Loving Lard
San Francisco Chronicle
September 17, 2008
Few food terms have become as loaded as lard, weighed down by the connotation of excess and enlisted as a prefix in the harshest obesity put-downs. But after a century of slander, the four-letter pork product is undergoing a renaissance.
Cooks seeking flavor, farmers advocating a return to more sustainable ways of raising animals, and science's shifting thinking on dietary health are all helping to rehabilitate its name. Consumers can once again buy tubs of fresh lard at farmers' markets, and celebrated Bay Area restaurateurs have put rendered pork fat back to work in the kitchen.
Anthropologists suspect humankind began using melted-down pork fat before or about the same time we took to keeping pigs around as a ready source of bacon, the earliest evidence of which dates back 10,000 years.
LARD AS MUSE
Lard's utility as a cooking medium has been celebrated in lyric and verse for centuries. The reverence for pork fat didn't begin to wane until the Industrial Revolution, when meat packers acquired a reputation for delivering somewhat less than prime-grade products.
The shifting perception created an opening for a new product that would reach supermarket shelves in 1911: A vegetable fat solidified into shortening through a new process called hydrogenation. Cincinnati candle and soap maker Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco to the world through a massive marketing campaign that denigrated animal fats as unsophisticated and unsafe, and proclaimed its own offering as modern and healthy.
The last assertion would eventually prove untrue, but in an era enthralled with the promises of science, Crisco would soon become America's go-to cooking fat.
FEAR OF FAT
The public also clamored for new low-fat alternatives. Pork producers, for their part, used selective breeding to make over the familiar, potbellied pig frame into something that looks more like a bulldog and whose meat resembles, according to the National Pork Producers Council itself, chicken.
The 'other white meat' left little room for the well marbled, pink variety - and little remaining lard. The annual availability of rendered pork fat dropped from 14.4 pounds per person in 1940 to 3 pounds per person in 1975, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By 2005, it stood at 1.5 pounds.
Books like Michael Pollan's 'In Defense of Food' (2008) and Gary Taubes' 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' (2007) make the case that much of the science behind the anti-fat crusades was, at best, inconclusive. In 2001, nutritionists at the Harvard School of Public Health reviewed the body of research and found that the type of fat matters more than the total amount.
BRINGING BACK BALANCE
In simple terms, the study lumped trans and saturated fats into the bad category, and monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats into the good. That's meaningful for lard, because rendered pork fat contains nearly a quarter less saturated fat than butter, more than double the monounsaturated and nearly four times the polyunsaturated fat, according to the USDA. And lard contains no trans fats, now universally considered dangerous.
Lard could also play a role in restoring an important balance between the types of polyunsaturated fats in our diets, says Susan Allport, author of 'The Queen of Fats' (2006). In the last century, use of corn, peanut, safflower and sunflower oils, which have high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, surged in the American diet. Consumption of omega-3s, found in leaves and some animal fats, has flattened or fallen.
The ratio between these two fats, which carry out completely different tasks within cells, appears to be critical - and way out of whack. Typical lard is low in omega-6s, which alone argues for its use over most seed oils, Allport says. Better still, free-range pigs that feast on greens and tubers instead of grains produce meat and fat with higher levels of omega-3s.
VARIED USES
Fortunately, the specific properties of pork fat make it a versatile tool, a veritable lipid chameleon. Because of its high smoke point, lard is exemplary in frying and sauteeing, producing clean and crisp results. Because lard has little water and melts into comparatively large crystals, it acts as ideal spacers between layers of dough, creating flaky and tender pastries.
Lard can also work as a soup starter, play the part of preservative in confit and even power your car as biofuel.
WHERE TO BUY LARD
Ask at your local farmers' market first.
My local source is Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, New York. They also ship.
E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.
Excerpted by permisson from James Temple's article in the San Francisco chronicle. For the full text, look here.
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