So I have been on a quest for the perfect pie crust. Perhaps because I find myself preferring the crust itself to the filling (there are others out there like me, I know it!), perhaps because I fancy myself someday running a small pie shop, or perhaps because I can become obsessive on random things such as pie crust…I have yet to conclusively decide.
In any event, I had discovered, before lard, that I preferred an all-butter crust over a crust made with shortening. It felt a little like sacrilege to make the shift to butter, as I’d grown up all of my 28 years on pie crusts with shortening, nothing else. Who was I to question the type of fat used for flaky pie crusts?
But in the name of all that’s baked, buttery, and sweet, I’m glad I went venturing. Because I have come across leaf lard. And now most, if not all, the pie crusts I make are made with half butter, half leaf lard because it’s just. so. good.
So what is leaf lard, you may ask. Ask away, friends, but I suggest you Wikipedia this awesome fat to get a clearer understanding than my garbled explanations. Basically, you can get hydrogenated oil lard in the baking section of your grocery store, it comes in a package like you’d find refrigerated butter in the dairy section. Except it’s not refrigerated, it’s in the baking aisle. Leaf lard, on the other hand, is the fat deposits taken from around the pig’s kidneys and is favored by bakers for its lack of a piggy flavor or smell. It can be kept frozen or refrigerated, but you definitely can’t find it in a regular HyVee or JoeSchmo grocery store. Thus began my quest.
After some cursory Google searches for ‘leaf lard nebraska,’ not much popped up other than an Erstwhile Farm in Columbus, Nebraska. They advertised with a co-op in Omaha about their pork products, and one such item was leaf lard. Eureka. Downside, they’re an hour and a half away from me. Upside, I have a friend who dates a farmer who lives in Columbus and likes to visit him on weekends and pick up leaf lard for me from Erswhile Farms. What a great friend (I will note that she did receive a mini cherry pie for her services).
This is how the leaf lard arrived at my house from my friend’s hands from Erstwhile Farms. While I was chatting with Lanette, the co-owner of Erstwhile, about my order, she asked if I knew how to “render” the lard. Naively believing that the lard Lanette was providing me was ready for chopping and baking in my flour and water mixture, I just said “Yes! I’m so excited to use it in my pie crusts!” Delighted at finding someone so enthusiastic about her leaf lard, Lanette suggested that I use the cracklings to sprinkle on my popcorn. And then I was confused. And so I asked.
Turns out, you need a heavy sauce pan or pot, or dutch oven, in my case. Heated over low, low heat, with a little water in the pot.
This is how the leaf lard looks unwrapped. Lotsa fatty stuff there, but not all fat. Some meat was still there too, and we don’t want that for our leaf lard.
Here’s the backside of the lard in its untouched, unmelted and refrozen form. As I was telling you, there’s some piggy meat attached to it that we must separate from the fat to render our lard.
Here’s the cutting up phase – I definitely didn’t need to show you this shot, I just like how the knife is stuck in the lard. That’s how frozen it was. That’s as close to an action shot that I can get you.
Now our leaf lard is cut up into small chunks, and thrown into the dutch oven with the little bit of water. Heat it on LOW until it melts. Why all caps on LOW? To emphasize the point that you can’t melt this stuff fast, unless you like to play and fast furious with your leaf lard rendering process. You run the risk of burning the precious stuff, and then it’s useless.
Here we have some melting leaf lard….in the interest of learning, I’ll also share some more pictures of melting leaf lard as it progressively melts. Although one may be enough for those of you thinking “This stuff looks really gross.”
Now the lard is starting to separate from everything else we don’t want. It’s starting to look like clear liquid on top of a lot of stuff that floats to the bottom. If I had used a smaller saucepan, which I will use next time, it would have been easier to tell whether or not all the lard had rendered to the top.
This is the final photo of melting leaf lard. I’m trying to show you the final melted stage, but it’s hard because I chose such a wide surface area (dutch oven) to melt the lard. All of the cracklings have fallen to the bottom, and the liquid gold (leaf lard) is clear liquid on top. I feel kind of funny typing cracklins’ as “cracklings,” it makes me feel professorial or something.
Now you’re ready to pour the melted fat into something to freeze or refrigerate it. But first you have to filter it to make sure you don’t get any of those cracklins’ in your liquid gold. I chose a glass jar and used cheese cloth for the straining. I also decided that rather than making a fatty mess on my counters, I’d keep the jar in a bowl to catch anything that missed the mouth of the jar. It worked out pretty well.
So here we have the aftermath of my pouring of melted leaf lard into a glass jar. It was quite a mess. The cheesecloth did OK, but next time, I’m going to find something else that is a little more firm and discerning. The cheese cloth was just a little too loose, and let in a few cracklins’ into the jar. I will also not be using the cheesecloth, or at least the one I used for this first rendering, because it’s completely gooped up and not good for another use. But here’s what I got out of the mess…..
Liquid Gold!
I ended up having to use 2 jars, but the smaller one didn’t really have much leaf lard in it after I’d poured the remaining contents of the dutch oven into the smaller jar. This yellow color is what it looks like immediately after finishing the straining process. Now it’s ready to be refrigerated or frozen for several hours before you use it.
And here we have the final product, leaf lard! The whiteness on the right is a gallon of milk, that conveniently illustrates the whiteness achieved by chilled lard. It also illustrates my poor straining job for the smaller jar, as you can see, I didn’t get much lard out of that one. The brown stuff was not usable as a fat, and I’m still not very clear on what that stuff was.
I keep mine frozen, and use a melon baller to scoop out lard as I need it. Of course, when making pie crusts, the colder the ingredients are, the better, but I usually let the lard thaw out a bit before carving into it because it’s pretty rock solid coming out of the freezer.
Should you ever get the chance to get your hands on some rendered or unrendered leaf lard, I highly recommend it for pie crusts. It’s just delightful.
