Why use lard in pastries? Butter produces extremely good crusts, yet lard holds two distinct advantages over an all-butter crust. First, lard produces flakier crusts than butter. Even the small amount of water present in butter may cause the dough particles to stick to one another rather than separate into the discrete layers that constitute a flaky pastry. Second, while butter is primarily a saturated fat, lard by percentage is primarily an unsaturated fat. Here, a recipe for lard-and-butter pastry dough. More