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Chewing the fat, part II
Superior taste makes solid fats (think lard) worth their weight
By Matthew Amster-Burton
April 12, 2007
Two weeks ago I talked about some of my favorite liquid cooking oils. This week we’re going to meet the bad boys of the kitchen: solid fats.
As before, I don’t want to dwell on the nutritional properties of these ingredients. I’ll just point out one thing: Despite their very different appearances at room temperature, some of them are not all that different, chemically, from liquid oils.
Lard, for example, contains less than 50 percent saturated fat and has nearly as much monounsaturated fat as canola oil. And it tastes infinitely better than canola oil.
Butter. Recently I had the opportunity to conduct a butter taste-test with James Miller, who makes Seattle’s best croissant at his Ballard bakery, Cafe Besalu. I included regular and high-fat, organic and non, local and otherwise, salted and unsalted butters. The most important quality in butter is freshness; one otherwise promising organic brand we tried tasted like the inside of a refrigerator.
The winner was Plugrá, the high-fat, unsalted butter from Texas. My only gripe with Plugrá is that it’s only sold in one-pound blocks from which it’s hard to slice off a tablespoon at a time. Our second-favorite butter was Tillamook, an Oregon brand that I bought at the supermarket on sale for $2.50.
The moral here? Choose an unsalted butter with high grocery-store turnover, and look skeptically upon imported or otherwise gourmet butters, which may have started out great — weeks ago. To avoid rancidity, store butter in the freezer and defrost it a stick at a time.
For vegetable sautés, I often combine butter with olive oil. Not because it prevents the butter from burning (this is a myth), but because the flavor is great.
Lard. Yes, I keep a tub of lard in my fridge at all times. Even good organic lard is cheap, and it produces incomparable results in pastry, frying, and sautéing. I use it (half-lard, half-butter) for flaky crusts for Cornish pasties, rustic sour-cherry tarts, and anywhere else I want a foolproof pastry experience.
Lard is an essential ingredient in homemade tamales and flour tortillas. It makes wonderfully crispy fried potatoes. It is the frying medium of choice for doughnuts, and you should slick your pan with it when making a quesadilla.
Lard has a characteristic porky aroma, but it doesn’t make the finished product taste like pork.
I’m not talking about partially hydrogenated supermarket lard, but the kind you render at home or buy at a Mexican grocery, probably in an unlabeled tub. Anything with a brand name or sold in a box is bad news.
Rendering lard is easy. Any farmers’-market stand that sells pork will sell you a chunk of pork fat, and all you have to do is process it to a paste in the food processor, put it in a pot in a low oven for three hours or so, then strain out the solids.
I tend to reach for lard these days when I would once have considered canola oil or shortening, and I am much happier for it, partly because it makes me feel like a bit of an outlaw.
Recently my wife, Laurie, was making some snickerdoodles and said to me, “We’re out of shortening. Do you think I could use lard?” Another palate successfully corrupted!
The cookies were fabulous. On the other hand, if too many people hop on the lardwagon, I won’t be a renegade anymore.
Duck fat. When chefs profess their love for duck fat, as they often do, the word “potato” is never far behind. I can’t deny that duck fat makes for great fried and pan-fried potatoes of all kinds. Try Nigella Lawson’s Perfect Roast Potatoes, for example, using duck fat if (as is probable) you don’t have any goose fat handy. (Please, please ignore the instruction that “Crisco is a good substitute.”)
Duck fat has plenty of virtues. It’s perfect for making braised cabbage or green beans, or any other vegetable that would go well with duck. Duck fat is also not much different from two other fats sorely lacking in cachet: the aforementioned lard, and chicken fat.
Which means (as Melissa Clark found recently in a great article in the New York Times) that if you don’t eat pork, you can substitute duck fat, and if you don’t want to pay a premium for duck fat, you can substitute schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) for either.
And duck fat isn’t as expensive as it sounds; Whole Foods sells rendered duck fat by the pound for $6 or so.
Coconut and palm oils. Frankly, I haven’t experimented much with these, but I’m curious. (If you have experience with these fats and want to suggest your favorite uses for them, please let me know via the comments section below.) I know coconut oil best as the beautiful layer of oil that appears atop a properly made Thai curry. And it’s the notorious force behind the great taste of movie-theater popcorn. Hmm, a batch of popcorn doesn’t sound bad at all. Where did I put my coconut oil?
Some people convert their cars to run on vegetable oil. I’m converting my motorcycle to run on lard. I’ll blow by so fast, the only trace will be a puff of smoke and the alluring scent of pork.
Okay, fine, I don’t have a motorcycle. You’ll just have to join me on the lardwagon.
Matthew Amster-Burton writes about cooking and culture from his home in Seattle. He keeps a blog titled Roots and Grubs.
Sift Fats are backBut can we shed our fat-hating ways? | All BooksFatAn Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes | Fat Homemade Butter | SiftSchool lunch gets healthierThe USDA gets stricter |
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| Matthew Amster-Burton sniffs out the unexplained in the kitchen, the store, and the food world at large. He blogs at Roots and Grubs, podcasts at Spilled Milk, and is the author of the book Hungry Monkey. | |
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There are 17 comments on this item
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1. by beckyleeprice on Apr 12, 2007 at 1:22 PM PDT
We were in Spain for 2 weeks this fall (Catalonia region) and I’m sure they use lard in their pastries there, the ones we would normally use butter in, like croissants, Danish, and the like. I got a definite whiff of pig, as opposed to dairy, from my morning pastry, and I don’t know, I just didn’t like it there! Otherwise I agree with what you say here and I’m going to look for the goose fat at W.F.!
2. by anonymous on Apr 12, 2007 at 4:27 PM PDT
If you’re looking for recipes using coconut oils, see if you can find a recipe for Jamaican “cocoa-bread” shortened with cocoa butter. I remember them from my youth as being soft and flaky rolls with a light aroma of cocoa that you ate with a really colorful vegetable stew. Thanks for the good article.
3. by sculpin on Apr 12, 2007 at 6:04 PM PDT
If you happen to have a solar oven (like the one at http://www.sunoven.com/ or perhaps a homemade one), it makes rendering lard even easier, especially in the summer when running the oven for three hours sounds like a bad idea. Rendering can be a somewhat smelly process, so doing it outside is nifty.
There’s a photo set of rendering lard with a solar oven at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjl20/sets/72157594253006618/
4. by beckyleeprice on Apr 12, 2007 at 6:33 PM PDT
I can’t believe that wouldn’t violate some city ordinance, or at least make my neighbors very unhappy!
5. by sculpin on Apr 12, 2007 at 8:09 PM PDT
On what grounds? It doesn’t smell that bad -- nothing at all like a barbecue, for instance, if that’s what you’re thinking. I very much doubt my neighbors noticed a thing. I just find it a little whiffy rendered inside for three hours in a small house. Or is it the oven itself that you think would be outlawed or socially inappropriate? Truly, I’m at a loss.
6. by Rebecca on Apr 13, 2007 at 6:45 AM PDT
Okay, I just watched your entire flickr slide show (pretty cool) and although I’m not completely clear on what you’re doing inside and what you’re doing outside, if what you say about the smell is true I guess you’re right, what I get up to on my smoker is probably much worse. I actually thought about the smoker after I posted this comment yesterday. Curious, though, how do you keep detritus from falling into the lard when it’s sitting on the solar oven for 3 hours outside?
7. by sculpin on Apr 13, 2007 at 12:06 PM PDT
It isn’t a problem. The body of the solar oven, in which the pot sits, is basically an insulated box with a glass top and some big reflectors. So the lard sits inside the solar oven, not on top of it, and nothing gets in. If you look carefully, you’ll see that two little metal clamps are holding down the glass lid of the cooker; it’s quite well sealed. Also, the lard is in a covered pot.
It’s a great way to cook in the summer. Residential air conditioning is almost unheard of here in Seattle, so it’s nice to find ways of cooking that don’t heat up the house any more than they have to. The only problems are that the you have to keep adjusting the angle of the thing (and have some luck) if you want a precise temperature, and the oven box is so small and (usually) tightly sealed that it can get pretty steamy inside; it’s not the way to get a really dry heat. I’m too lazy to try to bake anything tricky in it. But for cooking grains or slowly roasting vegetables for a cold summer salad, it’s ace.
It would be fabulous to have an entire outside kitchen, wouldn’t it, or at least some counter-height workspace? (Hmm, backyard project...) But I don’t, so I process the lard to a paste inside and do the 3 hours of melting outside.
8. by Rebecca on Apr 13, 2007 at 12:52 PM PDT
It would be nice to have at least some counter space next to my grill. We don’t have air conditioning, either, so I also try not to use the oven much in the summer; my kitchen unfortunately faces south-west so I get hot sun pouring in the windows just as I’m trying to cook dinner, and no sun in the morning when I might actually like it. But it is so hot and humid here in the summer that I don’t think I’d like hanging around in the yard working at a counter, either! I’ve always fantasized about an outdoor brick oven; if I ever move to the country...
9. by anonymous on Apr 15, 2007 at 10:04 AM PDT
Duck fat for popcorn. It’s a new cause!
10. by Matthew Amster-Burton on Apr 16, 2007 at 7:03 AM PDT
Sculpin, I love the solar power idea. Beckyleeprice, I also find all-lard a little too savory for pastries. It’s great for frying doughnuts, though.
11. by Carrie Floyd on Apr 17, 2007 at 9:28 AM PDT
How about a recipe for those fetching Cornish pasties?!
12. by Matthew Amster-Burton on Apr 17, 2007 at 11:34 AM PDT
Carrie, it’s so simple as to be not even a recipe, but it takes practice to fold them up and crimp them.
<a href="http://kenanderson.net/pasties/cornish.html”>This recipe</a> looks pretty good. I’d add that, as Laurie’s Cornish grandmother advised, if you’re feeling flush the beef to use is rib-eye (spencer) steak. You will feel very silly chopping up a beautiful steak and stewing it inside a pie, but the result is better than flank, top blade, or round in my experience.
13. by Wendy on Apr 18, 2007 at 12:36 PM PDT
I agree, the FIRST recipe there looks good, though some of the following recipes don’t. And I’m pretty firm on the crimp-on-top style as superior, while the picture shows crimp-on-side, but that’s just nitpicking.
Re Lard: is the stuff in a tub labeled “MANTECA” real lard or false? How long does lard last? Is it a true byproduct, making it marginally suitable for some “vegetarians”? ‘Cause it sounds pretty good. I don’t know if I could really do it, though.
14. by Matthew Amster-Burton on Apr 18, 2007 at 2:54 PM PDT
Sorry, Wendy, I did mean the first recipe, and I’m also (for obvious reasons) in the crimp-on-top camp. (I learned to make pasties from Wendy’s mother.)
Wendy, the rule of thumb I use for lard is: if the tub is in a Mexican grocery that has its own meat counter, go for it. Otherwise, it’s probably hydrogenated and yucky. As for whether it’s a byproduct, I’m not sure how you define “byproduct.” Certainly most of it in the US ends up discarded, but in some cultures it’s considered absolutely vital, as important as the meat itself.
15. by Jin on Dec 4, 2007 at 10:47 AM PST
What is the shelf life in the refrigerator of lard from a meat market?
16. by Matthew Amster-Burton on Dec 4, 2007 at 12:41 PM PST
Jin, I’d say three months. To see if it’s still good, heat some up in a pan. If it has a clean, slightly porky smell, it’s fine. If it’s stinky or rancid at all, dump it.
17. by anonymous on Dec 2, 2008 at 12:32 AM PST
there seems to be a pork fat shortage in western canada can not get any in for several weeks anyone have any helping ratioes to substitute it with duck fat i;m making pate en croute maybe someone has been in my spot and might have some ideas.I usually make 12 at a time
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