Occasionally, I remember that people outside of my bubble think that lard, if they ate it, would kill them and I feel simultaneously incredibly grateful for the world (and community) I have found and incredibly sad for the food situation we find ourselves in.

Lard can be a staple, but it is also a pleasure! So let me kick off my list of the many ways I use lard (and its cracklings) in my kitchen with my number one lard pleasure…

1. Lard on bread

Lard is so good as a spread. Cut a slice of sourdough, liberally spread it with lard and grind some salt on the top. Heaven. This combo is part of my main meal virtually every day.

2. Lard for frying

The smoking temperature of lard is 370°F/188°C, higher than that of coconut oil and butter, so it’s a good fat to fry in. I use it as my frying fat – eggs, onions, courgettes (zucchini), bread (you have to try this!)…they all get fried in lard in my kitchen. I have also deep fried in lard, making crunchy pigskin.

3. Lard when roasting

Lard is my go-to fat to accompany things inside my oven – both vegetables and meat; I bake autumn squash with rosemary and oregano using it and I smear it on chickens.

4. Lard to grease dishes

Always economical, I use lard to grease all of my dishes including my baking tins for sourdough and flat baking trays for things like biscuits and focaccia.

5. Lard as an ingredient in cakes

Lard is my first choice fat to use in cakes. There will be a sourdough chocolate cake using lard in the soon-to-be-released podcast sourdough spelt cookbook!

6. Lard in bread

Lard is a traditional and wonderful ingredient in bread. Our frugal ancestors, using everything, often made breads with cracklings, the bits of fat left over after rendering lard. You can find my take on an historic Italian crackling recipe here.

7. Lard crackling spread

Spread made with lard cracklings is a tradition in many parts of Eastern Europe. It is delicious atop sourdough bread, dotted with garden herbs or finely diced vegetables. Here’s a version I like to make in my kitchen:

Egg and Lard Crackling Spread

200g lard cracklings

2 onions

5 hard-boiled eggs

salt, pepper

optional: additional lard

optional: any spices or herbs you’d like to add

Fry the onions with the lard cracklings, adding the optional lard if the cracklings do not give off enough fat to keep the mix moist. When the onions have taken on a nice colour, turn off the pan and leave the mix to cool.

Once the onions and cracklings are cool, add them to your food processor along with the hard-boiled eggs, generous amounts of salt and pepper and any other spices or herbs you’d like to include. Blend until smooth.

Spread on toast, make sandwiches, top tomatoes with it – and remember you can garnish with extra herbs or spices (I love sumac on top!).

If you have a good quality source of pork back fat and you haven’t yet made your own lard, you’re missing out! Check out how to do it using a slow cooker in my article here.

And if you’ve got a way of using lard that I haven’t talked about, do let me know!

We use lard as our main fat. I fry with it, add it to breads, use it in casseroles, line bread tins with it and it is my go-to fat for spreading on bread. I choose lard over tallow (which is made from cow fat) for three reasons:

1. I prefer the flavour
2. I can more easily access good quality pork back fat than I can fat from a cow
3. I find the softness of lard at fridge temperature much easier to work with in the kitchen and at the table.

It is not difficult to render lard (even in the smallest of kitchens) providing you are organised. It does take time though! Expect the process to take 6 to 8 hours. Although you need to be available throughout that time, the actual hands-on time is very little.

I use a slow cooker to render lard as I find it the simplest equipment to use for the process. My medium-sized slow cooker can fit 4 kg (8 pounds) of pork back fat. From that original 4 kg of fat I usually end up with around 2 kg of lard. This lasts my family 4 to 6 weeks.

There are two ways of rendering fat – the wet method and the dry method. The wet method, which utilises water, creates a much more fine, ‘clean’ and deodorised fat, but is very time-consuming and fiddly. The dry method does not use water and is easier. I have used both methods in my kitchen but have settled on the dry method for almost all of my rendering. It creates a fat that stores well in the fridge for weeks (or the freezer for months). This article will talk you through the dry method.

How to Render Lard (in a Slow Cooker)

Be choosy about your source of back fat

All fat is not created equal. The type of food an animal eats directly impacts nutritional profile of its fat. In addition, if animals are treated with antibiotics or their food treated with fertilisers and pesticides this will show up in their fat and therefore your lard. Choose pork back fat from a farmer that uses traditional feed and doesn’t routinely use antibiotics. It’s also worth looking for fat from traditional-breed pigs – newer breeds often have non-traditional fat profiles that don’t ally with ancestral eating.

Consider asking for your fat to be ground

Back fat needs to be cut up into small pieces before it can be rendered. Doing this for, for example, 4 kg of fat can take over an hour. If you ask your farmer/butcher to put the fat through the meat grinder, you will save time – being able to put this straight into your slow cooker with no further preparation needed.

Equipment

• Slow cooker commensurate with the size of the back fat you wish to render.
• Utensils to aid with straining, cooling and storing the lard.

We use:

• large metal spoon
• large metal bowl
• colander that fits inside the large metal bowl
• medium metal bowl
• oven gloves
• lots of freezer-safe containers to hold the lard

Process

1/ If your back fat has not been minced, dice it into 2cm squares.

2/ Put the prepared back fat into the slow cooker, close the lid and turn it on. Slow cookers vary greatly in their temperatures – mine is not particularly hot and I start my lard on high and then after four or five hours turn it to medium. You may need to use different temperature settings depending on how hot your slow cooker runs.

Tip: Slow cooker’s often take a long time to heat up. If you are short of time and want to speed this process up, put your cut-up back fat into the ceramic insert of your slow cooker and place this insert into your oven on a medium heat (150°C) for an hour. This kick-starts the process of fat release.

3/ Prepare your equipment and space to receive the liquefied fat. I find a metal colander resting inside a large metal bowl the easiest method.

4/ Watch the heating fat. When you see a good amount of liquefied fat around the edge of the solid back fat, drain this liquid from the slow cooker into a bowl using a colander to catch the solid pieces of back fat so you can then return them to the slow cooker.

Tip: If you are processing a lot of fat, it can be hard (particularly at the early stages of the process) to tip the entire contents of the slow cooker through and into the colander. A way to get round this is to use a large serving spoon to spoon out half of the solid fat into your colander and allow it to drain, before temporarily removing what’s in the colander to another bowl and then pouring the remaining contents of the stock pot through the colander. You can then return both sets of solid fat to the slow cooker to continue the rendering.

5/ Repeat step four again and again (I tend to strain my fat every 1 to 2 hours). The the solid fat will get smaller and smaller and you will get more and more lard! As the lard builds up in your large metal bowl test it for temperature and when it has cooled down sufficiently transfer it into containers for the fridge or freezer so that you are leaving your large metal bowl free to collect more lard from the next straining.

6/ As this process goes on you will notice the solid fat starts to give off a lot less fat – the rendering is nearing an end. The more times you render, the more you get better at judging when to stop. Do a last strain of the lard/back fat and turn off your slow cooker. Leave it to cool before cleaning.

Cracklings!

In the process of making lard, nothing need be wasted. After your last straining you will have the remains of the original pork back fat in the colander. These are cracklings! They are delicious and have been used in foods by cultures worldwide.

Here are some of my suggestions:

If you want to eat some immediately, heat up a cast-iron pan and cover the bottom of it with some of the still-warm cracklings. Stir them as they brown and crisp up further. More fat may be released from them and you can drain this from your cast iron pan as you’re cooking. Serve these cracklings on fresh bread, just-cooked vegetables, scrambled eggs, stews…they are delicious on almost everything! Whilst they are still in the pan you can enhance them with fresh garlic, herbs, salt and pepper.

You can keep the remaining cracklings in the fridge for at least 10 days. I pack them into a glass container and then every evening for days after our lard-rendering session, I heat up my cast-iron pan and crisp up several spoonfuls of cracklings that become a treat to accompany our supper.

Bread with cracklings is amazing! There are many recipes for traditional breads using the leftovers from lard all over the world. In Italy, where I live, cracklings are called ciccioli. Here’s a fun recipe for my own sourdough take on an Italian bread using ciccioli – Pane con Ciccioli, and here’s a recipe that I love from Naomi at almostbananas.net for Slovakian lard biscuits (you can hear Naomi on two Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episodes – #23 about traditional Slovakian pig butchery and #49 about the glories of Slovakian food!).

Cracklings also make incredible spreads – something they’ve been used for traditionally in Eastern Europe for many generations. I love to hard-boil some eggs and put them into the food processor with an equal weight of lard cracklings plus lots of salt and pepper. The resulting spread is delicious and keeps in the fridge for ages! (You can hear me talk about this spread on the patron-exclusive podcast Kitchen Table Chats #16. To get access to this and much more, join Ancestral Kitchen Podcast’s Patreon community at the Companionship level here)

Here are some favourite ways to enjoy it:

• Lay lardo on top of warm crunchy sourdough toast
• Top home-made pizza with lardo and fresh rosemary
• Wrap a date or an almond in a fresh, wafer-thin slice of lardo
• Place slices of lardo on or around just-cooked vegetables, on top of mushrooms or wrapped around asparagus so they begin to melt
• Melt lardo slices in the cast iron pan and cook vegetables or an omelette in the fat
• Crisp slices up on the stove, pour the released fat over your food and enjoy the crunchy, salty remains

The ‘original’ lardo is Lardo di Colonnata. Colonnata is a tiny hill-top town in Tucany that is famous for its marble quarrying. It is said to be the place where Michelangelo got his raw material! The local marble has, for many centuries, been used to make large basins in which pork fat would sit, covered in salt and herbs, for months, slowly transforming.

You can replicate Lardo at home, without needing the marble basins. Neither do need a place to hang the cure – a fridge will do fine. It’ll take several (completely hands off) months, but it’s completely worth it! Here’s how:

Ingredients:

• A 1kg piece of fresh, high-quality pork fat, rind still on, ideally around 3cm thick

• 250g coarse sea salt

• 15g black peppercorns

• 8 large or c. 12 medium garlic cloves

• c. 8g fresh rosemary (this is about 4 sprigs)

• 4-5 bay leaves

• 20g fresh, or 10g dried, juniper berries

(You can use other herbs; sage and thyme also work. You can also mix spices like coriander and cumin into your cure.)

Equipment:

• Something to wrap the cure-covered fat in. I use several large pieces of parchment/baking paper secured with elastic bands, but you could also use a large zip-lock plastic bag

• Something to cover the curing fat in when refrigerating to keep out light. I use several dish towels, but a large black plastic sack would work too.

• Something to weigh the fat down with whilst it’s in the fridge. I use three empty olive oil bottles, filled with water.

• A space in your fridge that you can spare for several months. I use part of the meat drawer.

Method:

1. Clean the pork fat with water and pat dry.
2. Prepare the herbs: Mince the garlic very finely, chop the rosemary and bay, crack the peppercorns and smash the juniper berries.
3. Mix the salt with the prepared herbs.
4. Place the pork fat on or in the medium you will cover it in – i.e the parchment paper or the ziplock bag – and rub the cure onto its surface really well. Use all of the cure and work on getting it to adhere to the fat. The whole of the area needs covering for good results.
5. When you are happy that you’ve covered the whole surface, secure the wrapping. When using parchment paper I usually wrap the fat well with the original piece and then place it on another piece and wrap that at 90 degrees to the original piece before securing it with two elastic bands. If you’re using a ziplock bag, squeeze the air out and press the sides to the fat before sealing.
6. Wrap this parcel in something to keep out light – several dish towels or a black bag.
7. Place the covered lardo in your fridge in a spot where it won’t be disturbed. Weigh it down by placing something heavy (I use water-filled olive oil bottles) on top of it.
8. Wait. How long you wait is up to you and something you will learn your personal preference for over multiple lardo-making sessions. Most people say three to six months. I have left lardo two months with success and also four months. It’s strong enough for me like this. I haven’t gone the full six months yet!

When it’s done:

When you are ready to eat, remove from the fridge, unwrap and dust off the cure into your sink/a bowl. Although here in Italy, you can buy lardo with a crusting of cure still attached, at this point I tend to go further and wash off the remaining cure, patting dry the lardo. I do this as I find it too salty otherwise.

How to cut:

With the lardo rind-side down, slice it as thinly as you can stopping your knife when you hit the rind. Continue until you have as many slices as you require. Then turn your knife so it is horizontal and free these slices from the rind by cutting across the fat, just above the rind.

Traditionally the exposed rind is then folded back onto the fat (but it’s always been to solid for me to be able to do this!).

How to store:

Store, kept in the original or a newly-created wrapping in the meat drawer of your fridge. It’ll last for months and months like this. When you’ve enjoyed it all, use the remaining rind with strong scissors and use it to flavour a pot of soup!

The Weston A. Price Foundation published my article Fact Or Fiction? Uncovering The Fats Of Italy’s Past in the Summer 2022 edition of their journal Wise Traditions.

It was a deeper dive into my previous piece ‘The Myth of Olive Oil Use In Italy‘. If you want to know the truth about Italian cuisine, have a read of both.

It also includes two recipes – one for a traditional lard-based tomato sauce, and the other for a sourdough spelt bread with lard cracklings.

I’d love to hear what you think, your own stories of Italian ancestral food and also let me know if you make the recipes!

Fats derived from pigs were in daily use in virtually all Italian kitchens until the 1960s and ciccioli (the cracklings left over after rending lard) were often added to doughs. Here, I’ve taken the idea and had fun, making it into a sourdough spelt rolled loaf with added garlic and rosemary.

This should be cooked in a 1lb loaf tin as the abundant fat often leaks out during the baking.

Pane con Ciccioli – Lard Crackling Bread

Ingredients:

For the dough:

135 g wholegrain spelt flour

135 g white spelt flour

54g ripe sourdough starter

5g salt

3 tbsp lard (plus extra, melted, for glazing, if desired)

c. 110g water (adjust this based on the needs of your flour)

For the filling:

140g cracklings from rending lard

2 cloves garlic, chopped finely

Generous handful of fresh rosemary

Generous grinding of salt and fresh pepper

Method:

• Mix the salt and spelt flours together in a bowl. Dot the lard onto the top of the mix.
• Stir the sourdough starter into the water and then pour the mix onto the flour/salt/lard.
• Bring all of the ingredients together and work with your hands to create a smooth, ensuring the lard is well-distributed.
• Leave this for a bulk fermentation stage. For me, at 22C/72F this is usually about 5 hours, performing a stretch and fold every hour. You can cut this short and refrigerate it overnight to work on again in the morning.
• On a well-floured board, Roll out the dough into a large oval (roughly 45-35cm)

• Dot the ciccioli (lard cracklings), garlic and rosemary over the dough, leaving a border of an inch or so clear around the edges.
• Fold in the long edges of the dough and then roll it up (like a strudel) leaving the seal at the bottom.

• Leave to proof. You can do this by putting inside a lidded (or covered) loaf tin and leaving at 22C/72F for an hour or two.
• Preheat your oven to 230C/445F. Slash the top of the loaf and glaze the loaf with some gently melted lard if desired.
• Cook at 230C/445F for 15 minutes, 190C/375F for 35 minutes with the lid on, then a further 10 minutes at 190C/375F with the lid off.
• Leave to cool slightly (if you can!) and then enjoy!

If I ask you this question, I’m guessing a list starts forming in your mind. And I’d lay money on olive oil being close to the top. Italians have been cooking with and consuming olive oil since…well, since the dawn of time. Italian food just wouldn’t be Italian without olive oil, right?

That’s what I thought.

And who’d blame me? I grew up following Italian recipes from contemporary cooks; all used olive oil. I’ve known about the ‘wonder’ of The Mediterranean Diet and its use of this monounsaturated fat since my early health research. Here in Italy the trees, fruit and oil are all around me.

But it turns out I was wrong.

If that’s how you’ve viewed Italy’s relationship with olive oil, you’ve been misled too.

Here’s the truth:

In the decades leading up to the 1950s virtually all Italians cooked almost exclusively with lard.

How did the lie that olive oil was universal become ‘truth’?

Turns out the food traditions we internalise as true, that saturate our modern world, are malleable…even inventable.

Our tastes, choices and ‘knowledge’ are moulded, mostly unbeknownst to us, by the market. The promise of financial compensation and the possibilities inherent in global trade and marketing give groups of individuals the incentive and power to literally change our perception of what is true. Once changed, once ‘in vogue’, these misinformations are perpetuated through mass media, becoming part of our cultural heritage.

In the case of olive oil and lard, the post-war movement of populations from country to city, the growing search for a culprit for heart disease and the possibility for individuals to profit by the creation and selling of olive oil came together to propel olive oil into a position of ‘health champion’, with Italians being told to switch to it. From there, the export and trade possibilities rode roughshod over any inconvenient truth that the Italian fat of choice in the decades prior had been lard.

It’s only through talking to real people and learning what they actually did that truth can be uncovered. At a local level we have the possibility to do this with our own families (as long as we learn their traditions before they’ve been changed by our rapidly evolving world). But when these traditions have been carried out in a part of the world far from us, the truth is not so easily accessible.

Thankfully sometimes a person comes along who takes the time to interview and document traditions first hand. That’s what Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s book Chewing The Fat is all about. Karima is an American living in Italy – her book is a collection of interviews of 18 women in their 90s from incredibly varied walks of life who grew up in Italy before and during the world wars.

The information that these women revealed, through Karima, has completely changed my view of olive oil and its place in Italian history.

From Olive Oil Myths to Lard Truths

Again and again these women talk about how they used pig fat in the form of lard (and the cured version, lardo) everyday in their kitchens.

Women who hardly had enough food to survive, women who worked the land every day, dawn till dusk, women who were born into incredible wealth. Women from the Austrian and Swiss influenced north and women from the starkly different deep south. They all routinely used lard, not olive oil.

Pigs were a way to survive, their slaughter, come winter, providing meat yes, but most importantly providing fat. Fat to eat, fat to cook with, fat to preserve, fat to make soap.

As you can see from these quotes, all words from women Karima interviewed, Olive oil ranged from a local foodstuff used sparingly to something people even didn’t know about.

I’ve been rendering and using lard in my kitchen for almost a decade. I’ve done this not only because I love the flavour and how easy it is to cook with it, but also because it has always seemed the most environmentally sound and healthiest choice.

Despite doing this, I’d always had the ‘but the long-lived Italians have always used olive oil’ doubt in my mind. Reading the testimony of these women has given credence and history to my instinctive choices.

And it’s also reinforced in me the need for us all to question, at a deep level, what is ‘sold’ to us through media channels around our food. The profound social, political and cultural implications of the misinformation around the Italian use of olive oil is, I guess, just a microcosm of what is happening in the rest of our food world.

Real food – food good for us mentally and physically and environmentally – is not produced in factories by profit-driven companies. It is grown and reared by individuals who care, offered to the community and then kitchen-crafted into delicious, health-giving food. This cycle is full of connection; real people, and when we sit at the table to eat, our bodies and souls are truly fed.

Sometimes, the processes involved in cooking from scratch in this way can seem overwhelming. I want to make it as easy as possible for you. Because it’s worth it.

So here are 5 simple ways to start cooking ancestrally.

1. Make stock

Why?

Stock is magic – it’s making something deeply nutritious out of ‘waste’. Saving and cooking bones gives us a tasty base for many other dishes but also feeds us with essentials minerals and the incredibly-healing gelatin.

The simplest way:

Buy whole organic chickens. After you roast them, save the bones (along with any bits of skin/tendons attached) in a bag in the freezer. When you have a good amount of bones put them in a big pot with water, an onion, some celery and a carrot and bring this to the boil. Turn it down as low as you can and cook it so the water barely shows any bubbles for at least 12 hours.

Once it has cooled, drain the contents of the pot through a sieve. Drink the stock or use it as cooking liquid for grains such as rice, or as the base for a stew.

2. Eat organ meat

Why?

Organ meat is the most nutritionally dense part of an animal. And yet it is part of the 50% of the animal that routinely never makes it to our shops. Ancestral cooking is about respect – and eating all of an animal respects the sacrifice made.

The simplest way:

Out of all offal, liver is often seen as the most accessible. Chicken liver is milder in taste than that found in other animals. Get hold of some chicken livers, chop them and add them to a dish such as bolognaise or chilli.

3. Embrace fat

Why?

Fat is amazing. It carries flavour, making dishes taste good, keeps us fuller for longer and also carries essential vitamins that aren’t so easily available elsewhere – like A, D, E and K.

The simplest way:

Choose foods that haven’t had the fat stripped away. Buy whole milk, chicken with the skin on and red meats that are marbled with fat (if you can’t find fatty beef cuts in your supermarket, use the opportunity to seek out a local farmer and buy directly). Include these whole foods in your meals.

4. Ferment

Why?

Our gut, and the biome it contains, is the master controller of our health. Anything we can do to support the good bacteria that live there is, I believe, one of the most important health steps we can take. Fermented foods are packed with probiotic good bacteria.

The simplest way:

Make sauerkraut. All you need is a cabbage, some salt, a large glass pickling jar with a lid, a knife and a bowl. Click here to be taken to a post talking you through how.

5. Soak your grains

Why?

Grains contain a chemical called phytic acid. This stops you absorbing minerals. If you soak grains prior to cooking, you can deactivate much of this phytic acid. And in the process you soften up the grains too, which’ll make it easier for you body to absorb them.

The simplest way:

Think about what grains you want to cook the following day. Before you go to bed, put these grains into a bowl, cover generously with slightly warm water and add a couple of tbsp of an acidic liquid (lemon, vinegar, whey, yogurt, sourdough starter). The next day, before you use the grains, drain and rinse them. Cook them as normal.

If you’ve got question on any of these steps, feel free to contact me. You can do so via my Instagram account @ancestral_kitchen or by commenting below.