Lard is rendered pork fat, strained to become a pure fat, great for cooking and baking. High quality lards can also be used to make soaps, lotions, and candles.

We have been rendering lard from our own forest-raised as well as our friends’ pasture-raised hogs. Our particular heritage hog breeds – Mangalitsas, American Guinea Hogs, and Kune Kunes are known as “Lard Hogs” – and have traditionally been raised to produce an especially clean, beautiful, healthy fat.

Lard is a great option for cooking, with a high smoke point able to handle high heat. It’s also supposed to be the secret to incredibly light and flaky pastry crusts. We’ve been frying up our eggs, omelets, and veggies with our lard, and we love it! It does NOT have a “porky” taste at all, but adds a hint of richness to the food. Lard is also a good source of Vitamin D and Choline.

A BBC Article from 2018 ranks Pork Fat as the 8th most nutritious food, out of 1000 raw foods studied by scientists! Click here to read the full list of 100 Top Most Nutritious Foods by the BBC.

Here’s another quick article on the nutritional benefits of Lard from Prevention.com. They provide some great facts, such as this comparison:

(PS monounsaturated fats is a good fat!)

• One tablespoon of lard, for example, has 5g saturated fat, 5.8g monounsaturated fats, and 1.4g polyunsaturated fats.
• One tablespoon of butter, in comparison, has 7.2g saturated fat, 3g monounsaturated fat, and 0.4g polyunsaturated fat.
• Olive oil, on the other hand, has 1.9g saturated fat, 9.9g monounsaturated fat, and 1.4g polyunsaturated fat per tablespoon.