- Today I want to share with you how to make lard the right way. It's basically learning
how to render pork fat, but there are a couple of important tips that you need to know so that your lard comes
out perfect every time. (upbeat music) Hi, sweet friends, I'm Mary,
and welcome to Mary's Nest, where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient dense
foods like bone broth, ferments, sourdough, and more. So if you enjoy learning
about those things, consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below. That'll let you know every
time I upload a new video. Now, first things first, I want to take a few
minutes to talk to beginners who are new to rendering animal fat. But if you just want to jump ahead and start making lard, be sure to open the description
underneath this video, where I'll have timestamps
about everything that I'm going to cover so you
can go ahead and jump right in. If you're new to rendering animal fat, there are a number of
ways that you can do this. In two previous videos, I
showed you a stove top method, where we rendered chicken
fat to make schmaltz. And then I showed you
how to render beef fat, or what's known as suet to make tallow. And we did that in a
Dutch oven in the oven. Now I'll be sure to link to those videos in the cards above and
in the description below so that you can learn how to make schmaltz and also learn how to make tallow. Now, I want to just take a minute to talk about rendering
suet to make tallow because the process can
also be very similar if you take pork fat to make lard. Now, the method that I showed you for making tallow was simply
by chopping up your suet and putting it into a Dutch oven and then letting it all render
at 225 degrees Fahrenheit in your oven for about five or six hours. Now, you can certainly do that
with your pork fat as well. And when you're all
done rendering your suet or your pork fat, then
you need to strain out all the little crispy bits or cracklings. So I've shared with you
the stovetop method, and then I've shared with
you the Dutch oven method that I just explained. And today I want to
show you a third method for rendering animal fat. Now, what this third method
involves is making sure that you have some sort of nice big pot. What I've got here is a stock pot, but you can also use a Dutch oven if you have a nice big one. Next, you're going to need
some sort of mesh strainer or some type of colander. I'm going to use my colander
because it has handles because we need to place
this over our stockpot or our deep Dutch oven. But if you have a mesh
strainer with a handle, you can certainly use that as well. What is important to remember
is that whatever type of device you use, whether a
colander or a mesh strainer, and what type of pot you use, you want to make sure that the
colander or the mesh strainer is not touching any of the fat that's going to render down into your pot. So basically you just want to make sure that you have enough
room between the bottom of your colander or the
bottom of your mesh strainer and the bottom of your pot. Generally, I like to render
five pounds of animal fat, whether I'm doing suet
or pork fat, at one time. And so I find a nice
big stock pot works well because I'm probably going to see about three inches
or so of the rendered fat. So I like to make sure that my colander or my strainer has at least three inches, or is at least three inches
above the bottom of my pot. If you're rendering less fat,
obviously you need less space. And if you're rendering more fat, you're going to want more space. But generally I find that five pounds is a good amount to start with because this is going to
take about six or so hours, and it will render about three
inches of the liquid fat. So that's some good measurement
for you to know about. Now, let's just take a minute
to talk about why do we want to render pork fat to make lard? Lard was maligned for
years, whenever you said, "Oh, yes, I'm going to cook with lard." People would say, "Lard are you a kidding? That's so bad for you!" But in recent years,
lard has been vindicated. Lard is actually extremely
high in vitamin D. Obviously getting sunshine
is your best source for vitamin D, but second to that is lard. And what's interesting is
why do we want to make sure we have a lot of vitamin D in our diet? It's because scientists have
found that many people here in the United States
and maybe in other parts of the world as well are
deficient in vitamin D. And what happens when we're
deficient in vitamin D? Scientists have found that
people who are very deficient in vitamin D tend to be more
inclined to develop cancer. So if we can up our
vitamin D, all the better. And scientists have also found that getting natural sources of vitamin D, whether from the sun or from
foods high in vitamin D, are always our best source of vitamin D as opposed to taking supplements. Second, lard also contains
a nutrient known as choline and choline is especially good
for the brain and the liver. And scientists are
studying choline thinking that possibly people with
higher levels of choline may be less inclined to
develop Alzheimer's disease. So that's some very interesting research that will be worth watching. Now, I also want to mention that I will have a corresponding blog post that'll accompany this video, and I'll be sure to link to
that in the description below. And in that blog post, I'll discuss all of these benefits of lard and also provide for you
the scientific links. If you're interested in
learning more about that. Another benefit, speaking of choline, is that it's very good for the liver. It helps apparently clean
out some of the toxins, so to speak that can develop in our liver. So two good reasons to make sure that we do have sufficient
choline in our diet. Lard also has a very good smoke point. It's smoke point, which
means the temperature to which you can heat the
lard before it is damaged, is 375 degrees Fahrenheit, which I believe is 190 degrees Celsius. So lard is excellent for
sauteing or pan frying. Another benefit of lard,
and I think you're going to find this exceptionally interesting and maybe even surprising,
but lard is actually high in monounsaturated fats. Now, what else is high
in monounsaturated fats? Olive oil. And I think we've all heard
how great olive oil is for us, for our skin, our hair, our
hearts, just our bodies overall. Olive oil contains 77%
of monounsaturated fats, but lard contains 48%
of monounsaturated fats. So it's really up there
in terms of being a fat that is high in monounsaturates. And scientists have found
that when we have a diet rich in monounsaturated fats, it
helps keep our cholesterol in check and also protect ourselves. And protecting ourselves
in today's environment is very important because we're bombarded with a lot of chemicals
and sometimes poor diet, poor sleep habits, so on and so forth. And so when we have
monounsaturates in our diet, it helps to protect ourselves from damage. Now, I could go on and on
about the benefits of lard, but one more thing that
I want to tell you, that's exceptionally interesting to those of us who are
traditional home cooks, lard makes a wonderfully flaky pie crust. And since it's a healthy fat, it's much better for us
to use to make a pie crust then those solid vegetable shortenings that are sold in the can. Solid vegetable shortenings
go through a process of hydrogenation to make them solid. And it's very much considered
a damaged fat by those of us who are traditional home cooks. So if you're on your journey moving from a processed foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen,
substituting lard in place of that solid vegetable
shortening is probably one of the best things you can
do for making your pie crusts as well as other baked goods. And a little tip I'll share with you if you're concerned that if you use lard to make your pie crust you won't have that
wonderful buttery flavor that's also very
delightful in a pie crust. You can use half lard and half butter, and I'm telling you you're going to get the most perfect pie crust. Alrighty, well let's
get to making our lard. Now, I just want to say
you don't need to write any of these instructions down, because if you open the
description underneath this video, you'll see a link that'll say "recipe," and that'll take you over
to my website, Mary's Nest, same name as my YouTube channel. And you can read the recipe
online, or you can print it out. Now, as I mentioned previously, I'm going to render
five pounds of pork fat. And pork fat comes in two varieties. There's the pork fat that
is the traditional one that's just called lard. And that's generally
pork fat that comes off of the back of the pig. Lard is wonderful and it has
somewhat of a pork flavor and aroma to it, not unlike bacon grease, but just slightly milder. However, there's another type of pork fat and it's called leaf fat,
L-E-A-F, leaf pork fat. Leaf fat is the fat that
surrounds the organs, the internal organs of the pig, and specifically your
best leaf fat is that which comes from around
the kidneys of the pig. And it's that leaf fat
that's prized by bakers because the leaf fat
from around the kidneys is a very pure type of lard. And it does not have any
aroma or taste of pork. So when you're searching
to buy your pork fat, think about what you
might be using it for. And if you're going to be
using it in savory dishes, and you're comfortable
with it having a bit of a pork flavor or pork aroma,
the back fat will be fine. But if you want something that's very mild and doesn't have any pork
flavor or pork aroma, then look for leaf fat. Now can just regular pork
fat be used in baking? Yes, but it tends to work
better in those baked goods that have stronger flavors
like chocolate or cinnamon. You can even use it to make biscuits with because biscuits often have
a bit of a savory flavor. But for your more delicate baked goods, and I would even include
pie crusts in this, I would recommend using
some type of leaf lard, but that's specifically
for your sweet pies. If you're making a quiche
or a savory pie crust, then by all means your
regular lard will work great. This is specifically leaf pork fat because I'm going to make leaf lard. But regardless of what type
of pork fat you're using, the process is the same. Now what I've got here is
about five pounds of leaf fat. And this has been run through
a meat grinder for me. So it makes this job very easy. So if you're buying pork fat, whether it's the back fat or the leaf fat, ask the butcher if they can run it through the meat grinder for
you, if not, no problem. If you just have the solid piece of fat, all you need to do is
cut it up into chunks about one inch in size. I don't really feel it's
necessary to mince it or run it through a food processor. You can certainly do that, but I almost think it's like
a little bit of extra work that doesn't make a big
difference when you go to actually render the fat. Now, all I'm going to do is transfer all of this fat to my colander. Now there are two very
important tips when it comes to rendering animal fat the right way. Now I shared these tips in the video where I showed you how to make tallow. And I want to repeat them
here as we make lard. You do not need to put any water into the bottom of your stock pot, and you don't need to put any
water into your Dutch oven along with your fat. The reason you may see people add water, either to a stock pot, into which the fat is going to drip or right into their Dutch
oven along with their fat, is because water is
used to prevent burning. However if your fat is burning or the cracklings are burning,
your temperature is too high. So the secret to correctly
rendering animal fat the right way is to make sure
you keep your temperature low. What do they say? Low and slow or slow and low process. If you are putting your fat
directly into a Dutch oven and then into your oven, you
do not want it to be any higher than 225 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, in using this
method where we're going to put our colander over our stock pot, we're actually going to start
our oven out, even lower. We're going to set our oven
to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Then after about an hour, we're going to check to see
how our fat is rendering. And assuming at that point, there is some fat that's
down into our stockpot. We can then turn our temperature up to 225 degrees Fahrenheit and
continue to let our fat render and drip down into our stockpot. So don't add any water, but always remember to keep
your oven temperature low. And there's a very important
reason that I want to share with you as to why you really want to avoid ever adding any
water to rendering fat. And it doesn't matter whether
you're rendering pork fat or suet, beef fat. When you render fat, you want to make sure that
what you primarily have is fat, and it can be very
difficult for the home cook to make sure that he or
she gets all of the water that you've added during the process, it's very difficult to
make sure that you get all of that water separated from your fat. Yes, you can strain it. And then once it's cooled,
you can separate the fat from the water and maybe
scrape some off the top. You know, if you've ever
done this with a bone broth, you may be able to visualize
what I'm talking about, where you're scraping the
bone broth off the fat that's congealed on the top. The only problem is home cooks
do not have the equipment that allows us to really get
out every last bit of water, the way this can be done in a factory through centrifugal force
and so on and so forth. So that's really another reason why you don't want to add water. When you have just fat with
no little bits of droplets of water anywhere to be seen, you will have a very good
shelf life to your lard. Now, when I say shelf life, yes, lard should be refrigerated
and not put into a pantry the way tallow can be. Because as we discussed in the beginning, lard is very rich and monounsaturates, and it's the more saturated
fat that allows a fat to be more shelf stable at
room temperature like tallow, which is a very saturated fat. But making sure that there's no water in your lard will extend it's life, even in the refrigerator. And another thing about
not adding any water and doing this process on
a very low temperature, allows any water that may
be naturally occurring in your fat to evaporate, because we do have those cracklings, the little bits and bobs
of little bits of meat, little bits of blood,
whatever the case may be, that do contain some liquid,
that do contain some moisture. But rendering this at
a very low temperature, not adding any extra water
allows any liquid moisture water that may be in this fat to evaporate. So our final product is
really rendered the right way, as close as we can get
to how this would be done in a factory that you
really have 100% lard with no moisture in it. Now, we'll go ahead and put this into our oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I think that's about 93 degrees Celsius, but I think you could probably
do 90 degrees Celsius. And then after about an hour, we're going to check it and we'll see that some fat is
rendering down into there. So we no longer just have a bare pot that could potentially burn. So we've got some fat
rendering down in there, and then we can move the temperature up to 225 degrees Fahrenheit. And this will probably take somewhere around six or more hours to render. Well, this was in the
oven for about six hours. I checked it after that first hour and things were starting
to come along nicely. And I had a little fat
already rendered down into my soup pot. So I turned the heat up
to 225 degrees Fahrenheit, and then let it go
another five or so hours. And now I have these
wonderful cracklings here in my strainer. Now what I like to do
with these cracklings is just transfer them to
paper towel, (laughs) paper towel lined plate, and I'm just going to let them cool. And they're already pretty
crispy, but as they cool, they'll become even crispier. Some people really like
to enjoy these as a treat and other people like to save them for maybe a treat for their dogs. So I'll just transfer, you can hear a little
the crispiness to them as I transfer them over here. But I'll just get these onto
my paper towel lined plate, and I'm going to let those cool. And then I'm going to show you
how beautiful our lard looks. Now for the next step you
have a couple of options. Overall, your rendered
lard is going to look very clear using this method with a mesh strainer or a colander. Now there may be like a few
little bits that have slipped through whatever type of
colander or strainer you used. And so you'll want to remove those. If they're very minor you can even just take maybe a little
spoon or a slotted spoon and remove them that way. Alternatively, you can go ahead and strain your rendered lard
through a mesh strainer. Now this is where you have some options. Some people like to
line their mesh strainer with some cheese cloth
or a flower sack towel. You know, I use a lot of flour sack towels when I strained my bone broth, but I really don't like to do that when I'm straining rendered fat. And the reason is you don't
want to wet your cheese cloth or your flour sack towel
because you don't want to start introducing any
moisture to your fat. However, pouring the
warm or hot rendered fat through the cheese cloth
or the flour sack towel creates a situation where the towel or the cheesecloth absorb a lot of the fat and you lose some of your lard or tallow, whatever you're making. Instead, what I like to do
is to simply take my lard and strain it through
a plain mesh strainer, but one that has a very tight weave to it. This is extremely tight. If you have a French chinois
that works really well also. So what I'm going to do is take this and very carefully start to
pour through my mesh strainer. Now I poured this out very
carefully and very gently. And as you'll see, this is
all that was in my lard. And it really was just
kind of floating on top. I may have been even
able to just remove it with a little spoon, but
filtering it out this way. I feel, "okay, I've gotten every little last bit of a crackling." So I really like this method because I don't have to
worry about scooping all of the cracklings out of
my melted rendered fat, whether it's tallow or pork fat. It's nice that I've got them
all contained in the colander or a mesh strainer, whatever you use. And then you can pour it through a very tight mesh strainer like this. And as you see, this looks
beautifully, you know, for lack of a better word, clarified. Now, I just want to show you, I poured this very slowly and you'll see that I did leave behind some little bits and bobs that will float to the bottom. And then when you pour
your fat into your bowl to get ready to decant it, you can basically do it very slowly so that all those little bits and bobs that sunk to the bottom
when the fat was rendering, won't go into your final product. I just was really watching. And when they started to
come to the end of the pot, I said, "okay, that's it." Now, what I like to do is decant my lard, in this case, my nice leaf
lard, into quart size jars. And the reason that I like to
put this in quart size jars is that lard does best in terms
of extending its shelf life if you refrigerate it. Yes, some sources say
that you can store lard at room temperature for
maybe four to six months, and you have to make sure
that you've processed this very well and that
there's no water in it. And that you keep it in
an airtight container, preferably away from heat and light. However, I really feel
that it's best to keep lard in the refrigerator. Now, if I called this a
quart, I meant to say pint. So, (laughs) accept my correction. But in any event, what I wanted to say was I like to go one step further. I like to take one pint and
keep that in my refrigerator for my use. Then if I have extra, I like
to put that in pint jars, that I then store in my freezer. Because in my refrigerator, my lard can stay fresh for a year, but in my freezer it can
stay fresh for two years. So once I use up my one
pint in my refrigerator, then I'll pull a pint out from my freezer, transfer that to my refrigerator. And so to start the
whole cycle over again. So what I like to do is just warm my jars. So they're not getting too much of a shock of this hot rendered fat,
and then I'll clean it up. I'll put a lid on it. Well actually, I'll clean it
up and then I'll let it cool just to about room temperature, and then I'll put the lid
on and refrigerate it. Now, when I decant my lard into my jars, I like to leave about
an inch or so headspace. So as it chills in the refrigerator, or especially in the freezer and expands, I don't have to worry
about my jar breaking. And for my refrigerator
for this first batch, I'm definitely going to use a canning jar and just a storage lid. And that's going to go
right into my refrigerator. For my freezer, I really like using these, sometimes they're called
French working glasses or French jelly jars. I have them in multiple sizes. If you've seen a lot of
my bone broth videos, you know I like to decant
my bone broth in here 'cause I like to a lot of
bone broth in my freezer. And these are great because
they have a plastic lid and these are very strong,
very heavy glasses. And what's nice about these
is that I'll fill them just up to this point here. So, you know, it's giving it
about an inch or so headspace, and then I'll put these plastic lids on. I generally never overfill my jars. So I generally don't have
any problem with breakage, but if by chance, it really expanded in
here for whatever reason, all that happens, it just
will pop off the lid. So I find it to be very safe. So this is something I highly recommend. I find these a lot of times
in thrift stores like Goodwill and places like that. So these are definitely well worth it. They're very good for
freezing liquids or fats. Now, as this cools, it's going to get lighter
and lighter in color. And once refrigerated
it'll almost appear white. Now all you need to do is let
this come to room temperature, and you'll notice that
it'll start to become solid and it'll start to lighten in color. Then you can go ahead, put your lid on, pop it in your refrigerator
or your freezer, depending on how you're
planning on storing it. Remember, it'll have a
shelf life of one year in your refrigerator, two
years in your freezer. And once it's refrigerated or frozen, it will become more and more solid and it'll become lighter
and lighter in color. And that's exactly what
you're looking for. Now, If you'd like to learn more about fat and how to render animal fat, including chicken fat to make schmaltz and suet or beef fat to make tallow, be sure to click on this video over here, where I have a playlist
all about these fats and how to use them. And I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen. Love and God bless. (upbeat music)
