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Make Your Own Lard
Believe it or not, it's good for you
by Lynn Siprelle
by Lynn Siprelle
ou WHAT?!" said my friend, making the most disgusted face I've seen someone make in some time. I rendered some lard over the weekend, I repeated. "WHY on EARTH would you want to do THAT?!" she cried.
I wasn't surprised. North American culture is so fat-phobic we demonize some of the very foods that are best for us, and among those foods is homemade lard. The store stuff isn't worth bothering with; it's hydrogenated to make it shelf-stable. What I'm talking about is lard from the fat of well-raised pigs, not factory farmed pigs. To get it, you're going to have to make it yourself. Luckily, that's not hard.
What you don't know about lard
Not only does lard make the best pie crusts, it's lower in saturated fat than butter--if saturated fat bothers you. It doesn't bother me, in fact, the plaque levels in my heart have actually improved since I've started eating good saturated fats. (They've actually gone and looked, so I feel safe in saying this.)
Technically lard isn't even a saturated fat; it's a monounsaturated fat. And it's one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D. It also contains no trans-fats. If there's fat to be avoided, trans-fats are the ones.
Finding fat
The hardest part of making lard is finding a good source of pork fat. You're going to have to do a little digging, and it's important that you not just use any pork fat you find; you want to make sure the pig was properly cared for and fed right. Your average supermarket "butcher," and I use that term loosely, isn't going to have it; that pork is all factory farmed, and very few supermarket butchers cut whole carcasses any more. You may have more luck at a specialty market like Whole Foods, Wild Oats or the like, but be sure to inquire after the feeding practices.
If there is a farmer's market near you, look around and ask questions. That's how we stumbled onto our farmer, who is really in the goat cheese biz; he raises pigs on the leftover whey. We've bought two (incredibly delicious) pigs from him in as many years, and surprised the butcher by asking for all of the fat--and as much of the offal as we could get, but that's another article. Hey, we were paying for it. If you don't have a farmer's market, try EatWild.com where you can find farmers with good growing practices, and not just for meat.
Making it
Once you've found your fat, decide what you want to use it for. If you want it for pastries, try to find and use only the fat from around the kidneys--what's called "leaf" lard. I don't make much pastry, so I don't care about that.
Chop the fat into at least 1" cubes, taking any meat chunks off in the process. Some folks put it through a meat grinder. In any event, you want small pieces; otherwise you won't get as much fat out.
Heat your oven to 225°F. I use my cast iron dutch oven to render lard in. Put about a quarter-inch of water at the bottom of the pot; this keeps the fat from browning too much at the beginning, and it'll burn off in time. Add your chopped-up fat. Pop it in the oven for at least a couple of hours, stirring now and then. Eventually the chunks won't give up any more fat--it'll become obvious, the chunks will look the same after an hour as they did before.
As you're doing all this there will be a distinct smell. Some people like it, some people don't. It's a little too intense for my comfort, frankly, which is why I try to do a bunch of lard at once. If you can do this outside, or in a canning kitchen if you have one, so much the better.
Let the lard cool to lukewarm; while it's cooling is a good time to gather up your jars and lids and make sure they're clean and ready to go. There are various methods to filter out the bits of meat and unrendered fat--the cracklings--from the lard, but what I use is a paper coffee filter and cone. Ladle the still-liquid lard, skipping the bigger chunks, into the filter.
Refrigerate the lard and use it within a month. If you've made more than you can use in a month, it freezes well.
Using it
Use it anywhere you'd use butter or shortening: To pop popcorn (the best!); to make pie crust; to fry eggs. In some cultures it's even spread on bread, topped with onions and salt, and called a sandwich. As for the leftover bits, the cracklings? Salt them and put them on salads or just munch on them. Josie loves them. We got more cracklings than we could eat, so we fed a lot of them to the chickens and used them as doggie and kitty treats.
Comments
YES!
I am not alone! We do this, and it makes fabulous lard. Wonderful with red cabbage and apple.
One word of advice. When you've got your pork fat, do it as soon as you can. We once left some for two days before rendering it and the stench was unbelievable. I don't think I can remember smelling anything so revolting.
The fact is, pork fat rocks and this is the only way that I can get ethically raised lard
Zillah
Lard
We found this page because we bought the book 'Nourishing Traditions' and was surprised to see the book on this page during a web search on lard rendering! We have found a place to get the pork fat but was wondering an about average amount of lard per how much fat we'll be getting out, i.e. a large pig will produce (about) how much lard.
Thanks,
Pam
not the faintest clue!
I didn't make any measurements when I did this article--that is, how much raw fat turned into how much lard. I just grabbed what I had and did it. I need to do it again now that fall is here.
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
Measurements
Hello Pam,
I hope you can still read this reply, since you posted your comment a while ago. I found the article very interesting and very good, so, thanks Lynn!.
Our family owned company produces lard here in Monterrey, Mexico. We use the traditional method (somehow very similar to the one explained by Lynn), but in large quantities and from farmed pigs. The numbers you will get are 50% to 55% Lard, 20% to 30% craclings, and about 15% to 20% will be lost in vapor. If you leave the meat on the chunks of fat, you will get great cracklings or "Chicharrones" as we call them, but the lard will be more brown.
By the way, my grandmother used lard during all of her life, and she died when she was 94 years old, "Cholesterol Free" and without any heart problems!!
Thanks again for the article,
Raul Flores
I LOVE chicharrones!
Love love love them.
Thanks, Raul!
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
RE:Lard
Why not just use "OLIVIO" olive oil is much better for you than any butter, margarine, or "Lard"....
actually, if you did your
actually, if you did your research properly; you'd find that lard is much healthier than olive oil...
Really?
How exactly do you come to the conclusion that lard is "much healthier" than olive oil? Especially extra virgin (rather than refined)? Olive oil has a higher percentage of the mono-unsaturated, *healthy* fats that reduce bad cholesterol, than lard does. Plus it contains polyphenol anti-oxidants, being linked to lower cancer rates.
It just shouldn't be used in high temp applications, such as deep frying.
Have you ever tried to make a pie crust with olive oil? :-)
On the subject of health, it is important to note that lard and olive oil have different nutrients that your body needs. Eating a wide variety of foods is the best way to ensure you are getting a little of everything. Regardless of whether lard or olive oil is healthier, you just can't make the same pie crust with a cup of olive oil. Both have their unique uses.
cracklings
You can used cracklings in your tea biscuits if you don't squeezed them out. Instead of using butter or lard use the cracklings to your taste in your biscuits. I put 2/3 cup of cracklings to 1 cup of flour. I freeze them and then use a blender to chop them up and then measure. It gives tea biscuits a very unique flavor. My family came from Europe and were poor so they used everything.
Wow, you've got top 'Making Lard' billing on Google
And I don't think you google-bombed to get it.
cool, no? :D
No, I didn't google bomb. And this article is listed on Wikipedia in the "Lard" entry.
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
Thank you! Was reading the
Thank you! Was reading the article on lard making for info, but you've given me a great laugh first thing in the morning (google bombed for lard!). Hee, hee, hee!
Dieting with lard...? Yes you can, and should.
Hi, I love the article. Thank you Lynn. I just tried to make lard out of pork skin since it is very cheap, but didn't get much lard out of it. I come from Poland and we do eat home made lard with spices on a sandwitch just like Lynn says. I live in the US now and it is hard to find good lard or all those great meat cuts I used to get in Poland.
For all those who would like some challenge I recommend a book by Jan Kwasniewski, The Optimal Diet. In a nut shell Dr. Kwasniewski says that eating animal fat, cheeses and dairy products is all your body needs to live a long life. My father has been in this eating lifestyle for almost 15 years and at age 60 looks and feels better than most 20 year olds I know. Not only you will feel better (less illnesses and diseases) but you will also lose weight and sustain it at your ideal measures. Well, I have been on this "diet" for one year and a half and love it. Since I am not here to solicit or promote a website for Dr. Kwasniewski you can google yourself "Jan Kwasniewski Optimal Diet" and you will get many informative websites about this “diet.” I hope you will also find the Polish printing company that sells this book in English and Polish and I think in German. Thank you for reading this. Remember this is not a diet it’s a lifestyle of living.
Sebastian S.
lard
Thank you for the instructions! I have been wanting to make my own lard for cooking particular items for which there is just no substitute. I have just two choices for pork fat from my source for grassfed pork: internal and external, and they are currently out of external. Will internal work just as well?T Thanks so much; I enjoyed your post.
Any pork fat will work
You want the "leaf lard" for the best lard for pastry, but I just use it all.
Nice job throwing in the
Nice job throwing in the condecending remark about butchers. The quality of the butcher is not determined by wether or not you like the meat the supermarket he works at purchases. And having been a federal meat inspector, I have to say you are much less likely to get a skilled butcher in a small owner run shop than in a supermarket. Much more likely to get food poisoning though.
My grandfather was a union butcher for Safeway for 30 years
...and he was a real butcher. He was incredibly strong from hauling primals around on his shoulders--hog halves and steer quarters. Yeah, at Safeway, right behind the meat case, really butchering. His hands were covered in scars. The smells of clean, fresh blood and bleach still make me think of him; I can always tell when I'm in a good butcher shop by if it smells like Grandpa when he was at work. I own his knives, and they are among my prized possessions; his carving knife can shave paper-thin slices of kevlar. And I miss him every day. So understand me when I say I am not being condescending toward supermarket butchers.
There just aren't any real butchers at supermarkets much any more (hence the quotation marks). Most of the guys behind the meat counter are clerks wearing white butchers coats. They don't even package the meat there; they just shuffle stuff around the case. It's not true in the case of every store in my area, but it's true of a great number of them. You couldn't get a custom cut at most of 'em to save your life.
I go wherever there's a real butcher, who's really cutting the meat on premises in a really clean shop. Rarely that's an independent butcher shop, though there are a couple here in town that are rightly famous and worth patronizing. I learned my lesson about those when my grandfather worked at a cut-price one between jobs and told us some harrowing stuff. Independents are either extremely good or extremely bad in my experience; I advise going by reputation and not by price, but then, animal products are the one area in our diet where I buy the best we can afford (and that doesn't necessarily follow price, either).
Right now I do 99.9% of my meat purchases from New Seasons Market, where they butcher on premises, out in the open where you can see it, and can custom cut you just about anything. They can tell you where the meat came from and how it was raised. They do their grinding on-site, and make their own sausages (really good ones, too). And it smells like Grandpa.
The 0.1% of the meat I don't purchase there, I get directly from the grower. In the last few years, that's meant a cut here and a cut there. With luck, this year we'll be buying a whole pig again (with the fat) and perhaps a quarter of a beef.
thanks!
I just want to thank you for this site. The whole fam recently read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and I found your site. I think I found it in my google search for a good all wheat bread recipe. Love that recipe btw. This site just pooped up again when I was searching out instructions for homemade lard. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience.
-Liz "RealLiveHousewife"
(My hubby says I could kick Betty Crocker's butt. He says she'd be opening a box of powdered chemicals in a cook-off while I whipped up something homemade. I'm sure she'd run screaming from you. LOL Keep up the great work!)
thanks!
I can't make/eat bread any more, but I do still render lard from time to time. Don't eat fake food, folks!
rendering lard
googled this subject and found your page......thank you for sharing your experiences. Since I don't have a dutch oven, I don't have a vessel in which to put the fat in the oven. My first batch that I did yesterday I did on top of the stove. Took a long time. I didn't cut up the fat but I will next time. When I bought the fat, it was in fairly large bags, frozen. Wish I'd read your page before; I seem to google everything else
Lard ...
Hi Lynne,
Greetings from the sunny Philippines.
I live in the provinces where it's not easy to get some grocery items so I often attempt to make those things myself.
I've been looking at some old cookery books which call for lard, but none is available here in the shops so I made a batch myself.
There's no way of finding what the pigs are fed on as they come from many sources - often from someone's back yard.
Anyway, I bought a load of fat and followed your very helpful instructions.
It certainly tastes like the lard I remember as a child, but when I take it from the fridge it becomes runny very fast. It is hot here so it might be the tropical climate or perhaps I put too much water when I rendered the fat.
What kind of consistency would you be looking for please?
Thanks a lot
Robert Harland
Bacolod City
Philippines
Hi, Robert!
Wow, what consistency? I should think that in a tropical climate it'd be runny outside the fridge just on principle. Here in Oregon, if I leave lard out it gets the consistency of soft butter. Actually, lard consistency is a lot like butter, but softer; butter can get rock-hard in the fridge--lard does, too, but is still a little softer. So if butter left out becomes quite soft in the Philippines, lard will, too, but a little softer yet.
I should think if there's too much water, it'd rise to the top; water and fat separate.
And as for feeding, a back yard pig probably gets better stuff than a factory pig. I imagine your average back yard pig gets leftovers, not corn, soy and antibiotics. Pigs need a varied diet, and were not meant to eat massive amounts of grain or beans--or antibiotics.
Hi Lynn
Many thanks. Very helpful response. I think it must be the heat. I'll be eating the first meal I've cooked with lard tonight. I'm looking forward to it. Best, Robert
What about wild pigs?
This is such a helpful and informative article! Thank you!
I doubt that i will ever raise pigs, and i don't know anyone around here who does; however wild pigs are quite plentiful here, and often hunted. I would love to hear your opinion on rendering the fat from wild pigs. I'm pretty sure they don't ingest a lot of antibiotics and probably no corn.... =D
I don't know about flavor
But nutritionally I bet they'd be absolutely awesome. Try it and report back! Now I'm extremely curious.
Beef Lard?
Hi. I love this explanation and how many people are keenly eating lard because they know it is real food. I'm a holistic nutrition student and know that meat products really are wonderful for you when the animal that gave them was living the way it ought to.
Does anyone here know if the same method can be applied to render beef lard? I'm Jewish and, though I'm not religious, I've never eaten very much pork fat culturally. My grandmother used to make Shmaltz, or rendered chicken fat, on the stove in a pan. Could you do the same with fat from cows who where ethically raised, eating grass their whole life? I'd feel uncomfortable eating beef lard I purchased at a store.
Thank you!
Tallow
...is the name for rendered beef fat. I don't consider it good eats myself, but you could use the same method, I'm sure. I'd go with the schmaltz (mmm, schmaltz, I love it) and goose and duck fat. Them's REAL good eats.
Hi from Oregon :)
We are slaughtering 9 pigs in the next few months so I am anxiously trying to learn as much as possible about lard.
Thank you for posting this! It was very helpful.
Lard Sources
I raise Berkshire pigs in SE Wisconsin. They are naturally raised with no growth hormones or huge confinement buildings. The Berkshires are an old world breed sought out for their excellent tasting meat. They are a fattier pig and should render a lot of lard.
I just took in 6 on Thursday and I have requested all the fat from them so I can make my own lard.
Can this be done on a Coleman stove outdoors or do you need an oven?
anything that will melt the lard will do
It smells horrid during rendering, so doing it outside would be ideal!
smoked ham?
Hi Lynn,
We recently got a 12 lb organic, grass-fed smoked ham from our meat farm share, and I roasted it. When the pan drippings cooled the fat rose to the top and was clean, light colored and tasted delicious. We've been using it like lard, but is it? And if not, do you think it's ok to use?
Thanks!
Joelle
not lard, exactly
but perfectly safe to eat. It's smoked lard!
making lard from smoked ham
Hi Lynn,
Heated a smoked ham last night for some friends that had a fair amount of fat on it. I too noticed the white congealed fat in the roasting pan and dipped a biscuit in it this morning, which was quite tasty. I saved the fat and skin trimmings, figuring I would try to make some lard from it and/or use it to season further my cast iron Dutch oven. Do you have any sense of how tasty lard from a smoked ham would be? Seems like it should be good, but I am just not sure. I like the idea of spreading it on some homemade bread! What do you think?
Lard & Hogs
Does anyone know where I can buy leaf lard and really good GRAIN fed hogs in the Hillsboro/Portland Oregon area?
You don't want grain-fed
You want hogs to have an omnivorous diet. Hogs are not physically meant to eat grain, nor are ruminants like cows. It literally kills them. If you let a cow on feedlot grain live, within six months it would be dead. That's not me saying it, it's common knowledge withing the agricultural science community. It's one of the dozens of reasons we don't eat grain-fed.
I am in Portland. We get our pork from Pierre at Juniper Grove in Eastern Oregon. You can meet him and get on the list at the downtown Portland Farmer's Market.
Lard should not be taken seriously
Courtesy of Wikipedia;
Toward the late 20th century, lard began to be regarded as less healthy than vegetable oils (such as olive and sunflower oil) because of its high saturated fatty acid and cholesterol content. However, despite its reputation, lard has less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol than an equal amount of butter by weight.
Sorry, excess animal fat is not my forte
did you even realize what you posted?
let me reiterate what you said:
The quotation you pulled SUPPORTS lard. If you don't want to eat it, don't. You don't need a permission slip from me.
I have not tried making lard
I have not tried making lard (plan to at some point) but for all the people who think lard is bad, try going to the weston price website, or perhaps reading sally fallon's "nourishing traditions" that's how I recently discovered that saturated fat is quite good for you
Yum
Hate to say it, but I'd rather eat this than storebought! I've also heard in an emergency situation or hunting trip lard is a great mosquito repellent. That's kind of interesting. I didn't know it was better for you than butter! I guess it just has a bad rep!
-Sylvia
Water or no water?
Why do some recipes use water and others not? One called for starting with one cup of water and adding two cups after the rendering and then refrigerate and skim off the lard.
Thanks for the help
your article.
I was googling on how to make your own lard and came across this one. I find it very helpful and interesting. We will be getting a hog in a few days that we ordered from the locker plant here, he only uses locally owned livestock to butcher. He asked me if I wanted the fat for lard and I told him I sure did, I have never made lard before but goin to give it a try. Hopefully it turns out ok, not looking forward to the odor from it tho while it's cooking. lol again thank you for the article.
Homemade Lard
Is it a good idea to use farmers market bacon fat to use for lard?
bacon fat isn't lard
Don't get me wrong--it's still good eats! We use bacon fat all the time. It's been cured, though; it's not lard. Use it wherever you wouldn't mind the flavor of bacon along with the fat.
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