Hillside Farm

So we recently had some feeder pigs taken off to be butchered. My in laws usually get some feeder pigs once a year or so, and we get one along with them, and they raise them to butchering age/weight. When calling in our cut order, I asked about getting some of the fat back, because I wanted to learn how to render lard. Now, the processing plant will render it for you, for an extra charge, but this is something I decided I wanted to try.

I read a few articles on what to use and how long to cook the fat and they all seemed fairly simple.

This is how much fat I had to start with. I forgot to weigh it, but it was as big as my cutting board, which is roughly 18”x18”.

The stock pot I used is stainless steel. My stove is an induction top, so I can’t use aluminum.

Most articles recommended chopping the fat up into small pieces while it was still frozen.

I will say, it was easier to cut while frozen, in some ways, but it probably took me an hour and a half or more to cut up the whole frozen block of fat because it was all stuck and frozen together.

I tossed the fat in the pot and turned it on the lowest burner setting. You want to melt and cook the fat without burning it, so this is very important. If it is overcooked, it will end up having more of a porky smell and flavor, which is ok for most things, but if you’re wanting to use your lard to make pie crusts, you want to try to avoid that. Because it took me so long to cut up the whole chunk of fat, the temperature continued to stay low, as I was adding frozen fat to the pot every few minutes.

The instructions were to cook the fat low and slow until the fat chunks were floating. In all, this probably took about 2-3 hours, from the start of turning it on, to when it turned it off. You don’t need to worry about stirring it a lot, but in the beginning, until enough of the fat melted to coat the bottom on the pot, I had a few pieces of fat stick. This isn’t a huge deal as far as I know, but it does make it hard to clean the pot later.

Of course, you could wait to start the pot until you cut up all of the fat, but I was impatient.

This is what it should look like when it’s nearly done.

I set up a bowl and strainer, and another bowl for the fat pieces after I drained them. With a slotted spoon, I scooped the fat pieces out of the stock pot and put them in the strainer over the bowl. In order to get more of the liquid lard out, I shook them around a bit and let them sit and drip. Then, the fat pieces went into a separate bowl. I did this until I got all the fat pieces I could put of the pot and melted fat.

This is what it looked like after straining all the fat pieces through the strainer and bowl I had set up. You will notice in the bottom of this bowl are some very small particles of fat and meat.

This next step is also very important.

Using cheesecloth, I further strained the liquid lard to remove all the bits and pieces of fat and meat that fell through the strainer. If you skip this step, and leave bits of fat and meat in your lard, they can go bad during storage and ruin the whole batch/jar. I only had a very small piece of cheesecloth so I made it work with this little glass measuring cup. Next time I’ll make sure I have enough cheesecloth and it should make this step a bit easier.

From the glass measuring cup, I poured these directly into clean glass jars. You want to let the lard cool and solidify overnight before putting the lids on. It will look a yellowish color while it is still liquid, but sets up to a nice clean white color.

Here it is the next morning after lids were placed. I did use some repurposed jars. From what I understand, you can put these in a water bath and seal them, but it is not necessary.

This batch gave me four pints, a quart, and three 8 oz jars worth of lard! Properly rendered lard can be stored for 4-6 months at room temperature, a year in the fridge, and a few to several years in the freezer.

This process did take time, but I would definitely do it again!