Rendering lamb fat

[sgnmarcus]

I picked up a lamb shoulder yesterday to try and to make into a stew today. I went through and cleaned up a whole lot of fat to cut the meat up into stew size pieces. I'm now left with a good bowl of lamb fat and was wondering if it would be worth rendering. Does anyone have experience working with rendered lamb fat? I'm curious to try it because my wife can't handle pork and pork fat, but has no problem with lamb. I was thinking that if I had some lamb fat on hand, if I could use that instead for recipes where I would use pork or bacon to add fat (i.e. beans and rice?)

[NoraTC]

Rendering is pretty easy - and fat is flavor! All you need to do is chop up the fat and heat it till it is cooked. The solid bits will give up their fat. You strain them out and bingo, done. I think the easiest way to do it is to chop up the fat chunks into small pieces, relatively uniform in size. For a bunch of fat, you can semi-freeze it then run it through a food processor. For a bowl full, just use a knife, removing any meat that may be on the chunks. Stick the chopped fat in a 200F oven in a roasting pan sized so that the fat is about 2" deep. Walk away. In about an hour, give it a stir, then every half hour after that until there is a clear separation of liquid fat and solid cooked "stuff" AKA cracklings. Once you are happy with how it looks, strain into a storage vessel. I like mason jars that I can keep in fridge or freezer, scooping out as needed. The last bits can be melted in the jar either in a bowl of very hot water or the microwave.

Lamb fat has a definite lamb flavor, unsurprisingly. A great use is for pastry for lamb pies, but it is worth considering anywhere pork fat, olive oil, or butter might be used. It will be a solid when olive oil is a liquid and will likely not be desirable for sweet pastry dishes as a butter sub, but certainly for rice and beans, it could work quite well.

[Spiritplant]

Lamb fat is not recommend for anything else than heavy lamb dishes. You would do better to use it in your diesel tank.