Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [12]
The rendered fat of the pig is soft and pure and creamy; indeed, for centuries, that rendered pig fat, which we call lard, was one of the pig’s most valued attributes. It can be used as a cooking fat or as a shortening in pastries both savory and sweet. Replace the vegetable shortening in a traditional pie dough with half butter and half good lard, and the result will be a beautiful golden brown crust that’s flavorful, crisp, and flaky. (I can find lard, freshly rendered by the Amish farmers who grow hogs, during the summer at a growers’ market, but I can also purchase it by mail or order fat from my meat department and gently render it myself—see page 260 for the technique). Replacing lard with hydrogenated vegetable oil for the shortening in cookies and crusts has resulted in pastries that are a shadow of their former selves.
Still another advantage of pork is that it takes to just about any form of cooking. Grilled or roasted, sautéed or braised, pork is fantastic.
And salt and pork are a love affair, a marriage resulting in still more flavors and textures, depending on what part of the animal is salted, whether belly or ham, or even the fat itself. The flavor of pig fat is neutral: it’s soft but firm, creamy in texture (unlike beef fat, suet, which is hard, an indication of its higher saturated fat content). While at a restaurant in the mountains of Carrara, Italy, in 1988, my wife and I were asked if we’d like to try the house specialty, called lardo. The proprietor, Fausto, who had been feeding the workers from the legendary marble quarries for years, salted and seasoned thick slabs of pork back fat and cured them for months in marble casks. He served us three thin slices of this cured raw fat on some basil leaves, with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Soft, creamy, and delicious, it was a revelation.
Lardo has recently been making its way into American restaurants, though usually disguised under names such as carpaccio bianco and other innocent-sounding aliases (but pure pig fat by any other name is just as delicious). Pig fat is various too: Fat from the jowl, like the thick back fat, is creamy and excellent for pâtés and sausages. Some cooks prize leaf fat, which surrounds the kidneys, most highly of all for use as lard.
I think of Fausto’s lardo longingly, and not without irony and sadness, living in a country where so many people claim to avoid fat and salt as if they were evil incarnate and yet think nothing of devouring sodium-rich, fat-laden fast foods that come in boxes and bags.
Interestingly, the way a pig grows naturally, its ratio of fat to meat is culinary perfection. What is considered to be the optimal ratio of fat to meat in sausage is 30 percent to 70 percent, which is pretty much the composition of a pork shoulder.
There are recipes and descriptions of all varieties of food in this book, for vegetables and fish, and all manner of sauces and condiments, but we’d like to make sure that one thing is understood here and now: The pig is king.
KEY TO PARTS OF THE PIG
This detailed drawing allows you to see where the bacon, the long flat slab of belly, is (a). Notice the striations of fat and how they change as they move from shoulder to ham; if you buy a belly with ribs still attached, these striations are where the ribs will be connected; the back ribs, or baby back ribs (b), connect to the spine. Extending from the spareribs will be a wide strip of striated muscle, the diaphragm, or the skirt steak (the ribs and diaphragm have been removed in this drawing).