I am haing a devil of a time finding pork fat. Where do you buy yours and what do you have to pay? Seems crazy to me to spend more on pork fat per pound then on ready made sausage.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Yep, but around here we call it "Leaf Lard" and it is not ground.I have a great butcher that saves pork fat for me when he butchers for people that dont want it. I get it in 12lb. bags.
Lasst week I defrosted three bags and ran it through a course grind and into my turkey fryer covered with water and about five or six hours later I poured off three gallons of snow white lard. I just love the flavor of things fried in it and I should have taken pictures so you could see the process and the results, shame on me I know how much I appreciate the pictures that others put up on their posts. I sweasr I will take pictures next time.
Oh I do render it after its ground. And leaf lard is the pure white fat from the inside of the lower rib cage. trims off the belly before making bacon, its in there also I just dont bother seperating it from the rest of the fat since nobody in my house bakes we dont use the premium leaf lard. Eveeryone friews so mixing the leaf and the body fat together doesn't hurt a bit. I place the whole batch in my turkey fryer cover it with water and set it on a low slow rolling boil and after about 4hrs I have pure clear liquid gold.Yep, but around here we call it "Leaf Lard" and it is not ground.
It has to be rendered down.
It makes great lard and cracklins for cornbread.
Gotta get that fat into those lean game meats or it just dries up on you. Sounds like you have it dialed in. Just a thought but you could send me some and I'll let you know how good it is!In much of the country you can find custom processors who butcher animals for the local farmers and folks who raise their own beef or pork etc. They will usually have beef and pork fat at pretty reasonable prices. It is sometimes hard to impossible to get during big game hunting seasons as it is going into game sausage so plan ahead.
Locally (central NY) I pay $0.50/# most of the time for either beef or pork fat and I pick up 30 or so pounds shortly before deer season.
I process my own deer (usually 4-5 a year) and 12-15# batches of burger, meat loaf mix and sausage work best for us so I bag and freeze fat in 3# bags and adjust the amount of lean meat to the recipe (usually 20% or less). That saves me having odd lots of fat in the freezer.
Lance
Lance if I could get my hands on a sunny day Id have to keep it right now. They have been few and far between here in usually sunny California. Its to wet to ride and to stormy to fish.Franklin, we bag some burger lean and some at 80-85% lean. We like most sausages at around 80% lean and the common Italian styles a little leaner. We also use about 55-65% of the salt most recipes call for. Even though the fat gets frozen in 3# bags we do everything metric which makes scaling batches up or down a lot easier than English measures would. Small batches such as testing recipes can get into really small amounts of spices so since I reload rifle and pistol cartridges I use a reloading scale that is a lot more precise with small measurements than any other scale I've found.
If you can figure out how to send us some sunny 75 degree days in February maybe we can make a deal for sausage....