Walking past the malls, we often hear the persistent vigorous smell of smoked bacon. It is simply impossible to resist such a temptation. But is it so difficult to cook it on your own at home? Let's try to figure out how to smoke lard.
Of course, the big plus will be that you cook yourself and control the process yourself - a dish at home is always tastier. The second point, when buying fat, you choose a quality product, and this is half the battle. And, finally, another advantage - seasonings, you can also choose them yourself, to your liking.
There are several ways to smoke. If you do not know how to smoke fat in the smokehouse, you can use the recipe for residents of Transcarpathia - this recipe makes very tasty fat . To do this, select a piece with a layer of meat and cut it into large pieces - a width of ten centimeters, and a length of approximately twenty-five. Pieces are cleaned of straw, scraped off burnt places and covered with salt in a barrel. Salt must be very generous, and lay the skin down. Thus, the fat should be salted out twenty days. Over time, the lard is cleaned of salt and suspended for a day to drain excess fluid. In the smokehouse, it is suspended separately so that the pieces do not touch. They make a fire, sprinkle firewood with tyrsa so that the fire does not go, but the smoke. The temperature should not be high - best about thirty degrees. In this state, the fat is kept under smoke for a day. After the appearance of a golden crust, it can be removed and eaten.
If you do not know how to smoke lard in this way, you can make smoking in an air grill. To do this, take a pound of fresh product, salt, selected seasonings, liquid smoke and alder shavings.
Salo is better to choose in the market, but do not hesitate to ask for a veterinary certificate. Well, if the lard will be with layers of meat, this is the so-called podchereva - lard, cut from the abdomen. Some owners do not remove flap from the underbread - a good piece of meat that is “attached” to the lard. When smoked, this fat will be especially tasty. Before cooking, the lard must be cleaned with a knife, scraped off weathered places from it, remove all unnecessary. After that, cut it into small pieces. Each piece of bacon needs to be salted with coarse salt, and you need to salt a lot - lard does not absorb excess salt, but under-salted bacon can ruin the whole taste after smoking. After salt, lard should be sprinkled with pepper - black or red, if not - paprika. After this procedure, the fat becomes unusually beautiful color. Finally, the lard is sprinkled with various spices - thyme, rosemary, sage, nutmeg , oregano. Each of these spices will add a wonderful aroma to lard, which will simply be impossible to resist.
After the fat is processed, it must be put in a cold place for a couple of days, so that it is saturated. Twelve hours before you smoke fat, you need to brush it with liquid smoke using a brush.
Separately, in a bowl of water (not necessarily warm), leave one packet of forty-gram gelatin to swell, then add red pepper there and stir everything. In the mixture that turned out, lower the lard for a couple of minutes.
Now we begin to work directly with the air grill. Before you smoke lard, put alder shavings on the bottom of the air grill and moisten them with water. If there is no alder, you can take apple shavings. We lay the fat on the grill, bring the temperature to sixty-five degrees and at this level we withstand the fat for up to three hours, periodically checking the readiness. After a while, the lard will be ready.
Fans of camping cooking collect recipes for smoking, lard for them is a signature dish for any occasion.