Rendering lard is a lost art – a worthwhile technique forgotten in a fat-phobic, Lean Cuisine-centered culture. Many cooks, seeking out local foods and forgotten traditions, have rediscovered how to render lard in their homes. Learning how to render lard needn’t be a difficult task; it requires clean fat, clean water, a good stock pot and a quiet afternoon in the kitchen. The reward of a beautiful, creamy white jar full of freshly rendered, pastured lard is worth the minimal effort.
Pastured lard is a remarkably good source of vitamin D and of monounsaturated fat – the same fatty acid found in olive oil and avocado that is heralded for its benefits to cardiovascular health. Odd that lard, given its fatty acid profile and vitamin content, earned such a bad rap over the last few decades. Like many wholesome, nourishing fats, lard seems to have been swept aside for a time, but it’s quickly earning a much-deserved renaissance – ensuring that taking the time to learn how to render lard is worth your effort both in terms of its redeeming nutritional value as well as in celebration of the wealth and variety of your local foodshed. Hogs, and their nutrient-dense fat, are widely available.
How to Render Lard on the Stove top
I prefer to render lard on the stove top, so if you’re learning how to render lard from this method, take care to ensure you have a high-quality, heavy bottomed stock pot. Two and one-half pounds of fresh leaf lard or hog fat will produce approximately one-half gallon of creamy, nutrient-dense fat. For more step-by-step images, check out the photostream on flickr.
Ingredients for Rendering Lard
- 2 ½ pounds of pastured leaf lard or hog fat
- ½ cup filtered water
Stovetop Method for Rendering Lard
- With a sharp knife, trim any blood spots or remaining meat from the lard.
- Chop the fat into ½-inch cubes.
- Add the chopped fat and the filtered water to a heavy bottomed stock pot and simmer over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally.
- After about 45 minutes to one hour, the water will evaporate, the fat will begin to melt and the cracklings – little bits of browned fat – will begin to float to the surface of the pot. Continue to gently stir the melted fat periodically, taking care not to let it splatter.
- Eventually those cracklings will sink to the bottom of the stock pot, at that point you may remove your pot from the heat.
- Line a fine mesh sieve with a 100% cotton cheesecloth and strain the melted fat, reserving the cracklings for another use (they’re quite nice salted and eaten as a snack or served in place of breadcrumbs in a gratin).
- Pour the melted fat into mason jars and allow to cool. The melted fat will be golden-brown in color, but, when cooled, will appear a creamy white.
- Use your freshly rendered lard in pastries or as a fat for braising vegetables or seasoning meats.
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You have created a lovely blog–chock full of good information and beautiful photos.
FYI: This post appeared as a full feed, not as a summary, in my reader.
Thank you! After discovering a dairy intolerance in my son and being woefully sad at losing the butter option for cooking fat, I purchased 3 lbs of pork fat from the local ranch/dairy. I have yet to render it. Your post is timely in our world. Thank you!
I would love some good lard, but I don’t know where to get the fat!
Here’s a related question: I have bags of beef bones in my freezer from my grass-fed cow purchase. When I roast them to make broth, lots of fat comes out. How can I use that? Is there another/more preparation that needs to be done with the tallow?
Your great photos make the lard look luscious! Time to render some more lard!
Another wise post… pigs should root in the ground… eat roots and bugs and, most famously in the finest spanish ham, acorns as well as vegetables and grains. When fed this, the fat is sweet and delicious. Good for you to bust the bad myths!!
I do not eat pork…can it be made with beef fat?
What a wonderful post!
We just started buying organic pork (ordered 2/3 hog this year) and usually let the butcher render the lard. Now with your instructions we can try it ourselves next time.
I cannot believe all these years I never cooked with lard. I thank God for blogs like yours who share this wisdom and encourage us not to be afraid of fat.
Fried chicken in lard is just this side of Heaven. Yum!@
hello!,
just wondering how long lard lasts??!!
should it be refrigerated or does it matter?
thanks
How do I know if the lard I’ve bought from the co-op needs to be rendered? It’s white, so does that mean they already did it? What if it needs to be and I don’t do it? We’ve just always bought it and used it as is…
The lard is good enough to eat.
Lisa -
If the lard is smooth and creamy, it’s likely already rendered; however, if it comes in big slabs of fat then you will need to render it yourself. I bet you anything that the lard you’re using has already been rendered.
Take Care -
Jenny
Sarah -
Some people recommend storing lard in the refrigerator. I don’t generally do so. Lard is a pretty stable fat, like tallow or olive oil since it’s primarily comprised of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids rather than the sensitive polyunsaturated fatty acids that are found in vegetable oils, flaxseed, hempseed and fish. I’m not too sure how long lard generally lasts, because we use ours so quickly. Good fat, in general, is stable and tends to last a long time.
Take Care -
Jenny
Paula -
Thank you so much for your warm and thoughtful comments. Cooking with lard has been such a pleasure. It is so well suited to a vareity of cooking methods and it offers a phenomenal flavor. We recently did fried chicken livers in lard and that was just divine.
Take Care -
Jenny
Lizabeth -
If you don’t eat pork, you can absolutely apply this method of rendering fat to virtually any other animal fat. I use the exact same method when I render beef or bison tallow and it renders beautifully.
Take Care -
Jenny
Jeanmarie -
Thank you for your warm comments about the photos. I’m just getting the hang of photographing food. Real food is so beautiful. I hope that one day I can do it better justice.
Take Care -
Jenny
Brynn -
Do you know if your son can tolerate ghee? Since the milk solids are removed during the rendering process, many people find that they can handle it quite well. Of course, as with anything, your mileage may vary.
- Jenny
How is rendered lard different or similar to bacon grease. After we strain it ours looks the same as the lard pictured. We use it to fry chicken, for gravy, and general cooking. Thanks for the info and great post!
Thank you so much for your great comments recently! Nourished Kitchen is definitely a labor of love, for certain. I’m still working on the RSS issue, so thanks for giving me a heads up!
- Jenny
I can’t wait to get a hold of some pig fat and try this! I would have fainted of shock at that last sentence three years ago, thank goodness I found the traditional way of eating. My sugar cravings are nearly zero and I found out that all my body wants is real food.
just a note, before Christmas I went to Whole Foods and asked at the butcher counter if they had lard and I might as well have been escorted from the store, they were shocked and appalled. I guess we are all ahead of the ‘times’!
Jenny, What an encouraging article for anyone trying to eat sensibly! I would love to try this type of lard. My great Grandpa used to eat lard sandwiches, so I figure the real stuff has to have flavor!
Deb
P.S. Wonderful photography!
Jenny,
What is leaf lard?
And do you have any suggestions of where to source hog fat?
Beautiful photos, and thank you so much for generously sharing your knowledge!
Best,
Molly
Organic Spark
When I’ve gotten lard from the farmstand, they’ve said it keeps a month unfrefrigerated & for months frozen.
Thank you! This blog was so timely. My 1/2 pig is going to be delivered soon and I want to request the fat so I can render the lard.
I just came across your site from Kitchen Stewardship. I like what I have seen so far. This is a wonderful article.
I waited 3 hours (three hours!) for the crackings to appear, but it never happened, and since I have a life to live and didn’t have time to wait any longer, I just filtered it and put it away. Now it looks nothing like the pictures – it looks very unappetizing, in fact… It’s pure white along the rim, but dirty-looking and sunken in the middle. I think I’ll have to find a day when I have time to stand by the stove all day and redo it.
Wait… it can be redone, can it not?
I think my problem was that all the tutorials I studied lack a mention of the fact that even if I increase the amount of fat to render I’m NOT supposed to increase the amount of water accordingly, because it’s NOT an ingredient. And, this is not something a first-timer has any reason to be aware of beforehand.
Hello,
What is leaf lard?
Thank you for this wonderful site. So much good information!
FYI…to the author and readers:
I am quite an old man now, but as a kid, we would kill 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of our own pork each year and distribute through our family…I have forgotten more about total hog rendering than most would ever know that didn’t work in a slaughterhouse.
We would work through our hogs after first heavy frost (near Thanksgiving). At the tail-end of hog-killing week, we would prepare our lard. To do so, as you have mentioned, we would clean and prep the fat into 1×1 cubes. We would start a wood fire under our 40-gallon black cast iron kettle out back, and add 5-gallons of water (give or take…we didn’t measure it, or anything). We would then put in all the trimmed fat (that we didn’t already have being ground into the sausage). Normally, we’d fill that kettle twice, or so, out of 10-12 hogs. Once it boiled, one of the kids had to take the paddle (boat oar) and stir the kettle…normally for an hour or so. Then, we had a big quart ladle, and with our new store-bought 5-gallon lard stands, we’d take them and sit them on clean newspaper beside the kettle and dip the hot liquid lard out and pour it into the stand…filling it to within 2-3 inches of top. Then, we would leave them to cool…if the temp was above 40 or so, we would cheese cloth over top of the stands for the night. Next morning, we would take the cloth off (you’d save it), and put the lids onto the lard stands. Then, you tote the 40-pound stands up to the smoke house and they would go under the cut benches…for storage. We’d run out of lard for cooking sometime in August-September of the next year, normally…and though the smokehouse was cool, and dark, it wasn’t refrigerated or anything…it was a stone floor and smelled like maple and hickory…and of course, the 15-25 hams hanging overhead were the pride and joy…funny, when you remember things like that…
Anyway, hope this helps everyone…
Also, someone asked about beef fat as a substitute to pork…I don’t think it works, we killed our own beef as well, and I remember my grandfather (born right after the civil war) said that it ‘would sour’ and he wasn’t wasting his time for such a risk…whatever that meant…figure it was a crap shoot for not souring, so we never did it.
Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, we killed bear, and it’s fat works great for lamps and reducing down to oil for them…but bear is a really greasy meat…tougher than a pork roast, not as tasty, and really fatty…
Unfortunately for city-folk, not raising and killing your own pork, you don’t get to fully see all the fats and meats that come from the animal to properly understand the differences. Just like you have to sacrifice your bellies, er, bacon, for to make the most premium sausage, you also have to give up your hams as well. In the end, it is all a trade off for the desired cuts, in most cases…unless you make it a full family event, and kill enough for all in the family to mix and match your grocery list as all want…again, 50-years ago, few stores in the country carried much in terms of meats…but you could buy 200-pounds of Jefferson Salt and 10-lard stands pretty affordably. We could take $250 worth of hogs, and for the electricity to run the well pump and the linen to sew up the sausage sacks and about 200-lbs of curing salt each year, we could yield out over a ton of pork…not bad even back then, at a dime a pound…
Why, we even traded our beef hides back to the store owner for a lot of our curing salts each year to use for pork…and he would take them to the tannery up north and get $25-$40 per hide for them…it was all about barter and survival then…
Thanks for this! I plan to do this soon with some leaf lard I bought from Thundering Hooves in WA. The pigs are NOT pastured though. This is info about the pigs: http://thunderinghooves.net/about/how_raise.htm#4
Anyway, I may continue looking for pastured pork but what do you think of that pork?
Any guidance on the estimated timing for how long to cook until the crackly pieces sink to the bottom? Should this be started in the morning?
Jenny,
You’ve got a wonderful blog here! I’m not quite ready to do the 28-Day Real Challenge just yet, but I think your blog is going to be a great resource for my family as we try and eat more real foods and less processed goods.
This post is fantastic as I’ve been looking for an alternative to the transfattyness that is vegetable shortening from the grocery store.
Cheers!
So, I think I rendered lard (on accident)….
As you may know, I’ve been very challenged in the area of roasting. It’s been turning out like leather.
I asked my friend how he makes his roasts so absolutely mouth watering and tender and here’s what he said:
1. Braise it. I did it on the stove top because it was snowing too much to use the grill, he grills his
2. Roast it for and hour and a half or so at a little higher temp. I put my in the slow cooker on high
for a little longer.
3. Pour off the fat … this is where I made the lard … in the morning it was white and paste-like (wow!)
4. Roast it, in some water (I added spices basil, thyme, bay leaf, & some tomato paste rubbed on top), for several hours on a lower temp. I did 4+ hours on the low in the slow cooker
It was 2am when I woke to the most wonderful smell in my house. All the water had cooked off.
I put in the garage, where it’s cold, until this afternoon. I just had if for lunch and it was fantastic! And I have some lard to boot! I used a pork shoulder roast ~ and yielded 1/2 cup or so lard for maybe a 2 or 3 pound section of meat.
Annie -
That’s so awesome, Annie! I bet the roast was incredible, and that lovely snowy white lard – perfect for frying potatoes or braising vegetables. Don’t you love how you can use and reuse the food, minimizing waste? It was great seeing you, if only briefly, at CFMA last week.
- J