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.
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
LC, thanks for sharing your memories with us! I just love hearing stories like yours!
I am of Italian decent, Our grandparents cooked using lard, made biscuits and bread with it, The traditional old world Italian cooking used lard. the best tomato sauce was started with lard and salt pork or prosciutto fat, try it sometime I will guarantee you will eat the plate and your knuckles . Their are plenty of foods that got a bad rap especially in the 60 s , the nitrate scare was a big line of b.s. , the mouse had to eat 50 pounds of bacon to get the amount of nitrates for the test..If you use common sense and don’t over indulge in the consumption of these foods they will not hurt you. P.S you stomach has nitrated , you will die of botulism if nitrates where not present.
Do you know if beef tallow can be processed in jars to keep on the shelf?
LaNea -
Do you mean processing beef tallow as in pressure canning it? I wouldn’t do that, but it can be rendered in the same manner as lard and, thanks to its high saturated fat content, is shelf-stable at room temperature much like coconut oil.
Hope that helps -
Jenny
I bought some “pork kidney fat” from the farmer’s market yesterday and spent the afternoon rendering. It definitely has a stronger smell than I was expecting but I haven’t tasted it yet. Does it mean I did something wrong if it has a strong smell? (it was my first time rendering). I wanted to use it for pastries and vegetable dishes but I’m not sure I can do so if it has a very “porky” taste and smell.
I’m receiving my first delivery of fresh hog fat this afternoon and will begin the rendering as soon as it has been cleaned up. I’m wondering what to do with the attached skin? I’m told the hair has been completely removed and that the skin is a creamy white color. Should the skin be cut away before the rendering or left on during?
Your pictures make the lard look edible all by itself
Thanks Jenny -