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.