How To Render Lard:The Right Way

hi I'm Allison from health-nut nation.com and today we're going to talk about how to render lard so let's get started rendering this leaf lard into actual lard now there are three different types of fat that you'll find on the pig and leaf lard is actually the healthiest there's the back fat that's right under the skin and there's the belly fat which you'll find in bacon that's actually belly fat and the leaf lard is actually the fat that surrounds the kidneys and like I said it is the healthiest out of all of those three choices now if you get this from a butcher it is best to ask that butcher to grind it up you will render more quickly and you will also get more actual lard out of it so I'm just going to cut this up into really small pieces now I've done this before and cut it up into large pieces and I didn't get nearly as much lard in the end and I took a lot lot longer to actually render it down into this lard the actual lard I keep saying it's confusing because this is actually Pig fat and then once you render it it's lard but it's easy to call them both lard right so some of the benefits of lard is are that lard can be very very high in omega-3s now omega-3s are that oil that we get from salmon oil cod liver oil krill oil and it is a very healthy oil and we pay a lot of money right to get it from salmon oil pills or actual salmon or cod liver oil but the truth is that when you have a pig that has been allowed to graze naturally on tubers and roots and healthy pastured green grass then that animal has fat that is actually extremely high in omega-3s now there have been some studies that have shown that rendered lard and especially by heirloom pigs is actually higher in omega-3s then salmon so you can see that this is a pretty sticky messy job it would go a lot faster and be less sticky if this were semi-frozen if not all the way frozen because I am trying to get such little pieces now again if you asked your butcher to grind this up for you this would save a lot of time also it saves time in the actual rendering process too all right let's get it in the pan so we want to start with a really low heat I'm going to start on - but I'll be turning it to low after it heats my pan up a little bit next we want to add half a cup of water to the bottom of our pan that's just so the lard doesn't burn this will all evaporate next we're going to add the lard to the pot you want to make sure to use a wooden spoon when you are stirring this lard and you don't need to stir it very often it just needs to be moved around every 15 to 20 minutes or so so that it cooks evenly and the bottom pieces don't get too Brown now you can see that this is already starting to render so you now look at this some of I missed a piece that was larger right there and it's much lower than then the smaller pieces that I cut up however that's alright I can kind of chop it up and and let it take its time but you can see that it is already starting to render down into the fat and it's not boiling it's not bubbling it's not not doing much it's just very gently melting basically what we're wanting it to do is melt the reason why we don't want to heat our oil to our lard excuse me to a really high heat is because it damages the molecular balance of the oil when it's heated so you can see that this is a lard that is from bacon it's from conventional bacon that I was trying to use up to get out of the freezer so we would have room for our heirloom pig that was coming and you can see that it is much darker than this lard that I heat that I rendered at a very very low temperature so another reason why we want to render this lard at a very low temperature in fact I just turned it down to one is because um we don't want it to have a piggy flavor and leaf lard is best for eliminating the piggy flavor that is true I've rendered lard from the back fat and it was it was horrible I tried to make a crisp out of it and it tasted like I was eating Pig it and not good Pig it was really bad so you want to leave that piggy flavor out by number one using the leaf lard and number two heating it at a very low temperature as you can see even though I have this on a very low temperature I have it on one it is it is bubbling and basically a higher temperature than I want so part of the reason is because it's it's getting towards the end it's been about four or five hours now and you know when your lard is completely done and rendered when it starts popping and sign that means it's getting the last gasps of air out of it I'm going to render this now just so that you can see how I do it and then I'll continue to render this until I hear those gasps so I'm going to drain this the sediment basically out of my lard there will also be cracklings in there which means the last little bits kind of the bacon bits of it but I have a sieve and about three layers of cheesecloth on top of a stainless steel funnel which goes into a widemouth half-pint canning jar now the reason I use a smaller one is because I don't use a lot of lard at once so I like to take smaller containers out of my freezer and use them more quickly so they don't go bad in the refrigerator you know sitting there for weeks and weeks on end I also don't like to have to drain this into a bowl and then reput it into a another container I prefer to do it all in one so I'm going to take some spoonfuls of my lard and this like I said before is not completely rendered it's still working its way down so I'll put the little bits of lard that haven't been melted basically this isn't completely rendered yet and you can also tell the bigger chunks that I didn't get cut up quite as fine as I wanted still have a long way to go and it's been a good four or five hours if this has been rendering on the stovetop and it'll be another hour too once I put this last bit back in I just want to get that real snow-white lard especially in this first batch and then as it cooks longer or if I get impatient and turn up the heat then I still have that first batch now in the very end you're going to still have some of that large in the form of what's called cracklings leftover it doesn't completely melt down to nothing so when you hear those last sighs and gasps you're going to watch it closely and stir it frequently and then you're going to drain it like I just showed you how but you will still have some of these left now a lot of people like these in their salads they like to just eat them plain they're kind of like pork rinds or bacon bits so you can see from the lard that I rendered last week what happens when I render the lard at a very low temperature and what I get after just a couple hours is very beautiful snow-white lard it is perfect for pastries I waited another hour and rendered some more and you can see that it got just a little bit darker and from the smell you can tell it's just a little bit stronger now at the end I got a little bit impatient because I had diced that fat too and too large of a squares and I turned up the heat because I wanted to go to bed I was getting impatient and I got this much darker lard that is stronger and smell and flavor and would not be suitable for pastry making this is suitable for maybe frying chicken or cooking a steak in but what I want and what we're going for is this really beautiful white a pastry quality lard that doesn't have a smell or a taste it is just perfect for the best flaky pie crust you will ever have remember you want to store these in the refrigerator these are not shelf stable you

Channel: HealthNutNation

Views: 332,458

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Keywords: How to, how-to, lard, render, cook, omega 3, omega-3, recipe, chicken, baking, Cooking, Food, Kitchen, Recipes, pig, heirloom, fat, make your own, homestead, pie crust, paleo, primal, 4 hour body, diet, healthy fats, grandma's pie crust, like grandma used to make, Dinner, Pie (Type Of Dish), Restaurant, Weston A Price Foundation

Id: QieI4Xnr7uY

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012