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As someone who prefers Hydrox over Oreos I consider vegetable shortening superior to lard. It delivers a more sincere and delicate flavor which exactly what you will find in Hydrox cookies, which never used lard.
I wish they sold lard here I've rendered my own but it tastes too piggy for me to try using it in baking (I think my rendering process was not so great). Used it for frying and spreading on toast though mmmmm.
Lard comes from very fat pigs. They just are not fed to be that way anymore. It's a waste of feed. Therefore, the lard you see now in the stores comes from many many pigs in the slaughter houses.
The days for the fat hog for bacon is long gone! The old-fashioned, fat back or streak-o-lean for flavoring is expensive now. People are not even taught how to cook with it. People come to my section of the USA wanting "real" southern cooking, won't be able to find it, because it just isn't done anymore.
in these parts, fat back is 2.49lb ,,, cheaper than bacon..
My family always used Crisco shortening for making pie crusts. But my family is Jewish and we come from a long line of kosher Jews; my mother probably didn't even realize you -could- make pie crusts with anything else. I certainly didn't, until reading this post.
We did use beef tallow for certain things growing up; beef tallow is the renderings of beef suet. Basically the same thing as lard, but from a cow instead of a pig.
The problem with using tallow though, is you can't use it on anything that will also be used with dairy, if you're Jewish. So it wasn't simply a matter of avoiding the pig. It was also avoiding meat with dairy. So we wouldn't have used it to make pie crusts either, if dairy would be involved at any point from the ingredients mix to the final consumption (in other words - no apple pie with ice cream on the side, if the crust was made with tallow).
Neither my own parents nor myself actually keep kosher, but we are still products of our environment and grow up knowing only what we are taught (this was before the advent of the internet). We did cook bacon, but my father refused to eat any other kind of pork (he doesn't keep kosher either but he was raised in a strict kosher home).
What I can tell you for absolute positive, is that popcorn made in a pot over the stove, using bacon grease instead of oil, is exquisite.
WOW RIGHT THERE^^^^^ Never thought of that but sounds GRRRRRReat!
When I was growing up in the 80's, 90's and 00's, my mother always used butter to fry foods. However, knowing that butter is very fatty, as an adult, I always use olive oil cooking spray, because I believe it is healthier.
Lately however, I have been researching other cooking fats, such as vegetable shortening (Crisco), margarine, olive oil and lard. Apparently, lard was THE standard fat base to use for cooking for hundreds of years up until the early 1900's when people started switching over to vegetable shortening and butter later on. Nowadays most people seem to use some sort of cooking spray or just butter.
I have heard that margarine is terrible for your health, because it's entirely composed of chemicals. But now, apparently, they say that lard is not nearly as bad for you as people once thought it was. Apparently, the fat content in lard is approximately the same as butter and it's rich in vitamin D.
Also, there are alleged benefits to using lard for cooking. For example, it has little to no flavor, so it doesn't alter the flavor of the food you're cooking. And it doesn't cause smoke, because it burns at a higher temperature than butter does.
What kinds of fat bases do you use to cook? And what is your experience with using lard, if any?
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Do you ever use lard for cooking?
