Grandma also used lard to fry doughnuts, make fry bread with lard and then fried in lard and she had a mincemeat cookie recipe that she always used lard in. The cracklin's get cooked in a frying pan after being dipped out of the lard. Grainlady, I had forgotten how easy it was to render lard and my crockpot works better than anything else, I think because it never really gets hot enough to cook the cracklin's so there isn't so much of the "porky" flavor. It's a flavor not everyone likes when experienced later in life. I think you needed to experience lard early in life to really appreciate it. Freeze the disk to harden the fat before rolling it out. Mix in the liquid quickly and form into a disk. Where the large bits of fat are located they melt during baking, and the steam lifts the pastry layers to create flakiness. Grate the remaining portion on the large holes of the grater and add the last portion of fat so there are still some chunks remaining. Every step of making pastry is about avoiding gluten-development - including starting with a low-protein flour. Where fat coats the flour it won't absorb liquid and form gluten. When you are ready to make the pastry, grate 1/2 of the fat on a box grater into the flour and mix it until it creates a fine mixture. Tip for adding coconut oil to pastry (as well as any solid fat): Freeze the fat. The reason lard works so well in pastry is because it has a larger fat crystal than butter or shortening. Now he can't even remember the last time someone ordered them. He says when he first started selling for the company, paper lard buckets (with the flat paper lid that fitted on the top of the lard) were his top selling product because nearly every little town had a meat processor. A friend of ours will be retiring from a paper company out of Wichita, KS in August, after 52 years of sales with them. When the highly-advertised Wesson oil hit the market, it soon became an embarrassment to use lard because it was so old-fashioned. Lard has larger fat crystals than shortening or butter, and that's why it works so well for making pastry. Lard has a distinct flavor you probably had to be raised with to appreciate. Chicken, and everything else for that matter, was always fried using lard, but fried chicken on Sunday was always the best. I may have to take a page out of Annie's book and render my own because it's the WWII generation who purchase it for their special recipes during the holidays, and there's not many of them left, and not much of a market for lard anymore. I can still get fresh lard from a meat processing plant, but only around the holidays, and I wouldn't use the hydrogenated crap they sell in the stores now. It was a distinct memory trigger from my childhood. That crumb cake recipe always tasted better with lard than shortening or butter. Out in the country we all had hogs we raised, processed, and in the freezer back then, and that meant we all had lard. Lard was still the most common household fat at the time (1961). We always baked two of these cakes when our parents got together to play cards for a dessert with coffee after the game was over, and it was a favorite cake of mine for many years. When I was 9-years old my cousin (also 9-years old) gave me her mother's recipe for crumb cake and it called for lard.
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