That which is Caesar’s

Or, A Trying Day.

Since much of the appeal of blogging lies in punning titles, I also wanted to work in something about a render farm. But I’ll go on with the actual blog post.

This morning, I opened my 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking to the section titled “Know Your Ingredients.” In which I see Rendering, or Trying Out Fats.

Dice the fat and heat it very slowly in a heavy pan with a small quantity of water…When the fat is liquid, and still fairly warm, strain it through cheesecloth and store it refrigerated. The browned connective tissues in the strainer – known as cracklings – may be kept for flavoring.

Well, I got the dicing down.

I cut off some leftover pieces of meat and cooked them for lunch.

I even got out the iron disc that came with my stove, that one uses to distribute the heat evenly when only the center ring of the burner is lit. I use this maybe once every 7 or 8 years.

And then I turned on the burner really low and waited a long time. A long time. A really long time. And it occurred to me that Joy wasn’t that specific about how much water to add, and that a cup or so might not be a small amount, even compared to this amount of fat.

And then it occurred to me that pork fat has a higher melting point than the boiling point of water, that this is exactly the reason one cooks in fat, anyway. So I poured out some of the water. In between, I had to turn everything off and teach a seventh-grade baking class, which is its own topic.

But I came back home and just melted the fat. And it cooked there for a while, and it further occurred to me that the cracklings wouldn’t sink to the bottom (as a website had suggested they might) because there were so many cracklings that they were not submerged, anyway.

By this time, my lard was kind of tawny. But I got out my cheesecloth and strained it anyway. There were a lot of cracklings.

My god, they’re tasty.

Not so much lard though. It’s in the fridge, and tomorrow we’ll see if I can use it to make a pie crust.