Why Lard?

I had a couple of readers ask about the purpose of lard and how we would use it. I thought the answer was so obvious, I failed to put in the previous post. We would use lard for cooking!

Ah, but there's more to it than that. Lard historically has been used where we now use butter or other vegetable oils. Despite its somewhat nasty reputation, lard has less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol than butter. And, unlike margarine or shortening, lard contains no trans fat.

I don't happen to live in Iowa or, tragically, Italy, so corn and olive oils are not local foods. Nor do they provide the right kind of "mouthfeel" for moist but flakey baked goods. Lard also has a relatively high smoke point, producing little smoke when heated and is more stable at higher temperatures. To read all about lard, check out the wikipedia article for more benefits for cooking.

Of special note is that the kind of back fat I showed in the pictures does not come from modern pork pigs. You need a heritage pig bred to create fat (which most of our fat phobic dieters abhor) and it needs to live outside to be stimulated to produce more than 1" of fat under the skin. Our pig was a Tamworth x Berkshire.

As for our uses, we will use small amounts of lard for frying up meats so they don't stick to the pan. We will make tortillas and pie crusts, including quiche. We recently used it to grease a pan for bread pudding, using up old, stale homemade bread. Basically, we will use lard for anything we would use oil for if the food combines well with a more "savory" fat.

Once my goats are in production and I am making homemade butter, the hope is to limit our olive oil use to just what is required, such as marinating mozzarella (which, in my opinion is a "need" and not a "want"). Olive oil, like tea and coffee, are not produced locally so will figure into the 30% we allow ourselves to come outside of our sphere of influence.

The Goodness of Lard

Lard has been much maligned recently, but I think with the "Trans Fat" scare, people are starting to realize that animal fats aren't really all that bad. On a scale between Good and Evil, lard is not exactly lily-white Luke Skywalker. It's more of the Han Solo type (after all, Han did shoot Greedo first). You can't help but love it and nibble it all over. Lard, that is. Not Han. Ok, well maybe Han a little.

Anyway, lard contains about 40% saturated fat and 45% monosaturated fat. For reference, coconut and palm kernal oil run 80% in saturated fat. It is also high in Omega 6 fatty acids, Vitamin D and has some nice anti-bacterial properties as well. There's a reason soap has traditionally been made from animal fats and don't even think about hanging that nice slab of beef for three weeks unless there is a nice layer of fat covering it.

But don't run out and buy a tub o' lard for your next cookoff. The lard from the store has been hydrogenated to increase shelf life. And like most things done for preservation, injecting the lard with Hyrdrogen negates a lot of the good benefits, leaving the fact that it is just a bunch of fat. The best and healthiest way to use lard is to render it yourself from pig fat from a local farmer.

You knew I was going to say that, didn't you.

This year, we bought a whole pig from a local farmer. What that means is that we purchased a pig and even though the farmer raised the pig and delivered him to the butcher, he was technically our pig. We paid the farmer for the pig and the butcher for the processing and got the added benefit of being able to specify what we wanted back in little packages. Because we don't believe in wasting anything from an animal, we got it ALL back. So we received about 154 lbs of pig parts, including the head and trotters. About 120 lbs of that pork were prime cuts, ham, and bacon. Not a bad deal.

In case you are wondering, the head is great for jowl bacon and tamales and some amazing stock. Waste not, want not!

But today is all about the lard. As part of our pig, we received about 20 lbs of back fat and leaf fat. For lard aficionados, leaf fat, the fat from around the kidneys, is preferred because it can be rendered "purer" with less porky flavor. Another tip for less porky flavor is to not overcook it. If you heat the fat until the cracklins turn brown, it's too late and you get a more "savory" lard.

We cooked our lard via the "wet" method, where we poured the hot oil into water to allow the water to bring the stray proteins out. Then you reheat the water/oil mix until you stop hearing any sizzling. At that point, all the water has evaporated out, and the oil you pour off cools to a snow-white finish. Yum!

The cracklins can be saved to flavor meat soups and to feed to the chickens on cold days where lots of calories will help them stay warm.

The bag of fat as delivered from the butcher

The bag opened. Leaf fat is hiding under the first slab of back fat.

Leaf fat exposed!

Leaf fat ready for cubing.

Back fat being cubed. The smaller the cubes, the more yield. Also, it's easiest to cut the fat when it is semi-frozen.

A slab o' fat makes lots of cubes.

Two pans of fat ready to go. Leaf fat is on the left, back fat on the right.

Boil, boil, toil and trouble.

Pouring the oil into a pot of water, filtering out the cracklins and solids.

We cooled our lard with snow, the traditional method!!

The finished product. We used less than half our fat to make this much lard.

A Case For Meat

One of the issues with which I struggle daily (just ask my close friends) is the sustainability of meat. Long ago, when I was in graduate school at Cornell and later Oxford, I was a vegetarian. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, long before Fast Food Nation hit the scene. I felt very strongly that even though humans evolved to eat meat, and much of the population did not have the luxury to turn their nose up at a food source, that we had the technology to keep people happy and healthy without slaughtering animals for food.

What can I say? I was young and full of principles. I focused on the face of the beautiful cow that should not become my supper and ignored the reality of the thousand faceless animals killed in the growing of my squash due to deforestation, pesticide runoff, habitat destruction, maiming from farm equipment, etc. Life, it seems, is never that simple.

But until I could guarantee the end of suffering for the meat animal itself, I could not pay into the system which caused such cruelty. So I went without meat. This was actually quite easy to do. Mad Cow had paralyzed the UK and so even McDonald's offered a veggie burger. The years ticked by and although I missed the taste of meat, I was happy for the token effort I was making to Make The World A Better Place.

Then I got sick, very sick, and I began to lose eyesight in my right eye. Back in the States, and working at my first professional job, I had access to MRIs, specialists, tests. They found nothing, no brain tumor, no retina detachment, no Glaucoma. Doing research on my own, I found I had a severe Vitamin A deficiency which is derived from eating too many tubers. Yep, starch can suck the vitamins right out of you. I started eating meat again and my eyesight improved. My doctors were incredulous, after all, American doctors never consider diet and nutrition when treating an ailment, right? Many people can live quite happily on a vegetarian diet. I could not.

I decided I needed to eat meat, but was saddened at the lack of choice. Picking up a steak at the grocery story made me sad for the creature that had sacrificed so much. (Again, this was before much of the publicity around the fecal contamination in butchered meat, so I was not concerned about cleanliness). Until I did some more research and found a grass farmer in the Texas Panhandle that would ship meat to my door. Clean, ethically raised meat that never stepped foot in a feedlot and was humanely killed instantly. No misses, no suffering. I became that farmer's biggest fan and as he expanded his offerings from beef to chicken to lamb to goat, he became my sole meat provider. I had entered a world of Food Consciousness.

The years ticked by and I become vaguely away of some of the other issues with our meat supply: the contamination from fecal material, the treatment of workers, the ridiculous amounts of fossil fuel required to grow a pound of corn-fed beef and deliver it, packaged in wrap, to the grocery store. My dream of a farm starts to take shape in my mind. Yes, it would be great to grow some veggies, but really, I wanted to secure a sustainable meat source.

And here I am. With only five acres, I am not about to run a herd of beefers on my land, but there are wonderful, low impact solutions for people just like me. I've covered the chickens I raise on the farm in a previous post. I know they are treated well and they are humanely processed, because I do the work myself. Every chicken is appreciated and they are never forgotten or faceless. Animals, especially those that sacrifice their lives for us to eat, should always be treated with dignity.

Chicken is great, but what about other meat sources? This fall, we logged the back three acres which will open up about 4 acres of pasture in the next three years. It takes time to build pasture, and I intend to do it right, so there will be no grazing through 2010 and then select, high intensity, rotational grazing from then on. But more about that in another post. With 4 acres in high production, I can rotate through 2-4 horses (with Brego muzzled to lessen his impact, of course), a lamb and a pig. And then there are also the goats, but more on them in a later post as well.

I estimate that my small family can live quite happily on chickens, a pig and a small lamb a year, using all the parts from tail to snout. These animals will live in fresh pasture and treated with dignity, this I can guarantee. Once the pastures and animals are running smoothly, I will no longer buy beef, even from a local farmer. Many, many people raise cows sustainably and with beneficial impact, but I will be able to provide my families' meat on farm without it.

In the meantime, the pastures are still a year or more off. So I bought a pig from a local farmer. I purchased the live pig and then paid the farmer to take him to butcher. I was able to see the pig alive, in his field, wallowing in mud. I was able to follow his progress and even help move him from field to field. When the time came, I was able to specify the cuts to the butcher. He was my pig, in a very real sense, even though he did not set a trotter on my soil. I will have more details about the pig in the coming days.

So in many ways, I have reversed my opinion on many things. I used to abhor the slaughtering of animals for meat, and it still weighs heavily upon my mind. But now I either perform the act myself or I am a willing and eager participant. Not out of blood lust, mind you, it is never a fun job. But because it is the only way I can continue to eat meat, with eyes wide open, to the Real Cost of the food on my table (lest we forget the Meat Fail). I firmly believe that if you eat meat, you are complicit in the death of an animal. The sooner we all acknowledge this fact, the sooner the atrocities in our food supply will stop because people will not stand for it.