What's the Best Lard on the Market?

they say that lard is making a comeback but i say it never really went away jack's here and he's going to tell us all about lard and which one we should buy i know when i think like who would be president of the i love lard club bridgette who would be who is so this tasting was designed for you these are beautiful cat head biscuits southern recipe that are big biscuits made with lard lard has gotten a bad rep if you go back 100 years ago the average american was consuming 14 pounds of lard a year we're now under 2 pounds crisco ended up basically being marketed as because it wasn't an animal product it was vegetable as the healthy alternative it now turns out all that science has basically been debunked i'm not going to make an argument that lard is health food but lard is probably better than shortening now there was a range of flavors think about all of the uses for lard and so that's everything from frying pork for carnitas to making strawberry rhubarb pie in which case actually a porky lard most people would say no thank you the big advantage i think of lard is the texture because its melting point is considerably higher than butter it stays solid longer in the oven right and so you get more flakiness more tenderness and basically the results of the tasting follow the melting point the higher the melting point the better it did in the biscuit test and so that was a key factor and that's basically how it's processed slow cooking slow heating slow cooling gives you this nice crystal structure that then melts slowly the other thing about using lard as opposed to butter is that it's 100 fat butter is 20 water 80 percent fat roughly all of that water can activate gluten in the flour and so lard when you're using it in biscuits or in pie dough as opposed to butter you just get incredible tenderness the top rated brands that we liked the most were the ones that were not hydrogenated okay that said there were several that were hydrogenated that did well but that had the higher melting point and that basically the combination of hydrogenation and a low melting point ended up pushing the brands to the bottom of the rankings anything's jumping out at you i would say that this one is the most tender it feels moisture as well you know i would be really happy with any of these i would say i mean i love the crust on this one i'm trying to get away from the the visuals and and everything but i'm going to pick this one i think it has more flavor i think that was probably the one that people liked the least because it has more flavor to me so this is the porkiest it was actually at the bottom of the rankings it's armor they're all recommended right we loved all of these lards they're being very kind yes that's a good cooking lard maybe not great for baking um well if you want an apple pie that has notes of bacon who doesn't you want notes of bacon and everything just lose the apple all right and then this one that's the john morrell the favorite supermarket option some of these are only mail order lard is now so hip and cool that people are actually mail ordering lard from super high-end premium lard farms we felt like well we should also be really clear about what's what are the supermarket options i gotcha and this one i thought was the most tender so this was the favorite overall for the expert panel the studio audience love this as well it's us dreams it's a mail order only brand has the highest melting point of any of them which made it very tender you were having trouble here because honestly you loved them all i kind of do well there you go our winner was u.s dreams lard it's 11.99 for a pound or you can go with the supermarket best buy option and that's a dollar 69 for a pound of john morrell snow cap big difference in price [Applause] thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 117,106

Keywords: cooks country, americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated, lard, taste test, tasting, supermarket, ingredients

Id: n4p2Ct56Be4

Length: 4min 15sec (255 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021