LARD CHANGED MY LIFE!! AWESOME EDUCATIONAL FARM VLOG!!

hey folks its Josh Danny Ridge farmer welcome to the farm vlog today so we killed a pig last weekend on the farm and we have the skin and we have the fat and this is the fat the visceral fat the fat that's on the inside of the Hogs belly that we cooked down and we make lard so we make lard with the fat and we're going to show you how we render that and we take the skin and we make pork cracklings for putting in cornbread which is basically little pieces of skin or we can make pork skins or we can make some awesome treats for our dog come on with us today we're gonna teach you how to render lard and make pork cracklins it'll be a good time all right [Music] so we're here in the cutting board and what we're doing is taking these large pieces of what we call leaf fat and we will cut them into blocks about this big put it in the pot and boil it down until it renders lard yeah mate yeah yeah the next step here is slicing this up into cubes and we're gonna put it we've already got started over here we're gonna put it in the pot with the already boiling fat and then we'll pour out the lard into mason jars and we'll have it for our family to eat on it's gonna be awesome so we'll take the skin and if we want to make pork cracklings which is something that you might have to google it's just a little piece of skin that we leave that we cook we basically deep-fry it and then you put it in corn bread is absolutely delicious or you can use it as a snack we can eat this like pig skins like you have in the grocery store you buy or you can cut this up make cracklins or we can make delicious dog treats this stuff is really really thick and makes great dog treats and it'd almost be a shame to waste this on dog treats so we're probably gonna make it for our own consumption so let's get busy cutting so here's our piece of skin and the way we're going to do this we're going to set our fat to the side let's take our piece of skin here which is really tough and we're just going to use a standard razor knife and we're going to slice it into strips okay and these strips are probably going to be about this wide now we're going to take those strips and we're gonna cut them probably in thirds it's much easier to cut this when they're already cooled and if you flip it down skin side down it doesn't tend to slip all over the cutting board it's not an exact science you're just cutting it up I'll take these and we'll make big skins out of them delicious low-carb snack now the lard here will cut into smaller little cubes so that we can throw it in there and boil it off the size of the cube that you want is going to be somewhere around half the size of your fist okay you'll find the longer you work with this the better you'll get with your knife and the better you'll get cutting it up I'm where to take this board we're gonna dump it in the pot bring you over here alright so he's gonna break all the cracklings off and are already boiling oils this is the all-natural way guys old lay down the old days the women would be inside the house or right outside the house making dinner and hooking up the cracklings and rendering the lard we didn't have that many old women to help us maybe no we don't want oh and then we want young women see looking good so as time goes on over the next hour maybe 2 hours it takes to render all this fat basically we've cooked it down from chunks this size down to chunks yeah the size of the end of your thumbnail here we will go ahead and we'll pour all that fat off into jars and we'll jar it up I wish I could bring you in here and let you smell the aroma the the smell of vision I wish I had smell-o-vision so you could just smell the aroma the pork aroma it's just a really delicious smell that's going on here in the basement my dad's house pretty awesome so my dad wanted to show you we still have the ears this is the ears and the top portion of the scalp and over here we have the feet okay so the ears and the feet and the liver will all be boiled down to make what's called salsa me it's basically what you call head cheese now you can google head cheese if you want to but it's just a delicious treat that's made from pork from boiling this stuff down and rendering it up and making it delicious some folks call it scrapple some folks call it head cheese and some folks call it South's meat delicious stuff all pork products nothing on this pig is going to waste now previously when we made sausage in a video a lot of folks were commenting on this stuff back here these big carboys which are big glass containers what are they contain well they contain wine that we made when we were young kids back in the 80s and they also contain homemade apple cider vinegar underneath here is homemade apple cider vinegar we're gonna tease you with that a little bit and we're gonna talk about that stuff in a future vlog we'll show you how to make it so stick around right now we're gonna let all this fat and cook up we're gonna give it about a good hour and then we'll show you pouring it into jars it's really interesting I think it's really fun guys this is the time when I say click that like button subscribe to the channel if you're not already to subscribe it and follow our farm journey we're gonna take you places you've never been and teach you things you never learned it's gonna be awesome thanks click the like button subscribe click that bell down there it'll tell you when I post a new video all right so you need to know here this stuff is extremely extremely dangerous to work with okay you're gonna have to start you're gonna have to get in there and stir the bottom of the pot ideally you'd want to be outside doing this and you want plenty of space in case this pot were to start tipping you got to get back this is an extremely dangerous process the temperatures here can reach 300 400 degrees if you're not careful and basically ideal temperature would probably be a little close to boiling but you can tell you just kind of have to get a feel for it as you cook you want to be careful not to burn but you also want your fat to render a lot of people get burnt full with grease and boiling things like this even boiling a turkey is very unsafe so you have to be very very careful you have to be smart about it here's what we're looking at guys you're gonna stick a thermometer a digital thermometer in there and see what our temperature is about 240 while we're working at this process you can really tell as the cracklings as the fat starts to get brown it shrinks up and starts to almost get powdery okay now some of this will pour off the cracklings which is the leftover pieces in with the lard so that we can make cornbread with it and some of it will just pour straight lard in the jars now is it good for you is it better for you than these hydrogenated oils that you can get in the store do the research I think it's better for you all right now we've been at it here for about hour and 10 minutes I'll show you what we got here okay here's what it looks like all right so that's pork skins and your cracklins here pork skins and basically we got a stir kind of push down we have that behaves roll just roll it put the stuff that needs to be cooked down in there deeper to the top and that beautiful today's my dad's 66th birthday pretty good birthday present right here folks if you like what you see here and you're enjoying this and you're learning be sure you click that like button and leave me a comment subscribe to the channel and click the little bell down there at the bottom tell you when I post a new video yes what good would it be to be subscribed if you couldn't see when I posted a new video so we sent some of this out through the side mmm crunchy that's nothing like you'd get in a store mmm mmm good stuff so this is a fresh made pork skin we'll give that a few minutes let it dry you can hear it popping as it cools it starts to pop like rice krispies cracklins scooping them out down in here in the pan this will be the rendered large we slowly scoop something you get all of the little cracklins out that you can these will sit over here and cool and the oil will drain out of them here we are we've taken our quart jars we've already taken the lids off of them and ergonomically it makes more sense for the jars to be on the right hand side so we're going to slide this over a little bit we're gonna take a measuring cup and we're just going to pour into the jars this is a point where you really really have to be careful okay just basically fill our jars up and this is a glass measuring cup put the lid on nice and snug remember it's going to be hot send it to the side and it should seal itself and keep from now on now you can do half gallon jars so you can do quart jars quart jars fit in the cabinet a little bit better half gallon jars are a little more cumbersome depends on what you got laying around it's how country folks do it let your jar down dip into that beautiful lard but you lit on as tight as you can get it just like that now have yourself a rag handy in case your jars get too hot and you can squeeze them down tight you're gonna make a bit of a mess so be prepared for that have it in an area that you don't really care about making a big mess do it out in the yard somewhere you leap it down in there bring it on out beautiful isn't that beautiful it's so clear crystal clear almost like a yellow hue and it's just gonna turn beautiful light when it gets done cooling off it's just a beautiful thing something I really enjoy here while you're setting your jars out you want to leave about that much space in between them so they can all cool evenly don't get in a hurry there's a special time don't get in a hurry guy sometimes just the simple solitude of watching somebody work and do something like this just I don't know it brings peace to you it's just a simple piece in doing a good job and doing a doing a job right the folks here is our finished product here's all our lard and these are our cracklings okay I'll get you a little close-up of the cracklings we only have pork skins and down in here these are the cracklings right here and that's what you cook down in your corn bread basically you put them in the bottom of your cornbread pan and you cook that up with your corn bread or you can just eat it like this mmm just a taste you don't get anywhere else now folks with the Sun setting on beautiful Appalachia right here beautiful beautiful lard that we've rendered up today thanks so much for joining us here on the Stoney Ridge farm we're on my dad's place today I hope you learned a little something about how to render lard beautiful beautiful experience here with my dad on his birthday we're gonna shine the sunlight through this guys don't forget click that like button subscribe to the channel for now I already subscribed more stuff like this it won't be every day but hopefully you can learn a little bit of something on this channel and have some fun alright thanks a lot really appreciate it come on back and see me forget stuff look at that that's just beautiful just beautiful made on a stone Erie [Music]