Portuguese white bread and LARD
A while ago I posted (somewhere in the forums; I can't find it now) about a recipe for Portuguese white bread that called for shortening. I was wondering about substituting oil or butter.
The cookbook author and I (the copyeditor) ended up using the recipe with shortening, but suggesting in the recipe header that you could substitute oil or softened butter. We also gave a scaled down recipe that made 2 loaves rather than 8, and used a stand mixer and dough hook.
I finally got to meet the author; we'd been working on the cookbook by email. I said something to her about how the bread would have been made pre-1900, before Crisco was invented. She suggested that the bread would have been made with lard, not oil, not butter.
Wow! Yes, that was probably it!
I started doing research on the web, re the history of shortening and the use of lard. I discovered that Crisco had done their corporate best to blacken the name of lard and suggest that Crisco was a better, more hygienic substitute. Whereas, recent research has shown that fresh lard (not the hydrogenated stuff they sell in supermarkets) is actually full of good fats and is marginally better for you than butter. Apparently, lard is now making a culinary comeback. I found lots of articles touting the virtues of lard. The Wikipedia article on lard had some good links. Apparently leaf lard is hands down the best fat for pie crust and pastry.
I'm now interested in baking with lard. Unfortunately, I know of no way to get the right kind of lard. I'd want it to be from free range pigs, not poor tortured feedlot pigs, and fresh. If I lived in rural Hawai'i, I'd probably know people who kept pigs, but I'm a city girl and don't know any pig farmers. If I lived in NYC, I could buy organic leaf lard. But I live in Honolulu, not NYC.
Have any of you ever baked with lard?
Lard is a fantastic fat to use in pastry - gives a very delicate flaky pastry. If you've ever had a good chinese egg custard tart then you'll know what I mean.
In bread, I've maybe used it once and I'm not so sure that it was the best fat to use flavourwise. I was using supermarket lard (although I'm fairly sure it wasn't hydrogenated - it was just a block of rendered fat). Kept properly refrigerated, lard should keep very well (pig fat was (and probably still is) used as a preserving medium in much the same way as rendered duck fat for duck confit, etc.)
I've also used lard in pastry (and it does make great pastry) but not bread. I tend to use either butter or olive oil in bread that calls for fat. We buy our lard from one of our local butchers. It isn't always leaf lard but whatever lard we buy MUST be refrigerated (the lard is kept in the refrigerated section at the butcher shop); it is quite soft even at refrigeration temperatures.
There must be reputable butchers in Honolulu who will sell you lard made from untortured pigs.... I would steer away from boxed lard sold on the supermarket non-refrigerated shelves. Make sure that the lard you buy is in the refrigerated section and not laced with all kinds of questionable preservatives.
-Elizabeth
(Toronto, Canada)
I have an old community cookbook which includes bread recipes that had been in the families for many years. Some of the recipes call for bacon drippings as the fat in bread. I think home bread-bakers in the 19th century probably used what they had on hand. I save bacon drippings in the freezer and occasionally use the drippings in bread.
I bake many things with lard. The most desireable lard to use is "leaf lard" which rendered from the fat around the kidneys of pigs.
Unfortunately leaf lard is nearly impossible to find. However, you can often buy the leaf fat and render it yourself (as I do.) I have a local source for leaf fat from pasture raised pigs, however Heritage Foods USA (www.heritagefoodsusa.com) sometimes has heritage breed leaf fat available. It is not advertised on their website, you must call them directly. I have spoken to the owner of the company about carrying the lard and if there is sufficient demand he may do this. (I would love to see some clamor for this product. While I can render the lard - I just would rather not.) They will ship it to you and it usually arrives in good shape. It is not, however, inexpensive.
Leaf fat is very easy to render. Just chop it in small pieces and let it melt slowly in a heavy pot. As you cook it slowly you will see the non fatty parts turn a golden brown. you want to stop the process before the fat takes on color. Skim out the solids, filter the liquid fat (you can pour it through a paper towel) and there you have it. The solids (or cracklings) are quite tasty. Once rendered the lard can be stored refrigerated for about a year. Leaf fat will rot quickly - so should be stored frozen until you are ready to render it.
If you look up the process for rendering lard on the internet, you may see various steps to purify it prior to storing it. These are more for if you are rendering various animal parts and are not needed with good leaf fat.
I have family recipes that were made for many years with solid vegetable shortening and when I finally went through the effort to obtain leaf lard the (um) older members of the family remarked how this was the taste they remembered. I will never go back.
Hope this helps.
I've used lard in making Buttery Rowies, a Scottish bun layered somewhat like a croissant, and there is absolutely so substitute. It's also, of course, used in Lardy Cake, and to make the real, honest-to-goodness Chinese almond cookie, you must use lard for the texture, though there are no actual almonds in the cookie. It's interesting to see that it was Crisco who started the anti-lard thing; I heard a nutritionist on CBC radio once say that lard or butter would be a whole lot better for us than shortening, as long as we didn't go overboard which is what people tend to do. In Edna Staebler's Schmeks cookbooks, she talks about using goose fat or chicken fat in cookies. Lard is also, apparently, the best fat to use for frying doughnuts.