welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen if you've been following along
on the channel you'll know my friend Jamie stopped by and we started to break
down a pig and one of the first things we pulled out of the pig was this and
this is leaf fat so what I'm gonna do is just grab the leaf lard and then just
pull it back towards the ham and it'll just pull right out yeah if it's
attached to that kidney which it shouldn't shouldn't be too big of a
problem for you there we go there it is so leaf fat hangs inside the
animal around the organs it's not associated with any muscle group at all
so it's just fat and a little bit of membrane and this is prized
for making lard now it's also difficult to get so if you can't get leaf fat you
can do exactly the same process that I'm doing today but use back fat and so you
just want to slice it up and you don't have to chop it too fine you just want
to break through the membrane a little bit and if you leave it in strips like
this it's going to be just perfect and it really helps if you've put this in
the fridge or maybe the freezer for about an hour just to firm it up it
makes it easier to cut and a lot less greasy on your fingers now I'm just
throwing it in deff job in a small Dutch oven that I have here something that you
can put in the oven to render the fat out and you want to pre-heat your oven
to somewhere between 225 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit doesn't need to be any hotter
than that that temperature will render the fat but it's not going to color the
the fat at all it's not going to bring it to a temperature where it starts to
brown and it's certainly not going to bring it to a temperature where it would
start to burn which brings me to the next thing if you've watched the the
video I did on doing this rendering a beef fat pretty much exactly the same
process I spoke about how a lot of people tell you to put a quarter cup of
water in the bottom so that it doesn't burn if you're using temperatures that
are high enough that it's going to burn you're way too hot the second thing is
if there's any residual water in your fat your fat is going to go bad very
quickly you don't want to have any water at all in the finished product so
it's best not to add any water at the beginning if you don't have to that sort
of takes away that biggest problem because otherwise the fat will go rancid
and you definitely don't want that so I've got this cut up put it into the
Dutch oven and put on a lid now if you don't have a cast-iron Dutch oven don't
worry you can use any pot that you can put in the oven that you can put a lid
on and if you don't have a pot that you can put in the oven with a lid on just
cover it with tinfoil you can put this in a frying pan if you have a cast-iron
frying pan this would be perfect to do and I'm gonna stick this in the oven and
it's gonna go for three and a half to four hours and at about the one hour
point I'm gonna pull it out and just give it a stir and then stick it back in
okay so this has been in the oven for four or five hours that's kind of the
beauty of this method I don't have to really worry about it you can get on
with your day you can do a whole pile of other things and just leave this in the
oven if you don't go past six hours everything's fine so I've got a strainer
and a heatproof glass jug and I'm just gonna pour off the oil and strain out
the big bits you don't get a whole lot of lard from one piece of leaf fat but
there's enough in there that I'm going to be able to use this when I make the
prosciutto give it a try thanks for stopping by
let's see you can soon
you