Some back history on how we got to rendering lard, something I never thought I would do. First, we bought half a pig last Christmas and as a part of that got a bag full of frozen pig fat, which I had no idea what to do with. Someone mentioned rendering in passing but I brushed it aside since what do you do with lard? Anyway, then a few months ago I was invited to a soap making party where a bunch of us got together to make several large batches of various soaps. It was lots of fun and a neat thing to learn how to make. After getting excited that evening and doing some internet reading I realized that hey, you can make soap from lard! Wouldn’t that be an interesting experiment? And what do you know, I have a bag full of fat in the freezer right now that we could render into lard! Queue more internet reading, this time on rendering lard, and a few weeks go by before I really get serious about doing this thing.
I should also note that I made use of some excellent resources on this subject not found on google, my Grandparents and Great Aunt Arlene! Imagine that, they actually remember their mothers and grandmothers rending lard on the farm. We had a fun discussion about life on the farm in North Dakota back in the “olden days” when they were growing up. Interesting stuff, I am really blessed to have the ability to sit down and share in these memories with them. Life was hard on the farm in those days, they worked super hard all summer and fall to store up food for winter. They used root cellars for storage and when those were too cold in the ND winter, they would put food into the grain bins which provided better insulation. Some of the fun ones were Grandpa and Arlene remembering coming to their Grandma’s (My Great Great Grandma’s) house and finding the door locked, something that never happened in the small town of Parshall, ND. Turns out Grandma was inside ironing all of her money. You see she saved away all her egg money in a jar in her coal bin for years and years and it was time to take it to the bank, so it needed to be ironed (obviously). The kicker? There was something like $20,000 in there!
I found a great resource online HERE about rendering lard in a crock pot which seemed an excellent way to go. Funnily enough I mentioned this method to my Grandparents and Arlene and they had to think about it a bit because during their experience there were no crock pots to use in rendering lard! The other piece that gave me the courage to just go for it was having our friend Adam, who is a butcher at our house at the time. He had done it before and made it much less an intimidating thing to start.
I really debated about when to start it cause it could take like more than 15 hours! I didn’t want it to be all ready to go at like 2 am so didn’t know what to do. On the advice of Adam that it could take a really long time I started it at like 11 pm on Friday night. The benefit of this was that he was leaving to go to the ferry at 5 am and could double check it for more before he left. So off we went, with two crockpots full of fat to render. And it took a really really really long time. I started pulling it out into cans midday on Saturday (like 12 hours in) and continued that all the rest of the day. When we got home from our date on Saturday night I pulled more and then consolidated to one pot and let her go over night all the way to Sunday afternoon. Not sure if this is what its supposed to be like but even with all that time we never got those awesome cracklings they talked of. Maybe we needed to let it go even longer but I was kind of done at that point. In the end we ended up with 6.5 (16 ounce) jars of nice white lard and 1 jar of the “savory” lard from probably around 10 pounds of fat.
Jamie was anxious to try it out and we had planned on making some cornbread for a BBQ we were going to, so he substituted it for half the butter and to anit-stick the cast iron pan. It seemed to make the best crunchy textured crust on the cornbread. We’ll have to keep experimenting and see what other tasty things we can make and if all else fails we can make soap!
