I love cracklin cornbread!

Never made it myself, but sure have eaten it!

Beautiful! Congratulations on a job well done.

Just toss a handful of cracklings into the batter of your cornbread and bake as usual.

Just put them into the cornbread batter....
The lard is beautiful....it makes the best pie crust ever....and there are several recipes for cookies using lard....one is a Chinese cookie, with an almond in the center...think I have lost the recipe...
Linda C

That's FAT heaven...
You lucky girl!
I'd be using it anywhere a spoonful of butter or oil is called for in a pan!

Fry some potatoes and onions in it! YUM!

Stacy, that lard is a thing of beauty!

Cracklins? We used to just salt them and eat them, much like pork rinds, but I wouldn't turn down a piece of cornbread with them in it.

Annie

About once a year I make a batch of biscuits with lard instead of shortening. Magnificently rich.

There's a traditional Italian dish, bucatini alla Amatriciana, that has as a major ingredient guanciale, which is salt cured pig's jowl. You can use pancetta instead, but some recipes call for browning the pancetta in lard to get the requisite richness.

Wow! I haven't seen that in YEARS. Grandmother used to render her pig's fat...

As for the cracklins, use a salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder mix and sprinkle on the cracklins. Eat like popcorn. They are a thing of beauty that I don't allow myself to have any longer, so thanks for sharing such great pics.

oh thanks for the suggestions everyone!

I never in my wildest imagination thought that I'd EVER be pleased by comments stating that my lard is beautiful...:-)

Stacy

I just HAD to open this thread and look! Great job, Stacy!

Here is a recipe for some Scandinavian Oatmeal Cookies that are really different since they're rolled out super thin right on the cookie sheet before Baking:

Thin, Crispy Oatmeal Cookies
1/2 cup lard
1/2 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sour cream
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 pinch baking powder
1 pinch salt
3 cups oatmeal

Preheat oven to 350 F. You will need 8 sheet pans with no sides.

Cream lard, butter, sour cream and sugars. Mix together dry ingredients -- except oatmeal; add to creamed mixture and mix until well blended. Add in oatmeal. Divide into 8 equal portions.

Roll out each portion directly onto a baking sheet; it will be very thin and should cover most of the pan; a piece of waxed paper between the dough and the rolling pin will help.

Bake until brown (5-8 minutes); slice into pieces immediately, THEN remove from pan to cool. You can slice into squares, rectangles, diamonds. etc.

Stacy,
Thanks so much for posting this! Yet again I've learned something new. The pictures were great and you made it seem so easy. Thanks to this site, I now contemplate trying things in the kitchen I never would have dreamed of :)

Tracey

Wow, Stacy I don't think that I've ever had homemade rendered lard. Lucky you. I know you will put it to very good use. I'm tempted to buy 1/4 or 1/2 a pig now too. Just for the lard.

Ann

I think you have great looking lard too! It does make great pie crusts! I have never had cracklins and wondered what they were. I think they would be great in cornbread.
If I had lard I would make fried green tomatoes!! yumm!That would add a dimension to the taste!

Wahhhhh, I'm at work and I can't see your lard (d*mn photo blockers)!

It sounds wonderful and I'll be sure to check it out when I get home.

LOL Jessy, I should have known...

Westelle, thanks for the recipe - those sound great!

Tracey, I know exactly what you mean - I was thinking about it as I was elbow deep in pig fat yesterday - lol. A few years ago, I never would have imagined that I'd be making my own pie crust - let alone rendering lard to use in it. Baking Bread...is another thing. And I have 20 some odd pounds of sauerkraut fermenting in the basement and now I actually know how to can some things! When I came here I had a springform pan that had never been used.

All due to the help and support and generosity of my friends here. :-)

Ann, we also had a ham steak last night, and I took Shaun's advice and quickly fried up some potatoes and onions in a little of the lard - it was all wonderful.

I hope to try that cornbread this weekend. oh wow, fried green tomatoes - great idea!

Thanks again everyone.
Stacy

As Emeril says, "Pork Fat Rules". Lard actually has less cholesterol and saturated fat than butter.

Wow, Stacy-- that sure brings back memories ! Good job-- and as others have said, it makes the best pie crust-- can use it as a sub for anything calling for shortening-- I love it in plain sugar cookies & frying donuts & corn fritters, chicken etc

Praise the Lard!

Stacy, I grew up on lard; it's all my mom ever cooked with, and yet, my doc, Dr. Ima Quack, has always been impressed with my low cholesterol level.
I haven't made lard in years, but when I did, I used it in Polvorones, a Cuban cookie which melts in your mouth. And, as has already been mentioned, cornbread made with lard is unbeatable.

Sol

My DH just finished reading a book called "Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient with Recipes", and he loved it. He said it goes into lots of detail about why animal fats and lard are so good for cooking. It was very informative. I googled it and the author also wrote a book about "Bones" -- not sure if it's any good, but I'm guessing it is.

Stacy,
When I found this site almost ten years ago, I didn't even know it was possible to cook without a recipe! I've learned so much from this site! I consider myself a decent home cook and a better than average baker, but nothing special especially compared to some folks here! But I have friends who call me for cooking advice and it's all thanks to what I've learned here.

Tracey

I love making piecrusts with lard and

Here in Spain those Polvorones are a standard Christmas item.....like a melt in your mouth shortbread as Sol says.
They're often made by cloister nuns as a tradition of many years with each one wrapped in a little tissue paper with an image printed on the paper.

Lard is used a lot in Mallorcan cooking and one of our favourite breakfast buns....the famous ensaimadas of Mallorca are made with a dough that is stretched out paper thin like strudel dough, then smeared with lard and then rolled up snail-like into a light as a feather baked pastry.
Here is another site about ensaimadas and here is a blow by blow tutorial on making them......but they don't show the moment when you smear on the lard. Here they are making the giant ones which are packed in round boxes but we always had the small ones for breakfast when we lived there. They are fantastic, buttery (that's the lard) and so good with a morning coffee. They don't make them in other places as for some reason they never come out like the ones from Mallorca. A lot of other recipes from that island are based on cooking and frying with lard.

SharonCb

I cook bacon in the oven. I save the fat. Have a jar just for that. Same thing more or less as Stacy did. I use the fat when making cornbread as in the Cracking type [Joy of Cooking.] I also use it in other stuff. My mom's 94 and she's never tossed rendered lard as I know of.

"...hoping to use it for tortillas or pie crust or something."

That would be tamales, not tortillas. Tortillas don't have any fat. By all means, make tamales. Do it when you have some time to spare (yeah, I know).

You've got me thinking seriously about rendering some lard. It is a crucial ingredient in some very good dishes, especially Mexican ones.

Jim

Beggin' your pardon....a good tortilla does indeed contain lard.
Check the link....scroll down to the recipe.
Linda C

Sorry. I forgot about flour tortillas, because I never make them. Flour tortillas do indeed have lard.

On the same link, scroll down to the next recipe, corn tortillas. That's what I had in mind. Corn tortillas never have lard so far as I know.

Jim

Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts.
She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet.

November 15, 2006
Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust

By MELISSA CLARK
A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig.

Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma.

Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue.

The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again.

Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings.

The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice.

Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order.

With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil?

And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way.

But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there.

I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa.

Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite.

The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost?

Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said.

Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations.

With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level.

I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie.

A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen.

The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away.

Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings.

Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter.

The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way.

The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert.

But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings.

Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky.

The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive.

One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content.

Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard.

Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/dining/15crus.html

Even though visiting GardenWeb is probably responsible for the cookies that my Norton finds on my computer and deletes every time it runs, and even though there's that stupid Netflix or Screensavers pop-up that comes in the first time I read someone's post each day, I still will visit Gardenweb for the excellent ideas and insights that all of you submit.

I was really glad to see this thread, as economy coupled with good eating is how I was raised. My mother came into her marriage with no cooking skills. She was taught everything she knew about cooking by my dad's German grandmother. His grandmother knew, even, how to cook 'possum, although that was one thing she never taught mom and I was always glad the line was drawn there. LOL

Bacon fat was always something poured off into a jar and saved in the back of the refrigerator, to be used to fry potatoes and green tomatoes in, or for the fat ingredient in biscuits, cornbread and yeast bread. However, my mother never saved chicken fat or beef fat, believing it to be unsuitable.

Some months ago, I bought a brisket which I cooked, with a little water, slowly all day in my electric roaster. After removing all the cooked meat that I could, I was left with quite a pile of fat. I put this back into the roaster with the liquids from the first cooking, added more water, and let it simmer all night. In the morning I had very little solids left over. I picked out a lot of small pieces of meat but there was enough left in with the solids that it made quite a treat for the family dog. After the fat cooled, I lifted it from the liquids and stored it in a jar. The liquids were a really nice meaty broth that I froze for use later. I have used some of the fat in pastry and in breads and have found it superior to the vegetable shortening I have used. When the fat has been rendered by boiling in liquid rather than frying, there is less beef flavor in the fat because most of it goes into the liquid.

I have not, however, been saving chicken fat. When I roast chicken (or turkey), I always save the bones and any pieces of skin and fat that are left. They go into the crockpot or electric roaster with water and are cooked all night. By morning there is a wonderful broth and the bones are so soft, I have been crushing them and adding them to whatever skin solids are left and letting the dog devour that. If I didn't have a dog I'd probably dig a hole under the roses and bury those solids. BUT, I haven't been wanting to let the dog eat the fat that I skim off the broth (though I bet he would -- he's such a pig-dog) so I pour it into a disposable cup or can, freeze it and then put it in the garbage on garbage pick-up day. Shame on me! I will not again throw out chicken or turkey fat.

The cheapest vegetable shortening found in stores now is over $3 for what amounts to about two quarts of low-quality fat that looks disgusting and I question whether it's even safe to eat.

These days, I am almost at the point where I find it hard to believe anything the "experts" say. They have told us we shouldn't eat eggs, and then they say oh, it's actually ok. Coffee was bad, then it was good. Aspirin was bad, now it's the wonder drug. Somehow I do not find it so hard to believe that the basic foods our ancestors ate every day are better for us than the processed foods that the food-producers are pushing. There's something very satisfying in looking at the ingredients list of something and not finding synthetics or chemicals on the list. I do believe that anything somebody has to make in a test-tube does not belong in our food. I do have some concerns, though, about the bacon fat because of the chemicals used to cure the bacon, and consequently we don't have bacon very often at my house.

GardenWeb's cookies and pop-ups, not to mention the many pop-ups that my blocker does manage to block, annoy the heck out of me but I suppose this site has to make its money somehow. I thank all of you for taking the time to share so much of yourselves here. At 62, I find I'm still learning something every day--mostly here. --Ilene

About how long would you say bacon grease lasts in the refrigerator covered?

Bacon grease gets rancid fairly rapidly because smoking makes fat spoil faster and once having been cooked also renders it more unstable. I wouldn't keep it longer than a month to 6 weeks. It won't give you food poisioning but won't taste as good as it should.
I rememberw hen Iw as amrried being horrified that my MIL kept the bacon fat in a can on her stove....where it was re warmed every time thes tove was used....and it tasted like it too!
Linda C