Recently I have been cooking with lard. Yes, I, olive oil girl have been slowly incorporating rendered pig fat into my cooking. I truly never thought this day would come. But I guess that’s why they say “never say never”.

I consider myself a “healthy” eater. I eat mainly fruits and vegetables, whole grains, raw nuts and seeds, and healthy fats. I try to buy organic as much as possible, but what is more important to me these days is where my food comes from. Shopping at the Greenmarkets has ironically limited my diet while at the same time expanding it. In other words, I am now limited to eating mainly foods that are local and in season. At the same time, I have expanded what I eat, because there are so many more varieties of fruits and vegetables, and other types of products that I would never be able to find at a supermarket.

That being said, my staple cooking fat has always been olive oil. Sometimes I use ghee and coconut oil, but I usually can do anything I want with olive oil. I use butter in my tart shells. Earlier this Spring I was reading up on Fergus Henderson and thought that I might want to use lard, a cooking fat that I had seen available at the Greenmarket. I remembered Michael Pollan’s writing about lard in "In Defense of Food". His discounting it as an unhealthy saturated fat, and promotion of it as a traditional diet staple jolted my perception of this fat. His words rang true- it is a traditional food that was used by our great grandparents, so why had I been taught to think that it was so evil? It has less saturated fat than butter, and a good percentage of monounsaturated fat. Maybe it is not so harmful after all.

I purchased a small tub of Flying Pig Farm’s leaf lard, thinking that I would use it for a flaky tart crust. What happened instead was the best batch of frijoles that I could have ever imagined producing. It was the lard. I made a second batch of black beans (from Cayuga Pure Organics), and achieved the same result. It is the best cooking fat for homemade Mexican-style beans, and a more traditional fat than olive oil (although Mexico also produces great olive oils now) to use in that preparation.

Tonight I tried my hand at frying in lard, to learn first-hand about its superiority as a frying oil. Apparently, chicken fried in lard is the best thing ever. I decided to do a lighter “Surf and Turf” dish, and fry shrimp in lard to pair with a tomato/scallion salsa. It was delicious. The shrimp had an excellent flavor, and did not come out overly greasy. They say that lard does not taste like anything, but I find it gives off a slightly nuanced flavor which is hard to describe, but easy to distinguish. I will be posting the recipe soon on Kitchen Caravan, but in the meantime, I will be melting more lard in my frying pan.