A Booke of Secretes: Frying lard and boiling tallow PART ONE

How to make lard and tallow.

Any cook interested in traditional fare will find to their surprise - or maybe not for those with continental roots - that one ingredient to have disappeared without a trace from our cookbooks and kitchens: animal fats. When we think of lard now it is not the flaky pie pastry, the crispy fries and the luscious gravy which comes to mind, but a looming vision of obesity and clogged arteries. If that truly is the case, then why were animal fats a staple in cooking, used around the globe throughout history? Our great-great-grandparents consumed butter, lard and tallow at their leisure, while experiencing extremely low rates of heart disease. How can this be?

A razor back and a pure-bred hog – allowed to free-feed on fenced off cornfields after the harvest was brought in. The method was called hogging down corn, and gives the hogs about the right amount of exercise, allows them to eat whenever they desire, and saves the farmer the labor of husking, hauling and feeding. With this method, the same amount of corn will produce more pork per animal.

Let's take a closer look at lard and tallow. Lard is the fat found in pigs, which are omnivores. This diet influences its composition, and typically, lard is made up out of 40% saturated fat, 50% monounsaturated fat and 10% polyunsaturated fat, the latter even lower in pastured hogs. You might not be aware, but lard can come from two different places on the pig. Depending on breed and raising, pigs are quite the fat factory and store much of their excess fat under the skin. This fat is called back fat, and is much lower in saturated fat than leaf lard, making for a soft fat unlikely to solidify at room temperature. Like all mammals, the other place pigs store fat is around the kidneys, and this is called leaf lard, sometimes baking lard. Leaf lard tends to be higher in saturated fat, which makes it stiffer and harder, although not as solid as tallow. Saturated fats are most heat stable, and protect the more vulnerable unsaturated fats from oxidizing with heat. As oxidized fats create free radicals, and free radicals contribute to cell damage, lard actually makes an excellent heat stable choice in cooking and baking.

Tallow is found in herbivores, like deer, sheep, goats and cows. Most herbivores do store some fat under the skin, but it is rarely as thick as on pigs and tends to be inefficient to harvest. A very fat cow will definitely have under-skin fat, but as beef hangs much longer than pork after slaughter, the skin fat is usually left in place to protect the underlying meat from oxygen and moisture loss. Unless you harvest and process yourself, butcher store tallow primarily comes from the kidney area. Tallow is highly saturated, even more than leaf lard, making it solidify easily at room temperature. Refrigerated tallow is hard and crumbly when refrigerated, similar to cold butter.

Used in cooking, lard is a great choice for sautéing vegetables, browning meat and pancakes (don’t forget your bacon grease!) and flaky pastries and pie crusts. Tallow is not as good for pastries as it is not very pliable when cold and because it already solidifies at room temperature it can leave a filmy feeling in the mouth after eating if the food has cooled down too much. But because of the high smoke point of tallow (400 °F / 250 °C) it works phenomenally in the deep fryer. The smoke point for lard varies (from 250–424 °F / 121–218 °C) depending if it is from back fat (lard) or kidney fat (leaf lard), and this is why leaf lard is often sold as baking lard. Therefore, when frying with lard, make sure to use leaf lard.

But lard ranks number 18 in foods richest in cholesterol! That can't be good, right? Actually, cholesterol consumption is not directly connected with blood cholesterol levels. Levels of cholesterol rise during periods of stress and inflammation, as the body produces the cholesterol it needs as a healing agent. Even more interestingly, providing cholesterol from quality fats like pastured lard, reduces the burden on the body to produce cholesterol itself when already stressed. Pastured lard is also the second highest food source of vitamin D, after cod liver oil, and well ahead of pastured egg yolks and liver. And remember, as vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin it requires fatty acids, including saturated fatty acids, to be absorbed and utilized in the body.

Keep in mind that these wonderful benefits come from pastured animals, with access to sunlight and rooting around and foraging, not from confined, antibiotic-laden livestock. Ask your butcher where his pork fat comes from, or even better, go directly to the source and ask the local farmer at your Farmers Market. Even though lard is making a culinary comeback, lard and tallow is often are often products produced in surplus. Our local organic butcher shop sells pork fat and rendered lard, but our local farmers often end up composting their fats as there is no market. By now, we have saved at least 500 pounds of local fat from the composting bin to render into lard, leaf lard and tallow, used in soapmaking and cooking. It might be cheaper in labor and material to buy a tub of shelf-stable lard or tallow in the supermarket, but the purity and quality of the home-produced product beats off the shelf anytime.

Born and raised on Kingbird Farm, in Upstate New York, their heritage breed pigs produce copious amounts of high-quality lard. I’ve traded and bought many a box of fat at the end of fall to use in my line of sensitive skin goat’s milk soaps.

Rendering lard and tallow for the homestead.

Identifying the fat

When you purchase lard locally or have the butcher return from your backyard livestock, it is a good idea to separate the leaf lard from the back fat. Most times, the butcher does this for you and both types will be bagged separately. Back fat resembles a thick narrow sheet of glossy, greasy solid fat, often triangular of shape when cut through. I don’t like handling back fat with my bare hands as it feels slimy and immediately makes my hands too greasy to safely handle my knife (it’s a great moisturizer, though!). Leaf fat feels dry and looks like clumps of fat globules within a balloon-like sheath. Tallow looks and handles very similar to leaf lard, the main difference being after processing as tallow will solidify more completely.

Sheaths of shiny back fat (top) and bundles of crumble leaf lard (bottom).

Cutting the fat

There are several ways of processing the fat to efficiently extract the fat from the fatty tissue. If you have the option, ask the butcher to grind the fat with their sausage grinder. If not, you can either grind yourself, cut the fat real small by hand, or cut the fat in manageable chunks or about an inch and give the fat a hand to help release more later in the process.

Cutting up pastured beef tallow. This particular tallow is extraordinarily yellow because the farmer pastures his heritage breed cows on lush grass, making for especially nutritious tallow high in beta-carotene.

Heating the fat

This is the point where it makes a difference if you are working with lard, or with tallow. When the fat is rendered, cooled down and solidified, tallow will float on top of the water whereas lard will be less easy to separate as it does not completely solidify. This is why pig fat is “fried” and tallow is “boiled” during the rendering process. Heat the pot and then turn on low. It is better to heat low for a long time, than heat high and be done quickly – too much heat can create musky off-flavors in the fat, let alone the risk of burning the bottom (and that really does not taste good!).

Rendering fats is a good project for during the winter, during the times the woodstove is banked. Here I am also rendering lard from pig bones, another useful source of fat.

Lard: It is easiest to start the process with some lard already rendered. If you have none around, no worries, as a little water to prevent scourging works fine too. It will evaporate during the process, leaving you with pure fat and fatty tissue. If you want real high-quality leaf lard, do not heat the lard at all but only simmer at very low temperature, as high temperatures can damage the molecular structure of the fat. Leaf lard has much less game flavor than back fat, and rendering at low temperatures lessens the flavor even more. This explains why bacon fat, which is belly fat fried at high temperatures, is so full of flavor!

Tallow: This is started with a decent amount of hot water, enough to fill in around the fat to about half the height of the stock pot. The water will bubble through the fat, helping to separate impurities, which then sink to the bottom into the layer of water, as fats float.

Giving the render a helping hand

When the lard and tallow chunks start to become translucent - turning from white to off-white to beige - the fat is starting to render. If your fat was not finely cut up or ground, this is the time to use a stick blender to carefully break up the fatty tissue (wear safety goggles and gloves). This trick significantly boosts the efficiency of the rendering process. It also saves time on cutting, although it might add a bit of work to separate the sludge later on. Keep in mind, if you enjoy your cracklings, then this is not the trick for you.

Using a stick blender to maximize fat retention.

Filtering beef tallow using a metal colander and cheesecloth.

Cleaning the rendered fat

When the cracklings start to brown, or the blended fat starts to show separation into clear fat and opaque tissue, then it is time to filter. I use a tall metal stock pot, a metal colander and a doubled piece of cheese cloth. Do not use plastic, as the fat can be hot enough to melt or at least warp plastic. Slowly pour the fat through the cheesecloth. When it clogs up a bit, you can carefully pick up the edges, make a hammock, and slowly roll the sludge back and forth. Be careful not to let go, as cleanup is a challenge!

Filtering rendered lard through cheesecloth (left).

Ground up fats make a much finer residue, which is easier to work with and makes awesome cracklings (right).

Lard typically renders clean enough in one go. Unlike lard, tallow will solidify into a cake, floating on top of the water. Remove any impurities from the bottom of the cake and it can be stored as is, or gently re-melted. Often, tallow is re-boiled several times. The more often it is boiled, the purer the tallow becomes. The repetition of this step both helps to remove even more impurities for a whiter tallow and to minimize scent. If your tallow is especially fragrant – for instance from game – and multiple boils did not help, try some baking soda in the water-boil.

Cracklings

I don’t tend to produce cracklings as now I mostly blend my fat. If you did, after filtering, fry the cracklings a bit further, until nicely brown and crispy, and, like bacon, use as a snack, salad topping or soup flavoring.

Storing your lard and tallow

Rendered lard and tallow can be stored for several weeks on the counter. Its shelf life can be extended by storage in the fridge or cold storage, and for up to year in the freezer. Lard or tallow can be poured into wide-mouth glass jars, or when cooled down enough to not melt plastic it can be poured into freezer appropriate take-out containers. It can also be pre-measured in ready to go amounts in ice-cube trays, or poured into Ziplock bags for minimal storage space.