I have been making lard.

 

I know, it's gross. It fills the house with the smell of melting animals.

It's also weird to put so much effort into making fat, especially having grown up in fat-phobic America, where compounds like Slim-Fast and Snackwells were considered healthy and the idea of using animal fat for something cute and innocent like frosting on a child's birthday cake would invoke the gag reflex. Although lard was once commonplace, its high saturated fat content and the accusation that it causes heart disease made it unpopular, and now most people use "healthier" oils or butter, even though butter is arguably less healthy than lard. It's actually lower in saturated fat than butter (40% versus 50%).

Butter survived the war on fat because it tastes so good. Lard either tastes like nothing or it tastes like the animal it came from, depending on how carefully it was rendered. My first experiments were more like bacon grease than lard, a bit brown and toasty. A little bacon fragrance is nice in cooking savory dishes or biscuits but I wanted something I could use in pie crusts. And since I'm rendering wild boar fat, it's got an especially strong, gamy smell, especially if it's an adult male boar (which is why many Japanese people claim to dislike it-- they were probably eating boar that was in the rut). Fortunately my most recent lard jar is filled with the pure white fat of a she-boar.

I began this lard project on a whim, after getting annoyed at the amount of vegetable oil we were consuming, and the expense of butter and extra-virgin olive oil in Japan. We grow, hunt, or barter for most of what we eat, but producing our own cooking fat remained elusive, and I wasn't about to start growing rapeseed and pressing my own oil. I also found out that most oil seeds are imported here and that alone makes me consider it unhealthy-- not unlike another oil we are all addicted to and forced to import. Since my husband hunts, it only makes sense to make use of the parts that none of the hunters wanted and in the past would throw away.

It feels healthy to be eating local fat, and knowing that the wild boar's diet was acorns, bamboo shoots, mushrooms and grubs means it's healthy meat. I wouldn't be too excited about eating lard made from a pig raised in a factory farm or tallow from cows fed corn instead of grass. And commercial lard is usually hydrogenated, so homemade is the way to go.

 It's not so difficult. Just obtain boar fat from the belly, back, or kidney (or some other fat from some other greasy animal), chop it into little pieces, and cook it over a double boiler, or really really low heat, until all the fat is rendered out and you neither hear nor see any bubbling, which takes more than a few hours but can be shortened by cutting the fat into smaller pieces than you see in the picture above. I was just being lazy. Make sure to turn on the fan in the kitchen. Then pour the hot fat through a strainer into your jar and you're done and now you can go wash the smell out of your hair and change clothes.