stories : Feature
Love it, cook it well, eat it responsibly.
Get to Know Bison
Your questions answered.
Meat at Your Door
Bypass the supermarket and buy it direct.
How to Buy, Freeze,
and Prepare Meat
Smart tips from a butcher.
Your Meat Is Green
Ten ways to be a responsible carnivore.
Innard Workings
Chris Cosentino wants you to eat the nasty bits.
Beyond the Porterhouse
Ten underappreciated cuts of meat.
Rendering Your Own Lard
Part of the fun of getting a whole animal, or getting involved directly with a producer so you can ask for what you want, is cooking parts you’ve never cooked before. Case in point: fatback. It’s literally the fat from the pig’s back mixed up with bits of meat, and if you stick it in the oven for a while, you can melt it down and separate out the fat, or lard, from the meat, which will have cooked into cracklings. Use the lard for scrambled eggs, pie crusts, or french fries, as we did. The results are delicious. Here’s how:
1. Cut the fatback into squares.
2. Put the squares in a baking dish and place in the oven for about four hours at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, draining off the lard into a separate container every so often.
3. You’ll know all the lard has been rendered when there’s nothing left but fibrous, depleted nuggets, called cracklings. Some people like to eat these.
BONUS!
Make fries with your lard
4. To make fries, heat the lard on the stovetop in a pot that will fit all the potatoes.
5. Cut the potatoes into fry shapes.
6. Soak the fries in water for about 10 minutes.
7. Dry the fries off by rolling them in a towel.
8. Fry once until the potatoes are the color of straw, then drain on newspaper. Fry again until they’re golden. Salt, and serve in a paper cone (our contributor Daniel Duane uses printer paper).
There are a goodly number of online operations in the UK which sell butchered meat in family quantities. I buy, online, organic meat direct from a farm in my own region of northwest England. Probably order a couple of times a year.
Or how about going to your local butcher and supporting them?
My local butcher hand cuts prime beef for me, as well as supplys me with any cut of pork, or lamb I want. I can also get rabbit, duck, and fresh turkeys.
I buy half a cow at a time and just love it. I know ( I met the cow beforehand) that what I am serving my family is top notch. Also grass fed beef is FAR superior to that of corn fed. I also buy two lambs each year. You just have to get in the pattern of it. I usually take the meat out the freezer the night before and usually it is thawed by the next morning. If you do a lot of entertaining this is a very economical way to feed a crowd.
I do buy additional meats from a local butcher. So I do support both.
I am still looking for a pig resource. If anyone has any in the San Francisco- bay area, let me know.
The reason to skip the local butcher is that they usually carry factory farmed meat - this is what many of us who buy direct from the farm are trying to avoid. I would rather pay the farmer directly as they make a better profit that way, and it's cheaper for me than buying from the very few places that carry pastured and/or more traditionally raised meats.
Wineunleashed - Where do you get your beef from? We have a great lamb source already.
We're really fortunate in my part of Ireland that we have a local butcher who does his own beef slaughtering (and practically knows every cow by name). Nonetheless the pork slaughter is handled somewhere else, and getting leaf lard is very difficult. Annoying, since the Irish diet is changing enough that supermarkets rarely carry lard any more, just "cooking fat". (It's not that the diet's getting any healthier -- rather the opposite: people are depending on pre-cooked meals and fast food more than ever before, and no one wants lard now simply because most people aren't willing to do the kind of cooking that calls for it -- i.e., from scratch. A sad trend.)
However, the huge influx of eastern European people to Ireland in recent years means that the little local Polish, Russian, Lithuanian and Czech groceries routinely carry jars of "smalec", which is lard in jars, either plain or flavored with fried onion. (And now I understand the tradition underlying "schmalz".) Yum!
I started doing this a few years ago and it sounded really out-there to me. Now I know more and more people who either do buy farmer-direct, or who would like to. I buy poultry, pork and lamb from the farmer's market, and shares of pork and beef through co-ops with other families - couldn't be happier with it. I have had breeds of beef that I didn't like as much, and there was a learning curve with cooking grass-finished beef, but it's been so worth it.
We bought half a beef from a place that raises them and have their own butcher on site. The meat has been incredible. I have friends that raise meat chickens so we get our chickens from them. We raise our own hens for eggs. A friend raised an extra pig for us last year and that meat has been incredible also.
I would NEVER go back to store bought meat. I can't stand the thought of the factory farms.