As I noted in my previous post, the overweight hog we sent to the butcher recently produced---in addition to a freezer full of pork---more than 75 lbs. of fat, which I have been rendering into lard.
The first question people ask when I tell them I've been rendering lard all week, is: "Why? No health-conscious person cooks with lard anymore, do they?" In fact, that's not the case at all. As described in these various articles, lard is a lot healthier than most people think:
Lard: The New Health Food
Lard Has Clearly Won the Health Debate
Praise the Lard
Lard: After Decades of Trying, Its Moment Is Finally Here
Trans Fatty Acids: Why Lard May Be Better for You Than Vegetable Oil
Of course, even with the unexpected benefits, I'm not planning to eat 75 lbs. of lard this year! Some of it I'll save for cooking, but the majority I'll make into soap.
Lard soap is mild and gentle to the skin, and it will be great to have some "zero mile" fat for soap making (as opposed to the olive oil I use to make my sheep's milk soap, which is imported from thousands of miles away). I'll still keep making the olive oil based soap, since it's been very popular, but the natural farmstead lard soap will give buyers an additional option. Choice is good!
Anyway, since a lot of people have never rendered lard before, I figured I'd show the process, step by step, here on the blog. Rendering isn't difficult, but it does take a while, so you have to be patient.
Since I had such a huge amount of lard to render, I had to do it one portion at a time over several days, according to how much would fit into my largest stock pot.
Our hog was very large and very obese, so he produced 22.5 lbs. of leaf lard and 53 lbs. of back fat lard. The leaf lard is the internal fat from around the pig's kidneys. It is considered the highest quality lard, since it's said to have a finer texture and a more neutral flavor than the back fat lard.
Here is one of the slabs of leaf lard from our pig. We got two slabs this size.
The slabs of back fat were even larger. Folded over themselves and stacked together, they filled an entire banana box!
The first step was to cut off chunks of fat that were a more convenient size to handle. Here's a chunk of back fat, ready for me to start processing.
To get a neutral (not so porky) flavor to my lard, I trimmed off all the little scraps of meat. Then I cut the fat into little chunks, maybe about 1" square.
The discarded scraps of fatty meat made a VERY popular snack for my chickens!
To begin the rendering process, I put a couple of inches of water in the bottom of my largest stock pot, then filled the rest of the pot with cut-up chunks of fat. I heated the pot on the stove top until it started to boil, then reduced the heat to a low simmer.
The water in the bottom of the pot helps prevent the fat from sticking before it has a chance to melt. By the time the rendering is finished, all the water will have evaporated away.
You do need to stir the pot (less in the beginning and more frequently toward the end), to prevent the solids from sticking to the bottom and burning on.
Almost immediately after the boiling started, the fat changed color and began to get translucent.
Little by little, the chunks of fat started to release quantities of melted liquid lard.
For a while, the liquid in the pot was a milky whitish color. It was at this point that the pot began to need more frequent stirring, because the solids started sinking to the bottom.
Eventually, the liquid turned clear.
The smaller solids sank to the bottom. It was hard to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pot! Meanwhile, the larger solids puffed up and floated on the top of the liquid.
When the floating bits turn golden brown and slightly crispy, the rendering process is done. For a pot this size, it took about 6 hours.
Next, I strained the rendered lard through a strainer lined with several layers of cheesecloth. The solids that are left in the strainer are "cracklings." You can salt them and eat them as a snack, cook them in cornbread, sprinkle them on salads, or use them anywhere else you might use bacon bits (they don't taste like bacon, though. They taste---not surprisingly---like pork rinds).
The cracklings from the backfat came out chunky, as shown in the picture above. The cracklings from the leaf lard came out in smaller crumbs.
I'm storing my cracklings in ziploc bags in the freezer until I'm ready to use them.
The rendered, filtered lard itself I poured into mason jars. I had originally thought I would pour the lard into molds and store it in blocks like pounds of butter. But unlike the partially hydrogenated lard you can buy in blocks from the grocery store, this lard is still liquid at room temperature, so jars turned out to be essential!
When the lard was first poured into the jars, it was a clear, pale, golden color.
By morning, it had cooled down and turned pure white, but it was still liquid. It does turn into a solid if you put it in the refrigerator or freezer.
I'm going to store my lard in the freezer until I need it. Frozen, it should keep almost indefinitely.
From the 75 lbs. of fat I got from my pig, I rendered about 37 quarts of lard. That will make an awful lot of pie crusts and and awful lot of bars of soap!
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