Bringing Back the Love of Lard
Lard is the new bacon. It's showing up on t-shirts, at farmers' markets, and, according to James Temple's feature on the history and current use of lard in the San Francisco Chronicle, in popular restaurants around the Bay Area.
But lard wasn't always welcome in the kitchen. Temple explains that while lard used to be a chef's best friend—records of its use date bake to 1420—all that changed when Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911 and proclaimed that animal fats were unsophisticated and unsafe. With increasing heart attack rates in the late 1960s, fear of fat kicked in and pushed lard even further out of the picture.
The truth is that lard in small amounts can actually be good for you—it contains nearly a quarter less saturated fat than butter, no trans fats, and helps to balance the types of polyunsaturated fats in our diets. Its high smoke point makes it perfect for frying and sautéeing, while its low water content and tendency to melt into large crystals results in tender, flaky pastries. Lard is even helping safeguard a rare breed of pig called the Austrian Mangalitsa hog, which is now being raised at Red Mountain Farm in Livermore, California, specifically for the quantity and quality of lard it provides.
Some supermarkets carry rendered pork fat, but Temple says that the best lard, from the area around the abdomen and kidneys (leaf lard) or from the back (fatback lard), can be hard to find, so if you're looking for real lard, call ahead or try your local butcher. You can also make your own at home.
Related: Wooly Pigs Now Available in the States
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4 Comments:
Yes! Bring it!
Lard is one of my refrigerator staples! :)
hungrychristel at 3:59PM on 09/18/08
All the commercial lard I see for sale isn't much tastier than Crisco.
Rendering your own lard is a lot of hassle. Biggest problem is finding affordable quality raw pork fat.
I've run into this when trying to make my own sausage. No problem finding beef fat since people never lost their taste for choice and prime meat (extra fatty), plenty of excess fat on those carcasses. But there is no market for "extra fatty" pork.
Pigs have been bred so lean there aren't these huge hunks of fat for sale, even at Mexican markets (and other markets that appeal to saner cultures).
It seems a crime to buy nice pork belly, and render it all into lard. I already feel guilty grinding one up to make sausage.
peekpoke at 7:19PM on 09/18/08
"But there is no market for "extra fatty" pork."
While that might have been true 10 years ago, it's significantly less true today. At the behest of lipid loving swine lovers everywhere, many of the fattier, more flavorful old variety pigs are being bred again. If you go to your local farmers' market, farmstand, coop, etc, it's likely that you can find (or special order) some nice berkshire or tamworth fatback or leaf lard to render...
And it's really not that big a pain. A few hours of relatively unattended cooking makes it no more arduous than making stew or a stock.
Celeriac at 8:54PM on 09/18/08
This is the guy who imported the Mangalitsa to the New World. I'm happy to see it getting mentioned here.
Unfortunately, the SF Chronicle got two things wrong:
1) The brown pigs they show in the article (and on this page) are actually Mangalitsa x Berkshire hybirds. That brown hog is "half" Mangalitsa. The purebred Mangalitsas look different.
2) The breed is just called a Mangalitsa. See http://woolypigs.com for more info.
Fat and meat quality are heavily influenced by breed, feed and age at slaughter. It isn't just breed, contrary to what many think.
Also, the Mangalitsa is a lard-type breed, while the Berkshire and Tamworth are meat-type breeds. Although the Berkshire is one of the best-tasting meat type breeds, its fat doesn't taste as good as a Mangalitsa's, and it doesn't have the marbling, flavor or juiciness of a Mangalitsa.
Pigs don't have rumens (like cows), so they really are what they eat. The reason why Red Mountain Farm's Mangalitsa are so super is that they are controlling the breed, feed and age to get the best fat and flavor. So even if people raise the same breed of hog, what they get fed and how they get fattened is decisive.
You can learn more about that here: http://woolypigs.com/_austrianmeattheory.html
HeathPutnam at 11:52PM on 09/18/08