Who Killed Lard? (2012)
npr.org
npr.org
Here in Poland there are still many dishes that require lard as a cooking oil - "chrust" or angel wings, a friend pastry known all over the Slavic world is one that comes to mind.
Heavily salted lard, often with bits of bacon, apples and onion is used as a spread on dark bread. It's amazingly delicious, especially in the winter with some sour pickles. These are traditional winter foods here - salted lard would hold forever and sour pickles are a seasonal delight.
The money spend making crisco look 'healthier' than lard has left timeless traces in the general public.
The original form of crisco is so unhealthy that the now called trans-fats are banned in most countries.
However the damage is done, and people still look for other hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fats. Like my friends buying canola margarine instead of real butter.
That's only half the story though. The factually wrong part (fat in == fat deposited). The other part, that is still factually correct and hence a good reason to avoid lard, is that saturated fats absolutely and unequivocally lead to atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.
I'm surprised how easily the 'bad' fats are getting a free pass in the name of decriminalizing 'fats', in the bleeding-edge of dietary pantheon.
This isn't true at all. Too much saturated fat, perhaps, does, but this idea that if a drop of saturated fat crosses one's lips, you'll die a horrible death in 5 year is just plain silly.
The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet [1]
there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. There is a whole school of thought that polyunsaturated fats are the bad ones, while saturated or monounsaturated are good.
I'm eating a Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diet, also known as keto (ketosis) diet, where I eat many saturated fats.
http://befiteatfat.tumblr.com/post/24324936614/the-fats-in-t...
The linked article's claim that only Crete has this style of diet in Greece is strange, also. It's not even the part of Greece it's most associated with, let alone the only one that follows it (the region most known for its olive-oil cultivation/cuisine is Peloponnesus).
I do recommend it though; it completely changed the way I view immigration, labor laws, and capitalism.
Near DC, we had some friends with a farm on the water near Annapolis. They had some cherry trees, sour, red cherries, that they had cared for properly and, then, a lot of fresh cherries. So I offered to make a cherry pie.
They had no vegetable shortening but did have some lard; so I used lard. I cleaned, pitted, and cooked the cherries with sugar and corn starch, partly guessing on quantities from a poor cookbook. Then for the pie crust, I just did what I'd done a few times with shortening. The lard based pie crust was much more delicate -- the raw crust tore during handling!
But the resulting pie was terrific, especially the crust!
If can get some fresh cherries and lard, go for it! Or just make little cherry tarts!
http://www.stronach.co.uk/2013-02-04/how-to-make-the-classic...
I have fond memories of consuming rollies that were completed soaked in melted butter on a trawler somewhere in the North Sea - about the only pleasant memory I have of that particular trip...
Another favourite from that era was a scotch beef pie that contained a layer of mashed potato and a small clump of baked beans on top of that.
Plain old Steak Pie (i.e. what those who didn't grow up in Scotland would probably interpret "scotch beef pie" as) though are fine and I miss them dearly - as do my fellow expats who are from NZ, they've got a bit of a pie culture too as I understand.
Lard also makes me retch if I smell or taste it nowadays. The only reason I buy it is to make food for birds (lard + sunflower and other seeds).
The flavor is incredible and I can guarantee that the fat is from free range animals with zero additives.
I've also had quite a lot of success with a half-butter, half-olive oil mix.
Devout Hindus, Muslims, and Jews won't consume products containing lard derived from pigs. I'm surprised that factor wasn't covered at all in this article.
I have been cooking with lard for about 20 years. It's just something that my family never stopped using. I learned to cook from my father and his grandmother, and she always asserted the superiority of lard over Crisco, even going so far as to setup blind taste tests (that 85 year old woman was more of a scientist than most of the scientists I know today). Growing up in a rural area, it was readily available in all of the grocery stores. Even though most of the stores here in Alexandria carry it, they usually only have it in small tubs, about the size of a large tub of sour cream. The stores back home had it in bulk-sized canisters of all the same sizes that Crisco came in.
I'm also quite a fan of collecting bacon fat. Filter it through a paper towel first and it makes a wonderful oil for cooking eggs and sauteing vegetables. I've been known to cook an entire pack of bacon in the morning just to have the oil available for making dinner. Having cold, cooked bacon available in the fridge for the next week is a nice bonus.
Tripe, however, appears to have almost entirely dissappeared, replaced by kebabs.
The original LARD release ("The Power of Lard") was completely awesome (as with most things Jello Biafra does)... is their other stuff good?
The omnipresent Canadian chain, Tim Hortons, for example, stopped using lard in it's baked goods in 1997 and I seem to remember at the time this was partially due to a lobby from Muslim community groups.
But at least in the south it's available in every supermarket in several kinds. Some pure, some spiced. It's most commonly used as spread. But it's a matter of taste. Some fancy restaurants serve the bread they serve in advance not only with butter but also with lard.
Now we realise that not only were the lard-cooked fries more crispy and better tasting, they were probably healthier (relatively) as well.
I think the matter is that eat what is naturally available in the environment you live and it should be ok. Also with food act always like dont have money to spend more than what you really really need then we should be ok.
Because we all live on the African savannah, where humans evolved?
I've stopped eating carbs over the summer. There is a "correct" moderate amount of protein to eat, hence I eat lots of fat (including saturated) to make up the rest of my calories. I've lost 33 pounds so far.
It's very likely the final answer will be genetics dependent not a blanket one.
On a side note there is much of food and dietary research from the 50s onward that needs to be reviewed if not done over. I am still fascinated by the fight over salt, something as a cook I never believed as I cannot imagine cooking without it. Having the majority of relatives on similar diets who lived into their 90s its either genetic or just, well its anecdotal at best.
But it's true most restaurants switched to those [s]cheap ass[/s] healthy vegetable oils.
Not true. Olive oil use go as far as 5000BC. Lots of other animal fat were used too.
Germanic countries used Lard a lot, they needed enormous amount of fat to survive the winter. By the way, in my opinion Germanic food is one of the worst in the world, and I had traveled a lot.
They also used a lot of butter.
Going to the north people used seals, whales and even bears.
In North America they ate Buffalos, in Ecuador they ate llamas. In China they used lots of different fats.
Only a small amount of people in the ancient world ate big amounts of lard in their food.