Rendering Suet aka Makin' Lard

Suffice to say that I have a greater understanding of the scent of a medieval household after my first experience rendering suet.

I've been reading The Great Mortality by John Kelly, a riveting account of the black plague and how it wound its way through Europe in the 14th century.  Needless to say a key ingredient in its spread was the incredible filth of households in this period.  People bathed rarely and garbage (think dead animals, toilet offerings, rotten food) was strewn about the streets.  They also used lard or tallow in making candles.  According to Kelly, lard wasn't a preferred source of fuel because of the smell.

So let me get this straight.  People who were surrounded by rotting flesh and human excrement complained about the smell of burning lard.  How could this be?

Let me tell you.  It is a penetrating and murky smell.  Those familiar with the smell of their house after a deep fry session will have some idea, but rendering lard is worse.  It lacks the richness of cooking meat and the purity of cooking with vegetable oil.  It just smells heavy, and not in a good way.

I would like to think that I have a fairly strong stomach.  I mean I did saw open a sheep's head after all.  Despite the strength of my stomach, I will probably never render suet again.  But what inspired me to bother in the first place?  It was the pie competition.

According to the Joy of Cooking lard makes a "very tender crust (that) is best reserved for covered fruit pies" (p. 862).  Did I want a "very tender crust" and was I making a fruit pie?  Yes on both accounts.  I was sure that using lard would give me an upper hand on my competition.  With this in mind, I trotted to my butchers. 

Lo and behold they had bags of frozen suet, ground up and ready to go.  Luckily one of the butchers told me that I would need to render it before I used it for my pie.  Armed with this information and clutching my little bag of ground fat, I trot home, sure that I was about to have a pastry breakthrough.

Before getting started I decide to do a little research.  There is a wet method and a dry method of rendering fat.  The dry method is used during normal cooking - think of frying bacon and then using the wonderful extra fat to fry your eggs.  The wet method involves throwing, in my case, a big chunk of suet into a pot with water and letting it cook on low for hours.  As it cooks the fat melts out and can be poured off through a strainer. 

I didn't use a lot of water so the water had evaporated before I poured the fat off.  If you are using a lot of water then the fat can be skimmed off the top.  As this fat and water-filled mixture steams and bubbles away for hours your house will be filled with its distinctive odour.  I highly recommend closing all doors to bedrooms to prevent the smell from making friends with your clothing.

The rendered lard is quite beautiful, lily white and pure.  Its hard to believe that it came from a murky, flesh-colored pot of melting suet.  Once the process was complete (well to be honest, once I had rendered enough lard) I took my hot pot of suet off the stovetop and thanked the spirits that the process was over.

To ready myself for the pastry-making process (this was for my second test pie - the disastrous one) I froze the lard.  I grated the frozen lard into my flour, using butter for half the fat, finished my pastry, filled the pie and waited for ecstasy.  The pie was a disaster because I was experimenting (a combination of different recipes and my imagination) and miscalculated the cooking time.  Once my pie had "cooled" I realized that it wasn't hardening and in fact I had made strawberry soup pie.  Luckily I was still able to taste the lard-filled pastry on top.

The Verdict

It tastes like beef.  The texture was nice but the beefiness came through so strongly that it overpowered the delicate fruitiness of the filling.  Mmm strawberry-beef fat pie...  No, not so tasty.  It might work for a beef pie but even then I question the flavour the lard gave the pastry.  Some would call it the essence of being not tasty.  I have since read up more on lard and possibly, possibly will try pork fat in the future.  Emphasis on the possibly because I don't really want pork fat perfume wafting its way through my house.

Back to pure butter pastry for me!  I would love to hear if others use lard in their pastry?  Do you render it yourself or do you buy it from the butcher?  Do you use pork or beef?  Share your pastry and lard experiences.

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Shonagh explores the guts of food in An Offal Experiment

My first pie competition...

And I was a wreck.  I had made two test pies.  One was perfect - the second was a horrific disaster.  The disaster pie led to a reworking of my pie plans, a subtraction of sorts.  I am definitely the type of person who likes to overcomplicate, subtraction is not my forte.  While I know this is my pattern, I generally don't catch it early enough.  Ahhh... getting older.

So there I was the day before the competition, ready to start the most nerve wracking part - the pastry.  Here is my process.

1. Put bowls in the freezer.  One large bowl for the flour, one small bowl for the butter and one measuring cup for the liquid.  Freak out a bit that I didn't put the bowls in sooner.  Will they get cold enough???

2. Sift a whole pile of flour into a bowl before measuring two cups into the large bowl, add salt and return bowl to freezer.

3. Grate a cup of butter into the small bowl.  Freak out that my fingers might be melting the butter.  Return grated butter to the freezer.

4. Take measuring cup out, crack egg into it and whisk.  Add water and vinegar.  Return to freezer.

5. Put the timer on for 15 minutes because that seems like the correct thing to do.

6. When timer goes off, gather up my nerves and start "making the pastry."  Ahh!  What if I screw it up?  Put some flour in the bottom of a bowl, sprinkle a bit of grated butter on top.  Put more flour on top of the butter and then add more butter.  Continue layering flour and butter on top of each other.  Mix up gently with a fork - put the combined butter and flour back in the freezer.

• A great tip I learned is that the key to flakiness is to coat the butter in the flour rather than mix them together.  That is why coldness is key.

7. At this point I needed a walk.  I was approaching a key moment in the pastry process and I needed something to steel my nerves.  In my case the necessary steel came in the form of coffee and chocolate.  Cocoa Nymph just opened a new chocolate bar in the 'hood and this was the perfect opportunity to check it out.  I bought the Elphaba and Barnabas the Tortoise.  The Ephaba was my favorite, filled with pistachio, rich and creamy. Now, I was ready.  Alert and fidgety from the caffeine.  On edge.

8. The flour and butter is taken out of the fridge.  The chilled measuring cup with egg, vinegar, and water is taken out of the freezer and sprinkled on top.  Quickly, fueled by your anxiety, mix the liquid into the flour with a fork.  Using your hands, rub the pastry mixture together.  Do this as much as necessary but as little as possible.  If the pastry starts to hold together you are done.  Don't touch it anymore.

9. Thank your (G)godesse(s) that you have finished the major steps, separate the pastry into two, saran wrap and put in the fridge for at least an hour.

10. Now it is time for the rolling and the putting in the pie tin.  Another key step.  The saran wrap is the key.  Don't use parchment or wax paper.  They don't work.  Saran wrap does.  I think this is because the saran conducts heat slightly so the butter melts slightly and then sticks to the saran, making the process of transferring the crust to the pie plate infinitely easier.  Once the crust is rolled out to a nice thinness, peel off one side of saran and flip into the pie plate.  Trim the excess pastry, use it to patch the crust, wrap and then place (place) in the freezer.

11. Roll out the top crust.  Cut to the size needed for the top crust and place (place) in the freezer.

12. Take a deep breath and let it out.

13. The next day, fill the pie with filling, put the top crust on and bake it.  See isn't making pie easy?

A few notes:

• Anxiety, as I hope you have noticed, is a necessary ingredient when making pastry.  If you have no anxiety then you will fail.
• Two other necessary ingredients are speed and coldness.  The anxiety fuels both.  If you forget or get careless about either speed or coldness your pastry is ruined.
• Perfectionism is also useful if it further fuels your anxiety.  Other stimulants, such as coffee and chocolate are also useful.
• Pastry no-no's: a laissez-faire attitude, warm hands, a warm kitchen.