Pure Lard Part Two: Soap

So what's a gal supposed to do with 15 lbs of lard, anyway? How much pie crust can you eat? A few weeks after rendering all my pig fat I was still trying to figure this out when I thought of making homemade soap. I remembered watching my Oma make soap when I was a little girl. It was really harsh, nasty stuff that was great for cleaning laundry - all that lye burned the stains right out of the clothes! I found the idea of using my nice organic, porky lard to wash my tender body quite delightful, so I started doing a little bit of research online. How hard could it be?

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found so much info - recipes, lye calculators, tips on what to do if your batch fails, and pictures of what each step is supposed to look like. I even found a local source of lye at http://www.dierbe.com/ . (Di Erbe actually just opened up shop at 1853 Main Street next to Don's Photo this last weekend! Funny that I had to find them by googling 'Winnipeg Lye' and they ended up being neighbours...) Anyway, I was glad to find them because lye is a little hard to find in retail stores these days - apparently it's also an ingredient in Crystal Meth.

There was also a ton of info on which oils and fats made the nicest soaps. Most recipes use a combination of tropical oils and almost every recipe included coconut oil, which is desirable due to its abundant lathering capabilities. It was pretty difficult to find information on lard as the main ingredient but I eventually discovered that soap made of pure lard is known to be slightly soft, quite moisturizing, but with meagre suds action. It was pretty universally recommended that you add beef tallow (or even better, coconut oil for hardness and bigger bubbles!) to lard soap to make sure you get nice soap.

I wasn't terribly interested in besmirching my 100-mile lard with mangrove-destroying, plantation-grown palm or coconut oils, so I started to look for tallow. However, it turned out that NO ONE in Winnipeg even knows what tallow is, let alone sells it. Only a handful of the dozen butchers I called even knew what suet was, let alone tallow. I finally found suet (from veal - yikes!) at DeLuca's. They gave me four pounds of it for free! Time for more rendering!

The online soap calculators are really neat - you input exactly how much and what kind of oil or fat you have, and it will calculate exactly the amount of lye and water is required to saponify the amount of fat you have. I think this is why the old fashioned stuff was so harsh - people used to use a lot more lye than necessary.

My first batch of soap did turn out slightly harsh, due to my inexact and bouncy kitchen scale. Maybe I'll get a better one for Christmas, hey Santa? I made a bigger batch the second time around so I would be able to measure larger amounts at a time and therefore get slightly more accurate measurements.

Anyway, this is how you make soap.
1. Weigh your fat, and melt it.
2. Weigh your lye and your water, and then add the lye to the water in a WELL VENTILATED AREA. Lye fumes are pretty nasty - My Aunt Mary told me scary stories of damaging her respiratory system when making soap in her basement many years ago. It can also burn your skin, so you have to be careful with that, too. Wear your gloves and your gas mask!
3. Make sure your lye mixture (which gets really hot when you mix it together) and your fat are both around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then mix them together.

4. And then mix together and mix together and mix together until the whole mess starts getting thicker, kinda like thin pudding. This is called 'trace'. It probably took about 15 or 20 minutes for my soap to trace. When your soap starts to trace, add your scented oil and colours (I used a vanilla pomegranate scent and a bit of paprika to add a bit of colour) and mix it up.

5. Pour the thickening soap into your primary mold and let it sit.

There was a lot of info online about how to primary molds, but I used the good old fashioned milk carton like Oma used to, which worked out well. The soap continues to heat up as it hardens - you want to keep it warm so it can finish going through the magical chemical process of saponification.

After a day or two, you can take it out of the mold and cut it into blocks and lay it out to cure a little longer. Apparently soap made from animal fat solidifies a little quicker than soap made from pure vegetable oil, which can take a little longer to harden properly. I let my soap dry out for a couple of weeks before I tried using it.

In the next few weeks while I was waiting for the soap to harden I read up on milling processes. Milled soap is basically regular soap that's shaved and then melted down and poured into molds. It's the FANCY stuff! I ended up melting down most of the first batch and about a third of the second batch to make some new exciting molded soaps. I made some lemon scrub soap with turmeric, lemon zest and cornmeal and a couple batches of cinnamon oatmeal soap.

EVERYBODY will get soap for Christmas this year. Make sure you look surprised when you open it up!

Pig's Head Soup (warning - graphic photos)

Like I mentioned in the previous post, when I purchased a butchered pig last month, I asked for the extra fat, the liver, the heart and the head to be delivered with my meat. When you buy meat directly from a farmer, you pay for the whole animal, even though you only get the nice bits of meat that the butcher wants you to have. I figured since I already paid for the weird parts, I should get them home and figure out what to do with them. I had a few plans - I had long wanted to try making liverwurst, and as for the head - I was interested in getting the jowls so I could smoke them or make Guanciale. When smoked, it's similar to bacon and guanciale is apparently kind of similar to pancetta.

Well, the idea of using up all the spare parts was a noble one. I didn't take any pictures of the liverwurst making process for some reason - I guess it was so intense and engrossing that I didn't pick up the camera. I ended up making two large liverwursts and about 10 small loaves of liver pate with bourbon. Pretty yummy stuff. I ended up giving the heart to my brother Carl, who always called dibs on the chicken hearts and gizzards any time Mom would roast a chicken when we were kids.

But the head.... Oh my God, the head nearly did me in. I don't think I was quite prepared to handle the huge hog's head that came wrapped in butcher paper. First of all, it was skinned. Do you know how gross a skinned pig's head is?

I'll show you how gross it is:



Not only was it gross, but the way that it was cut left very little meat in the jowl area, so I couldn't even make my hog jowls. Now what was I supposed to do? Make head cheese? Even I have my limits.
I found my way over to El Izalco that particular weekend, and the lovely Salvadorean woman who runs the place (and who I constantly forget the name of) suggested that I roast the head, make stock, and cook up some pozole. Pozole is a Mexican/Central American soup made with pork and hominy corn. Apparently it is served on special occasions because of the time it takes to prepare and it is a pretty big treat. I picked up a few pounds of dried hominy and lots of dried guajillo and chipotle chiles and went home with renewed excitement for my pig's head.

I have some pretty large stockpots, but nothing really worked with this damn head. I had hoped to skip the roasting part of the stock making, but the skull just wouldn't fit in the pot in one piece. After it had roasted for an hour or so, it was easier to break up into parts.

Long story short -

I was victorious in my goal of not wasting the pig's head. It made a delicious, rich soup that tasted extra yummy with all the hominy corn and chiles. And triple yummy with a garnish of chopped up avocados, cilantro and lime juice.

Pure Lard

Let me preface this post by saying that I don't particularly care for pork. It's not really my favourite meat in and of itself - if I'd have my pick on a buffet table I would probably go for chicken or fish sooner than a big piece of pork. However, I seem to be drawn to the transformative nature of pork. You can do so many interesting things with pork - you can cure it, salt it, smoke it, age it, stuff it into sausage casings, and render it. I love what I can do with pork.

This year we purchased a whole pig from some organic farmers in La Broquerie, Manitoba. (Butchered, of course). I like buying meat directly from the farmer for a few reasons -

1. I like buying straight from the producer. The farmer gets all the profit - no money needs to go to a middle-man or shiny grocery store. They get to pocket all the money from the sale and thus actually afford to have a small-scale organic farm and be able to make a living doing so.
2. I like that organic meat is cheaper than in the grocery store. Not cheaper than the regular meat, but cheaper than the organic stuff. I really like the idea of eating organic, humanely raised meat, but I also cringe at the inflated prices on the freezer-burnt organic roasts I see in the supermarket freezer. I paid $1.95 per pound of live weight - around $300 for this batch of meat.
3. I like that I can decide how I get my meat cut up. Now this point is actually hypothetical, because I haven't ever received meat cut the way I requested it from the butcher. It seems that butchers are an obstinate bunch that like to do things the way they want to do them instead of how they were asked to do them. This time, I asked for large roasts, to have half the belly fresh so I could make pancetta, and half of it smoked into bacon, for lots of ground pork so I could make my own sausages and very few pork chops. I also wanted the head, the liver, and as much of the fat as possible. What I actually received was 3 measly pounds of ground pork, no fresh belly,12 rings of farmer sausage, 56 pork chops, a couple of large roasts.... and the head, the liver and 3 giant bags of fat. (At least they got that part right.) Apparently my ham and bacon is on its way this weekend - when it comes, I'm going to see if I can trade some of those pork chops for ground pork.

Anyway, the first weekend of the pig I was BUSY. The meat went straight into the freezer, and I started working on the weird stuff. The first job was rendering the lard.

Why do I need to render lard? I really have no idea.

I think the main problem with me is that I read Chowhound.com way too much and I pay too much attention to the crazy Mexican food aficionados that say that you gotta render your own lard to get the real, authentic good flavour you need for good Mexican food. I've been on a bit of a tortillas, beans and pork kick for the past year or so and so it made sense that I should ask for the fat from my pig so I could render my lard and have lots of exceptional flavour in my tortillas.

Rendering lard takes a long time. You have to chop up the hard fat into small pieces like the picture above, and then cook it for hours and hours until all the fat turns to liquid.

There will still be some solid pieces in all the liquid fat at this point. Strain the fat through a small-grain sieve to get all the chunks out of there and set the lard in a pan to cool and harden. I figure that I rendered about15 pounds of lard, when it was all said and done. When it solidified, I cut it into chunks, wrapped it in parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer.

The chunks that are left are crackles, or Jreewe, in Low German - the preferred way to die from cholesterol poisoning for every Mennonite girl worth her weight in grease.

You can still buy Crackles in Steinbach in big plastic tubs, smothered in lard. I was really grossed out by crackles when I was a kid - Mom would scoop up a big spoonful of what looked like dirty lard into the frying pan, and then it would melt to reveal these brown glossy lumps of... whatever the hell they are. I'm thinking it must be leftover collagen from within the fat structure of the fatback. Like... Grody to the Max.

But who am I to deny my heritage? They're still not my favourite, but once the extra fat is strained out of them, they tasted pretty fine with some fried potatoes.