Finally...we have lard!

At long last I have ticked another box on my 'To Do One Day' list! I have been wanting to render lard or tallow for ages and reading the new eBook from Farmer Liz gave me the motivation I needed to finally give it a try.

To be honest I didn't know the difference between tallow and lard so learned something new recently.  Lard is from pig fat and tallow is from beef or mutton fat. My grandparents would probably have been ashamed of me for not knowing that if they were still alive as they were farmers on the Darling Downs many, many years ago but I was brought up in town so that's my excuse :-)

So I started off with 2.3kg back fat from a pig which I thawed as it had been in the freezer. I was told that it was easier to cut up if it was cold so as soon as it had thawed I started cutting it up into small pieces after removing the pink bits first.

That took a while but eventually it was all done and it went into the slow cooker at 7am. Some bloggers said to turn it onto low and some said high so I started off with low. I had heard that it would be a bit smelly but not as bad as beef or mutton fat but just in case I had the slow cooker sitting beside an open window.

Using the slow cooker is not the only way to render pig fat. Sally from Jembella Farm shows how she does it in the oven in her post Rendering pig fat - Lard. Seeing as I had put three loaves of sourdough into the oven the week before and had consequently forgotten about them I didn't thought I would use the slow cooker instead. That way I could just leave it all day without having to bother pouring off the fat every half hour or so. By the way I ended up with three sourdough bricks last week :-)

This was how it looked at 4pm. Ho hum! This was going to take a long time by the looks of it.

As I hadn't rendered pig fat before I didn't realise that there were supposed to be 'bits and pieces' left after cooking all day so at around 5pm I turned the cooker up to high as I thought I was going to be up till midnight waiting for the process to be over.  By 7.30pm I was over it so decided to just strain out the 'bits and pieces' and count my losses if I had to throw out the hard bits. I found out the next day that the hard bits were connective tissue. Duh, silly me but now I know! 

I used the ladle to pour it into a bowl that had a strainer in it which had been lined with cheesecloth and then let it cool down before pouring it into a couple of Moccona coffee jars. It is very white and now I can't wait to make soap out of it although I will be adding coconut oil and olive oil. I should have enough for a few batches of soap so hopefully it will turn out alright. Some people say it will make a hard soap while others say it will be soft so one way to find out is to experiment and see for myself :-)

Watch this space!