Crispy on the Outside

Chewing the Fat on Lard’s Resurgence

A week or so ago fellow Crispirator Jerry Brito was lamenting how hard it was to track down a good handful of lard. I recall him saying he went to some extremes (only slightly short of doing the killing and rendering himself) to track down a portion for cooking. I’m sure we’ll hit on that in the podcast later tonight.

Anyways, on Monday night, I had a pretty lengthy discussion about lard with a classmate while chomping on very good pizza (paid for by my ping-pong shark of a food & drug professor, who since he reads this blog–and brought up that he used to eat that little piece of lard in canned beans–gets another thanks here) at Comet. Our conversation took place in the context of a class outing to discuss In Defense of Food, in which Michael Pollan mentions the joy of lard (at least as compared to his aversion to trans fats) more than a handful of times.

Well, today I came across a great piece on the (seemingly Midwestern) revival of–guess what?–artisan lard!

In Kansas City, Kan., Bichelmeyer Meats… renders lard once a week, generally on a Wednesday or Thursday, according to Jim Bichelmeyer, who owns the business with his brother, Joe, and nephew Matt.

It’s a relatively simple process: The back fat and any other trimmings from freshly slaughtered hogs are coarsely ground and put into a small, steam-jacketed kettle, which works like a stove-top double-boiler. The key is to keep the fat off any heat source. The process is called wet rendering.

It cooks in the kettle four to five hours, stirred every 15 to 20 minutes, until the solids melt into a liquid and the cracklings - the bits of skin and meat - rise to the top.

The cracklings are skimmed off and sold; the lard, once it has cooled enough to handle, is strained and poured into 5-, 10- and 26-pound containers. It is pure lard. Unlike lard found on supermarket shelves, the Bichelmeyer’s product contains no preservatives or additives.

[...]

He sells 300 to 400 pounds of lard a week, and there’s a waiting list for the cracklings.

More here. Pick up your lard from any of the sellers mentioned in the piece or here. Another good recent piece by the lard article author, KC Star food writer Lauren Chapin, here.

In case you’re wondering, I haven’t cooked with lard since seventh-grade home ec class. I plan to rectify that pronto.

Apr. 16, 2008 | Comments