Pork fat comes in many forms. It comes as lard, rendered to a snowy, spreadable white and ready for deep frying potatoes.
There are the bacon drippings from your breakfast, which can be run through a sieve and then mixed with mustard and shallots. The resulting vinaigrette is lovely tossed through Brussels sprouts.
There’s chicharrón—deep-fried pork skin attached to a crispy layer of fat—and pork belly, more fat than meat, perfect for slow roasting or braising in soy sauce and mirin and serving over ramen.
But surely the ideal expression of pork fat is lardo: a slab of fatback, taken from high on the hog, rolled in salt and rosemary and left to cure in a marble tomb for several months. It emerges slightly yellowed by age, but if you cut away the rind you’ll find a pearlescent interior scented with rosemary, both rich and delicate, and ready for all kinds of splendid applications.
Lardo is never heated, which gives it a pliable firmness you won’t find in other pork fat products. The result is that you can slice lardo thinly—so thinly it’s transparent—and drape it over all kinds of foods. A sheet of lardo, placed on warm focaccia, will melt gently into the crevices while retaining its shape at the edges, creating pools of decadent, herbed fat with bits of texture nearby. Thin slices of lardo are magnificent atop scallops—more proof that pork and seafood are destined to coexist on a plate. Lardo is especially good at its simplest: piled onto a plate like a cold cut, and maybe served alongside some sliced pears.
My preferred preparation for lardo requires less finesse. Instead of producing whisper-thin sheets, you pound the lardo into a paste with garlic and herbs. Then you whip it, incorporating air until it resembles a cloud of pork fat, and becomes perfect for spreading on country bread.
Prior to any of that, you’ll need to obtain lardo. Before 2014 finding lardo was a difficult task; import regulations prevented many cured pork products from entering the United States. Today, the dark ages are over. Those import bans have been lifted and lardo is easier to find—though you still may have to do a bit of hunting.
When I lived in Los Angeles, my lardo dealers were the fine folks at Guidi Marcello Imports. Their shop is located in the back third of an industrial park, wedged between a gravel supplier and a lumber company. When you see the outside, you’ll be sure you’ve come to the wrong address—but when you step through the door all doubt disappears, and is replaced by the giddiness one feels as a child, when discovering a secret world hidden deep in the woods. You’re greeted by mounds of fresh bread, colorfully wrapped pasta, Ligurian anchovies, 36-month-aged red cow Parmigiano, pots of cuttlefish ink, Cerignola olives, and, in a little section off the main room, a series of fridges stocked with every Italian cured meat and cheese you could possibly hope to eat, lardo included.
If you live in Los Angeles, I suggest you visit Guidi Marcello. If you live elsewhere, perhaps you can find a similar Italian importer nearby. Or, I suppose, you could order lardo online—though you’ll miss out on the thrill of the hunt, and that’s half the fun when acquiring specialty ingredients.
In any case, once you have your lardo, I suggest you make the following recipe.
Whipped Lardo and Bread
Serves: 4
Prep time: 20 minutes (10 minutes with an immersion blender or food processor)
Cook time: 0 minutes
Total time: 10-20 minutes
Ingredients:
250g lardo
50g Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
1 clove garlic, chopped
1-2 sprigs of fresh rosemary, chopped
1-2 sprigs fresh oregano, chopped
A few grinds of black pepper
Olive oil (optional, but recommended)
Crusty bread
Instructions:
Check your lardo for a rind. If one of the slab’s edges has a tough, membranous coating, trim it off and discard it. Cut the rest of the lardo into cubes.
Now you have a choice to make. You can do whipped lardo the traditional way, adding all the ingredients except olive oil to a mortar and smashing with a pestle until homogenous. This process will take you 10 minutes of hard work. Or, for a much easier time, you can blitz everything in a food processor or with an immersion blender, which takes 2 minutes. You may need to add a tablespoon of olive oil to facilitate blending.
Once you have homogenous paste1, grab either a mixing bowl and a whisk or a stand mixer with a whisk attachment. Add the paste and whisk vigorously, the way you would when making whipped cream. The lardo will resist at first, but as it takes on more air, it will lighten and become silky and voluminous. Continue whipping until you achieve a cloud-like texture. It’ll take you several minutes by hand, or a couple minutes if you’re using a stand mixer.
Pile your whipped lardo into a bowl and serve it with slices of crusty bread, alongside a bottle of red wine. As long as you have these three things in your home—whipped lardo, bread, and wine—contentment will always be within reach.
If you’re in a rush you can stop here, before you’ve done any whipping. Transfer your spread to a bowl and serve it with bread. It won’t have the lightness of the whipped version and will be more rustic in appearance, but it’s delicious nonetheless, and saves you a considerable amount of effort.