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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c known as cracklings \u00e2\u20ac\u201c may be kept for flavoring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, I got the dicing down.<\/p>\n
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I cut off some leftover pieces of meat and cooked them for lunch.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> had suggested they might) because there were so many cracklings that they were not submerged, anyway.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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My god, they’re tasty. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"