How to Render Pork Lard from Fat
Author: Whats4Chow
Recipe type: Techniques
Serves: 1.5kg
Rendering your own lard from fat is rewarding exploit that has numerous benefits. The main being the amazing flavors of foods cooked in lard, and secondly the health benefits. You can render any type of animal fat, with the most widely used being pork, as the resulting lard has a high smoke point, and it imparts tons of amazing flavor. It is also available in large quantities almost anywhere in the world.
Ingredients
- Pork fat with skin removed
Yield:
- 2kg pork fat yields 1.5kg lard
Instructions
- Rendering your own lard from fat is rewarding exploit that has numerous benefits. The main being the amazing flavors of foods cooked in lard, and secondly the health benefits.
- You can render any type of animal fat, with the most widely used being pork, as the resulting lard has a high smoke point, and it imparts tons of amazing flavor. It is also available in large quantities almost anywhere in the world.
- Here is 2 kg of pork fat with skin removed. Cut the fat into blocks small enough to fit through the feeder tube of your grinder.
- Spread the blocks out into roasting tins and transfer these to your freezer for 60 minutes until almost frozen.
- Remove the partially frozen fat from the freezer and run this through your grinder using an 8mm grinding plate.
- Transfer the ground fat to a large heavy bottom pot. Place the pot over low heat and bring the fat up to 120c.
- Allow the fat to continue bubbling slowly at this temperature for 2 hours, stirring it up every 30 minutes.
- After about 60 minutes, a foam will start to form on the surface. Continue cooking for a further hour.
- You will know when the rendering is complete when all visible bubbling has ceased, and very little foam remains on the surface.
- Turn off the heat and allow the lard to cool to 90c before pouring it through a fine sieve into a clean bowl.
- Allow the lard to cool to less than 60c before transferring it to a container for freezing or refrigeration.
- The lard will last indefinitely if frozen, and up to 3 months if refrigerated. My lard has never lasted long enough to test these limits.
- Use your lard for pan frying, deep frying, in pie pastry for savory pies, in fact in just about any application where oil, butter or margarine would normally be used.
