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I’ve been reading all this stuff online about making lard, and although I’m not sure how we will use it, i decided to give it a try since we would otherwise throw the fat away.

I know it’s best to use leaf lard, but it’s hard to find that here, and what we had was from cuts
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of meat like pork chops. So rather than throw it away, i decided to experiment with what i had. My first attempt, I’ll admit, was a total flop. I used fat from the pork chops, and my slow cooker since the fat must be rendered slowly. Well, after 24 hours, the fat still wasn’t rendered, so I filtered what little WAS there. It ended up not even being lard! It was just some clear stuff. The dog got a good meal from the fat that was left.

A few days later, we bought a large pork butt that I separated into several meals, and there was a large strip of fat. So I clipped it off and rendered it. This time I used the stove, and it worked well! I got one little jar of snow white lard, and there was still fat to render.

However, there was some trial and error using our burner (for the first few hours it wasn’t hot enough), so what was left didn’t render well the next day (I turned it off over night), so the dog got another good meal with what was left. But I feel the trial and error part is over, so my next batch will hopefully be better!

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Maat van Uitert is a backyard chicken and sustainable living expert. She is also the author of Chickens: Naturally Raising A Sustainable Flock, which was a best seller in it’s Amazon category.  Maat has been featured on NBC, CBS, AOL Finance, Community Chickens, the Huffington Post, Chickens magazine, Backyard Poultry, and Countryside Magazine. She lives on her farm in Southeast Missouri with her husband, two children, and about a million chickens and ducks. You can follow Maat on Facebook here and Instagram here.

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3 Comments

    1. I watched some videos on YouTube. It wasn’t hard, but there’s a learning curve, some trial and writ. I tried at first to do it in the slow cooker, but doing it over a stove is better. I found I needed more time than I thought. We don’t eat the fat on pork chops or anything, so that’s what I used. Not traditional, but I got enough to make tortillas with, and they tasted so much better and were softer. I’m going to do a blog post on that soon!

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