And the pasture-raised pigs that provide it!
We have been celebrating lard lately, after making some fresh batches and coming into the season of more time for cooking and baking. And the bounty of sweet potatoes has one farmer craving a deep fryer so we could make sweet potato fries in our lard.
With the prompt from Judy Simpson & Joe Carroll’s visit and their WCAX story, we got to take a step back and think about why it is we love it.
Our short list of what makes lard almighty:
- a healthy fat — not its reputation but fact. Not hydrogenated like margarine, crisco and other oils and has less of the bad kinds of fat and more of the good. Plus lard from pasture-raised pigs has more vitamin D than anything but cod liver oil — key for us northerners.
See Pete Wells, Lard: the new health food? and Corby Kummer, High on the Hog
- Our localvore fat. Lard is great for frying, sauteing, baking and roasting, as is schmaltz, (poultry fat), but we produce a lot more lard so it is a readily available local fat and helps us use all of our pigs – Nose to tail.
- More stable for high temp cooking like roasting, frying, sauteing and making popcorn than vegetable oils which deteriorate and produce smoke at high heats.
- Makes the best pastry. Leaf lard is especially sought after by bakers.
- Delicious…it just makes it all taste better
Enjoy some happy, pasture-raised lard. Stocked up in the farmstand and also at our upcoming markets!
But eternal truths will remain: food is always best with little or no processing and eaten as close as possible to where it is grown. This goes for lard, too.
– Corby Kummer, Food Writer, New York Times