This 13-pound bag of pork
fat has been sitting in my freezer for three months, waiting for me to render
it into lard. (I don't know why the label says $0.01. It really cost 40¢ a pound.) I’d never rendered fat before but I knew I would make a big mess
doing it. Procrastination comes easily to me and I found several excuses, such
as waiting until after the holidays or waiting until I had used up my supply of
canola oil.
Finally, I knew it was time
to wade into the fat. The butcher shop had ground the fat and I was thankful I
didn’t have to chop hunks of fat into little pieces before I could begin. After
the fat had thawed, which took a couple of days, I stuffed half the fat into
the crock pot and turned the temperature to high. Soon liquid began to form around the edges of the pot.
I stirred the fat every 20
minutes to keep it from sticking or burning. After a few hours a good amount of
liquid fat had accumulated.
I set a cheesecloth-lined
strainer over a large bowl and ladled some of the fat, both liquid and chunks,
into it.
Then I dumped the solids back into the crock pot. I repeated this process several times, each time pouring the liquid fat into a one-quart canning jar.
I was tired and wanting to
go read my book by the time only a couple of inches of fat particles remained
in the pot. I dumped the remaining fat into a large baking pan and put it in
the oven to finish. The end result was another cup or two of liquid fat and a
lot of cracklings. I drained the cracklings on a brown paper bag. We will
sprinkle these crunchy, high-protein bits on salads.
Finally, I have two full
quarts of lard and a small bowl full.
Tonight I’m going to make lard biscuits
for supper, just like my grandma used to do. And when I render the
remainder of that big bag of fat, I’ll do it in the oven. To heck with the
crock pot.
Copyright
2014 by Shirley Domer
2 comments:
And how did your lard biscuits turn out?
Thanks for this instructive post!
Lard biscuits are perfect. They're crusty outside but moist inside. Their crumb is more substantial than oil biscuits'. I'll be making these from now on.
We don't care for the cracklings and plan to give them to the chickens as a special treat. They can eat the protein and return it to us in their lovely eggs.
I failed to mention in the post that lard rendering is, just as I feared, a messy undertaking. One good result of that was my nice, soft hands. Lard is a great emollient.
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