I have recently switched butter with lard for cooking eggs for breakfast.
While it’s more delicious it is cost effective too. However, I am curious to know its long term impact to one’s health.
Comparing it like for like with butter, I suspect it is much better than butter I buy from supermarkets, because there is a good chance that the milk supermarkets use to produce butter, might be less natural/organic.
What’s your take on it? Any scientific reason why I should go back to butter?
Butter has a different flavour. Refined lard has much less flavour. More relevantly, perhaps, according to one chart I’ve seen, their fat compositions are a bit different:
| Fat/Oil | Saturated | Mono-unsaturated | Polyunsaturated | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safflower oil | 9% | 12% | 78% | 1% |
| Olive oil | 14% | 77 % | 9% | — |
| Soybean oil | 15% | 24% | 61% | — |
| Chicken fat | 30% | 47% | 22% | 1% |
| Lard | 41% | 47% | 12% | — |
| Tallow | 51% | 44% | 4% | 1% |
| Butter | 54% | 30% | 4% | 12% |
| Coconut oil | 77% | 6% | 2% | 15% |
(Actually, I thought the compositions of butterfat and lard were more alike than they apparently are.)
As far as we know at the moment, quantities of polyunsaturated fats are likely to be inflammatory. Also, the polyunsaturated fats in the industrial seed oils (in this table, safflower and soybean) are unknown to the human diet before the past century, and so the body has little defence against them. The animal fats, and to a lesser extent the fruit oils (here, olive and coconut) are what we evolved to handle, so I don’t particularly worry about the PUFA’s in lard.
I’d guess both the chicken and pigs of old had better profiles, as they didn’t eat corn, which is relatively high in PUFAs. Saw chicken feed at the store the other day, and the second ingredient was corn.
But unless you get what you’re using tested, you won’t really know the PUFA content. I assume it’s on the container, though?
If you’re looking for “organic”, I would guess pigs would not be like that, unless you’re buying from a farmer.
This is interesting. It make me to think that I should do some homework to establish in more details, what’s it that I buy as lard. Thank you Bob.
I’ve read the PUFA content depends a lot of the feeding and pork is all over the place…
I can buy lard from a local farm I trust but as I get some from my pork anyway, I use that. I can’t afford to cook with butter but I wouldn’t do that anyway, I like lard and I would burn butter 
I need to eat all the lard I get with my meat (and that’s pretty much) as my food cost is high enough for me so it’s a moot point how good is this - but I can’t possibly know that anyway as I know about nothing about the pork I eat… I stay away from supermarket lard, that’s sure, it tastes bad (it did many years ago when I was fed bread and lard here and there, I never bought any looking at the ingredients) and the farm lard is cheap too. But as I wrote, I use the lard from my sadly supermarket pork, my body is still happy with me if I keep my carbs low… And I’ve read I have better chances with our European pigs… But there is still a big difference between them. But I buy what I can. The definitely not high-quality cheap pork but it’s still tasty and the lard is okay too. (But NOTHING gets near the lovely super smooth piglet lard I got from a pig farm piglet once :D)
Good lard has a stronger flavor than butter indeed (makes sense, fried fat, fried skin is tasty and rendering lard is frying the above stuff, at least for normal farm lard and my rendered lard even meets a lot of meat :D) but they are quite different and while I love lard, I need some butter too for its subtle, different flavor. But the difference is smaller at cooking especially if eggs are involved, eggs have a strong egg flavor, after all (at least the good eggs I buy)… But of course people have different sensitivity…
Mmm, lard 
Pork including pork fat is the tastiest thing ever if anyone ask me 
Butter is fine but subtle.
I care little about nutritional content of butter as I eat a few grams per week and that’s it. But pork fat is in my daily food so that matters - and I can’t have NO idea about it and I couldn’t eat something else anyway…
I get my nutrients from meat and eggs, mostly. They should be enough. So my other items don’t need to be very nutritional but they typically are.
For people using lots of added fat the nutritional content of lard/butter/whatever they plan to use is more important.
I might be buying half a pig from a local farm. If I do, I plan to use the lard for normal cooking and frying. It would be an interesting test to get lard from the store (our local store sells lard) and compare with the lard I get from the farm.
We get chickens from a local farm, and they are expensive relatively speaking. However, they taste so much better than store-bought, that I can’t give them up. (We only get 2 chickens every 2 weeks, so it’s not a huge amount of chickens.) My least favorite meat is probably chicken, but I really like these chickens and look forward to eating them.
Very good-quality home-raised chicken are tasty indeed! I had some super good ones at my Aunt once a year (it was enough that frequently, I was traumatized by chicken eating as a kid). And those are MANY times more expensive than normal ones. And just as unsatiating. So I stick with my pork (satiating) and turkey (probably not but it’s tasty and it’s probably satiating when paired up with work. I only have problems with fowl alone. 1 kg good quality chicken? I gets super hungry and need a very big meal afterwards… crazy. it’s protein and lots of fat, WHY? I already don’t understand why carbs made me hungry in the past, it’s energy, they satiate my SO just like every other food except something extremely fatty and low-carb)…
I even eat normal chicken sometimes, at a relative or I get brave a few times a year, it’s fine with spices, I just have way better ideas… Turkey is as cheap as chicken but much, much better and it only has the normal version, not the fancy ones chicken has.
I’m not sure I can tell the difference, but the best lard is supposed to be “leaf” lard, which (if I’m not mistaken) comes from around the kidneys.
The difference is heaven and hell here The (worst, I suppose there are differences) store lard is white, I think I saw it contains milk (don’t ask me why, I have no idea) and it tastes foul (to me. people eat it). I hate it with a passion.
Proper lard (well the kind I met and love) has a warm, less white color, it’s pure lard (or maybe with morsels from the fried pork fat and skin, once I have found a whole… scratching, in lack of a better word, I studied the meaning of different such words and they aren’t the same… but those impurities came with a special kind of lard from the pig farm shop, it was a bit cheaper but I loved it more! win)… And it’s quite tasty.
The lard I render from simple supermarket pork is close to the latter so I am lucky
I didn’t used to buy lard until recently. The animal fat seems to give a delicious taste to good. I have only consumed the kind that is sold in supermarkets but I suspect they are purified as there little of no taste or smell.
I guess there is a tastebuds development is happening in my tastebuds in favour of animal fat.
Is rendering the fat in a pan, is what lard is? When I render animal fat, it’s a lot atrium flavour or aroma than shop bought lard.
@PaulL I have heard that, although it’s supposed to be really good…for making desserts from wheat.
I first learned of leaf lard pre-keto, when I was in my high-carb baking phase.
@Geymakh That does produce a fat. True lard or tallow would use fat from the animal (suet in the case of tallow; I’m not sure what’s used for lard), and then you go through a process where you boil it a while, then strain it.
But I’ve cooked duck and got quite a bit of duck fat I used later for cooking. I just used a gravy separator to pour off the water/liquid and get to the fat.
I think any fat should be good, especially if you like it.
Tallow is suet heated and strained; whereas I don’t think you need to strain lard. (But don’t quote me!)
Any fat tissue here as far as I know. Actually, lard is the pork fat if it’s rendered out… I guess that fat of pork belly is used most commonly as there is plenty of fat at that place…?
My lard comes from any fatty pork I fry but it’s my byproduct while the scratchings are the byproduct in lard-making (not like they aren’t more expensive than the lard and very popular 
but one gets very much lard that way while I get only some lard and end up with lots of fried meat. okay it depends, sometimes I find some super fatty meat that is still not pork belly as that’s way too fatty for me).
I tried to research lately and only fat tissue cubes were mentioned, I researched the almost-scratchings, not lard though but they are hand in hand.
In big food industry… No idea what happens but surely fat tissue is used from a part where there is lots of fat and maybe not from super popular parts as they can just sell that part for more…?
I think I find the “leaf fat”, we call it háj and it’s fat around the intestines. The pastries helped as it is still used to make sweet pastries. They are absolutely awful to me but many people like them. I have these things, no lard in my sweet pastries and no sugar in my meat (not much sweetness in my savory dishes in general)… The two worlds just can’t mix in my life.
You still need to strain lard. Even with leaf lard it gets tasty little crunchies you need to strain out.
You have 100% control over the type of butter you buy. You can buy a good grass fed one, or no name garbage. It’s up to you. Buy what you like to cook with and what tastes better to you. Don’t overthink simple things.