09/22/2026
Mareks behind the scenes 🇸🇰 My family is from Slovakia. My mother rendered lard, and her mother before her. Now I do it, and my kids watch the same way I watched. Nobody ever wrote the method down — you learned it by standing in the kitchen.
🐖 I rendered 2.5 kg of pork back fat this week. Here's how it goes.
1️⃣ Call Commisso's or any butcher and ask for pork back fat.
2️⃣ Cut it into cubes about 1.5 inches. If the piece is thin, cut it a little wider. 🔪
3️⃣ Half a cup of water in a wide pot on medium-high, with part of the fat in. Stir often — the water is there to keep things from burning before the fat starts to run. 💧
4️⃣ Once the water has cooked off and fat has taken its place, add the rest. Keep stirring. When you've got a good base of rendered fat you can ease off a bit. 🥄
5️⃣ At about halfway, drop to medium-low to render out the rest. Ladle your first jar now — it comes out the clearest, and clear is what you want. Later jars boil longer and go darker, so you can mix them together to even things out. Use a funnel and a metal mesh strainer to catch the particles. 🫙
6️⃣ When the pieces turn golden, press them with a potato masher to get the last of the lard out. Take the pot off the heat, lift out the pieces, then strain the rest into a jar. ✨
7️⃣ Lids go on only once the lard has cooled completely. Worth the wait. ⏳
🔥 Lard is a good cooking fat — stable at high heat and unprocessed, which is more than you can say for most oils on the shelf. Strained clean and sealed, it keeps about a year in a cool dark cupboard with no refrigeration at all. That's part of why people made it this way for generations, long before anyone had a fridge. The cleaner you strain it, the longer it holds.
🍞 The best way to eat it is still the simplest: on bread with salt.
🥓 The cracklings are the other half of the job, and honestly the part everyone waits around the kitchen for. Lay them on paper towel and salt them the moment they come off the heat, then let them cool before serving with bread — pickles too, if you ask me 🥒. They're calorie-dense and high in protein, which is exactly what made them such a useful food for people who worked with their hands all day. They're also rich and salty and very easy to overdo, so keep plenty of bread alongside or your stomach will let you know. 😅
🏡 I sell real estate here in Niagara — Fort Erie, St. Catharines, Welland and the surrounding area. I work the same way I cook: do the steps properly, and don't skip the ones people skip.
👇 Anyone else here made lard? Or remember a grandmother making it? I'd love to hear it.
