How To Render Pork Leaf Fat For Lard

Use Pure Pork Lard anywhere you would use vegetable shortening in baking cakes or pie pastry. Rendered Pork Leaf Lard is completely flavour neutral and won't add any flavour to your baking, but lard will give you the flakiest pie crust ever! Home rendered pork lard is also great for frying and deep frying.

The leaf lard we are making here today is about the consistency of butter at room temperature.

When rendering leaf lard from pig fat, I just chop it coarsely, no need to grind it fine, you can if you really believe it needs to be done... but I don't, my Grandmother didn't and it's always fantastic.

Another piece of advice that most give is to put water in the bottom of the pot - "so it won't burn" - no need for that either... you are setting your oven at 225ºF to 250ºF and pork fat doesn't start to smoke until over 400ºF. So unless your oven is waaaaaaay off there is no real danger of it burning. Adding water just causes problems later because you need to boil it off.