Ox and I have both made lard several times, and the recipe from the book is pretty straight forward and easy to use. The results are excellent both times we've done it.
I don't even have any pictures from making it, but we did stumble upon a really neat trick for making lard quickly, easily and with some pretty cool side benefits.
We were making the Rabbit Andouille Sausage, which called for 1/4 pound of fatback, run through the large die of a meat grinder. We looked for fatback from the usual sources at the Summerville Farmer's Market, but everyone was out - no big deal, we had lots of options. Luckily, Russell at Sunny Cedars Farm suggested using leaf fat, which he had at a good price. We grabbed two pounds and froze the chunks for easy grinding. We only needed 1/4 pound, so we decided to make lard out of the rest. Ox had been wanting to try a crock pot instead of the stove top, and then genius hit us!
We were grinding the fat anyway, so why not grind it all! We figured this might speed things up and increase the yield. It worked! Less than 45 minutes and we had perfect, easily strain-able lard. Not only that, the bits of meat that had been in the beautiful fat were not over crisped. After straining we threw them in a skillet and cooked them for 5 minutes and ended up with AMAZING pork bits.
I don't know if I'll break the grinder out every time I make lard, but if I'm grinding pork anyway...
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