I’ve been dying to write about this. I won’t deny that, delicious as they are, all those uber-trendy pig products like “rendered pork fat” have sometimes made me wince just a little when I hear they’ve been drizzled over my dinner. It’s basically a fancy way of saying “lard,” and in my head, that word is synonymous with Worst Thing For You. Ever.
So you can imagine how shocked I was when I found out that, while lard that’s been hydrogenated into trans fats (think Crisco) isn’t so great, pure lard is actually considerably better for you than butter. In a nutshell: Butter is mostly saturated fat (over 60 percent). Pure lard, by contrast, is about 40 percent saturated fat, and—to sweeten the deal—45 percent monounsaturated fat (the same “good” fat found in olive oil). Furthermore, compared to butter, lard has a higher smoking point (the temperature at which the substance starts to break down). Studies show that the higher a fat’s smoking point, the less of it is absorbed into any food it happens to be cooking.
New doors have clearly opened. To lead me through, I turned New York’s most notorious meat-lover, Joshua Ozersky—Citysearch’s Restaurants Editor and author of Meat Me In Manhattan: A Carnivore’s Guide to New York and The Hamburger: A History. After the jump, his rundown.
Okay, this may sound really elementary, but what’s the taste difference between butter and lard?
To set the stage: People eating in restaurants have no idea that the reason everything tastes so good and feels so right in their body is that there’s loads of fat of some sort going into their system. Fat is where the flavor is. If you were to eat the lean muscle tissue, all animal meat actually tastes the same. In other words, these differences carry a great deal of meaning.
Butter is creamy. Unctuous. It has an ineffable richness. Lard is earthy and robust. Both fats grant an invisible fundament to any food they’re added to. I’d say lard is more potent. It’s something to think about from a health perspective. From a flavor standpoint, in cooking, you can get away with using much less lard than butter.
And lard, specifically…
Lard is interesting. It has a kind of elemental visceral satisfaction—it’s sweet and savory and salty all at once. There’s a pronounced flavor but at the same time you can’t put your finger around it. But think about really great Mexican food, melt-in-your-mouth Southern pies—and of course sausage and bacon. That’s lard.
Also of note: There’s something about it that tastes good preserved. For example, nobody likes beef jerky but everybody loves bacon. The Italians have taken that concept to an even higher level with lardo. They cure it by air-drying it with salt and sugar mixture.
So why not use lard all the time?
At room temperature, pure lard stinks. You can wash butter off of your hands but with lard your hands will smell during the day. So it’s the cooking element where lard is really irreplaceable. Lard actually transforms with heat, and that’s when you get all that complexity. If you’ve ever had biscuits or fried chicken with lard there’s no going back.
Why do you think lard has such a stigma?
In America, historically speaking, lard was far more common than butter. Pigs were more common than cattle. Cattle need more space and care, whereas pigs are compact and fend for themselves. Also, pig fat is dense with calories and preserves very well, so in the times before refrigeration, this was one of the only ways to feed people cheaply year-round. Lard is, in fact, still one of the main fats used in Europe. But here, there’s a socio-cultural hierarchy of animals and animal fats. Cows tend to precede pigs. Lard is considered a poor people’s food, while people don’t think of butter as fat. They think of doe-eyed cows and milkmaids, and the pure creaminess of it. Chicken fat has suffered the same fate. In French kitchens chicken fat has 1,000 uses, but for Jews it’s considered low and unsavory because it’s what they ate when they were poor.
How do I get my hands on this stuff—the pure, un-hydrogenated kind, I mean?
If you’re lucky enough to be near a greenmarket, any farm that sells pork will have lard. A butcher will also be able to get you good leaf lard. And even the meat counter at a good supermarket can get it.
What’s a good recipe for a first-timer?
I’d take a good metal pan melt a tiny bit of lard and roll some Brussels sprouts around, so they get coated. As you go, remember, this isn’t like butter where you really need to soak the stuff in. So be conservative. You don’t need much at all. To vary the flavor, I also sometimes use equal amounts lard and olive oil.
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Camille