It's unbeatable in pastry and delicious with a roast, says Claire Hargreaves.
A few years ago, if you'd called your restaurant Lardo you'd probably have been considered bonkers. Lard was a four-letter word guaranteed to send us recoiling in horror at visions of clogged arteries and playground fatties. If there was one food reviled and derided above all others, lard won hands down.
Now, though, a restaurant in Hackney, east London, has named itself after the wicked white stuff, arguing that lard might actually be one of the tastiest foods around. The most popular pizza that Lardo hatches in the igloo-shaped wood-fired oven at its heart is its Lardo, Marjoram and Rocket, a pizza draped with paper-thin slithers of lardo, the Italian word for cured pig back-fat, and doused with a marjoram dressing and some rocket leaves.
Also flying off the menu is Lardy Loin – aromatic melt-in-the-mouth slices of lardo with a smidgen of loin, served with yummy fingers of freshly baked focaccia. We're learning to love lard once more, it seems.
"The best lard comes from many of the heritage-breed pigs that we've devalued," says Eliza Flanagan, Lardo's owner. To drive home the message, the restaurant's postcard is a close-up of the free-range pigs that provide its charcuterie: Mangalitzas whose long curly locks make them look more like sheep than pigs. "I am not a sheep," the caption helpfully informs diners.
Our ancestors, of course, had no trouble recognising the virtues of lard. So central was it to our diet that the room where we stored our food, the larder, was named after it. Many British households kept a family pig, so the fat you used over winter was good old lard – as it still is in many countries today. Its great strength was that it coaxed out the flavours of foods that it was cooked with. In pig-rearing counties such as Wiltshire, housewives threw the fat into scrumptious lardy cakes, which are happily seeing a quiet revival.
The loveliest lard is from fat found inside the loin and around the kidneys, known as flare or leaf fat. That's rendered then left to solidify into blocks of crystalline white fat. It's so pure and malleable that a museum in Ukraine has used it to make more than 30 lard sculptures – including a particularly appetising one of Marilyn Monroe's ample lips and breasts.
Lard, with its high smoking point and unobtrusive taste, was the ideal fat for roasting, so our grannies roasted their potatoes in it. Today, home cooks are cottoning on to goose and duck fat, now sold in fancy jars in delis and supermarkets at vast expense, but they still struggle with using our native pork fat – perhaps because it's not yet packaged poshly.
It's also in short supply – and much of what's around is channelled into cosmetics and soaps. "Proper lard is difficult to find," says charcutier Graham Waddington whose Gloucestershire-based company Native Breeds crafts Lardo's lardo. "You'd need to buy pork fat from a butcher and render it yourself. But these days few butchers have any to sell."
Waddington dismisses the highly processed lard sold in supermarkets, often hydrogenated and treated with bleaching and deodorising agents. One reason we can't get pork fat in Britain, says Waddington, is that pigs are now bred to have as little fat as possible.
"Our demonisation of fat has meant that in recent decades farmers have mainly produced lean, fast-growing breeds such as Hampshire and Duroc. They're slaughtered at around five months, which doesn't allow time for them to develop a proper layer of fat." Instead, Waddington uses slow-growing heritage breeds such as Mangalitza or Saddleback that are reared to at least a year to give them time to develop a good fat covering.
Lard also has fantastic shortening qualities, hence its use in all types of pastry. A Melton Mowbray pork pie, for instance, must use lard in its hot-water pastry casing to qualify as the real thing. "The pastry is baked free-standing. As it cooks, the fat on the outer layers of the pastry burns off, giving it a crisp crunch that you experience as you eat it," says Matthew O'Callaghan, chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association and a food historian.
If you watched The Great British Bake Off you'll also have seen lard hailed as a must-use ingredient in puddings and cakes. On the series, O'Callaghan demonstrated how to make the perfect spotted dick – using lard. "Lard has a low melting point so after a cake has cooked it solidifies quickly, trapping in the air," he says. "If you want the lightest, fluffiest cakes and puddings, use lard. People think lardy cake is heavy. Actually, it's surprisingly light."
Chefs, such as Jeremy Lee at Soho's Quo Vadis, vigorously champion lard for roasting potatoes and in pastry. "Lard is up there with goose and duck fat – it's a very sophisticated ingredient," Lee says. Lard also has great preserving qualities which, says Lee, makes it ideal to make a pork confit whereby pork belly or shoulder is cooked in its own rendered fat which then solidifies and seals the meat. "Confit takes on a heavenly melting texture which is one of the world's best things," he enthuses.
Lee is also an aficionado of lardo – gourmet lard if you like – which he wraps around his famous meat terrines. Since Roman times it's been produced in the Tuscan village of Colonnata, famed for its marble, and is highly prized. Raw backfat is wrapped in rosemary and other herbs and spices, then cured in marble basins for a minimum of six months. Michelangelo is said to have treated himself to a nibble while seeking out choice cuts of marble. Lardo's Eliza Flanagan believes lardo is catching on here too. "Once people discover it they totally get it. It has an amazing silky texture, creaminess and depth of flavour. Customers get very grumpy if we take our Lardo pizza off the menu."
If you're reaching for the extra-virgin olive oil in horror at all of this, you might not need to. Recent research is questioning the received wisdom that animal fats are the main cause of obesity and that we should eat vegetable oils instead, and carbs rather than fats. A book by the American science journalist Gary Taubes quotes US government figures showing that nearly half the fat in lard is monounsaturated.
Monounsaturated fat raises HDL ("good") cholesterol and lowers LDL ("bad") cholesterol, and 90 per cent of that fat is the same oleic acid that's in olive oil. "If you replace the carbohydrates in your diet with an equal quantity of lard, it will actually reduce your risk of having a heart attack," claims Taubes. Unsurprisingly, UK Government advice does not agree. Yet.
Graham
1 comment:
Taubes is King. His books are good.
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