A large crockpot of roaster oven works even better than the oven. We pour it hot into canning jars, seal, and put it in the basement where it stays cool all year.

Well, we have an old refrigerator, with the compressor taken off of it, with a hole cut in the bottom that we used to smoke the hams and bacon. We usually put our lard renderings in there too, but we use a pressure cooking vessel that lets the air out of the pressure cooker, and to a smaller extent, lets small amounts of air in, such that the lard doesn't pick up the smoked flavor. We essentially render the lard while doing the smoking.