Lard, a pure white rendered pork fat, is essential for making traditional lard pastry used in meat pies, quiches and pasties.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
Jaci Hicken, a seasoned Riv journalist and trained chef, shares her wealth of knowledge on growing, cooking and preserving homegrown produce and insights from running her cooking school. In this edition, Jaci is learning how to make lard.
I'm about to embark on a pies and pasties baking crusade, and to pull that off, I’m going to need lard, which is pure, white, rendered pork fat.
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Lard pastry is made by rubbing together one part lard and one part butter with four parts flour, adding a pinch of salt, and then adding water until a dough is formed.
This pastry is used as the bottom of a meat pie, as the base for a quiche or tart or as the outside of Cornish pasties.
Lard pastry is tough yet flaky, with little flavour, and would traditionally be used as a biodegradable wrapper that the Cornwall coal miners would discard, eating only the filling.
Lard pastry is tough yet flaky, with little flavour, traditionally used as a biodegradable wrapper by Cornwall coal miners.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
Now, there is not much call these days for coal miners to worry about only eating the filling, so the pastry is consumed.
It’s off to the supermarket to pick up some lard, which for many years has been on the top shelf between the copha and dripping in the butter cabinet.
But it is gone!
Which means one of two things: either source it from a different shop or make it myself.
As a journalist, with a bit of gumption, it was the perfect opportunity to call the local British butchery, have a chat about food (which I love to do) and find out how they make lard.
Pacdon Park Free Range British Butchery started when Peter Tonge and Jim Arrowsmith started making the smallgoods that they missed, while backpacking around Australia
Photo by
Aidan Briggs
Pacdon Park Free Range British Butchery butcher Jim Arrowsmith started making traditional pork products with a mate, Peter Tonge, when they were backpacking around Australia and couldn’t find a decent pork pie.
According to Jim, a pork pie is a hot-water crust pastry, with ground shoulder and belly pork seasoned inside and a bone-stock jelly.
Hot-water crust pastry, which I had never heard of before our chat, is made with boiling water and lard, added to flour and kneaded together to create a stiff dough.
But if I can’t get lard in the supermarket, how can I make it?
“We had noticed that it had no longer been available in the supermarket, as our sales of lard have gone through the roof,” he said.
Jim said there were two ways of making lard: dry or wet rendering, with Pacdon Park preferring the dry method.
“You would put a little water in a pan and would cook the fat for 10 to 14 hours to get the best yield,” Jim said.
“You get a 50 to 60 per cent yield of the end product.
“And you can do it with the skin on, and you get the lovely crackling as well.
“We mince it because you get a larger surface area per kilo, and it renders a lot faster and you get more lard.”
Once the pork fat has slowly melted, you lift off the fat, strain through a fine cloth, let it cool and you have the magic pure white baking gold.
Now I’m off to the butcher’s to pick up some pork fat, then it’s a 14-hour wait until I return to the pies and pastries baking crusade.
Are you a pork pie connoisseur? Share your favourite pork pie with Jaci at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au
