There are, as they say, a great many different recipes for making lard. Salt it in different ways. Not only salted, but also smoked, boiled in onion skins, added to various dishes, and much more. Today we will marinate the bacon. If you manage to pick up a good bacon, then pickled it should turn out to be very tasty. When applied to lard, tasty often means soft, or even tender, with the obligatory presence of various spices. Usually garlic is ideally combined with bacon. This ingredient is also present in this recipe, all its other components are still simple.
How to pickle bacon? A very simple recipe
So, the most important point here is to pick up soft bacon for pickling. It must be fresh. It is best to choose a sufficiently thick piece, with the presence of veins in it. The main thing is to figure out whether it is soft, or the piece you got is very fibrous. You can check a piece of bacon with an ordinary match. If you managed to pierce it without any problems, and the match entered it freely, then you got a piece suitable for pickling. This is exactly what we need.
Cooking lard
But, we will not marinate the whole piece. It will need to be cut. In this case, you should get pieces of about 5 by 5 centimeters in size. Next, we need garlic. We clean it (if you are in a hurry, then read how you can clean it quickly enough), and cut it into thin slices. Mix salt with black pepper, put the garlic plates in there, and roll them in this mixture. Further, this garlic will need to be stuffed with our small pieces of bacon.
Cooking the brine
The next important ingredient when pickling lard is brine. Here, the calculation of all components will be based on a liter of water. The main component is, of course, salt (we take 200 grams of it, not necessarily iodized). But, first, the water is boiled, only after that the specified amount of salt is added to it. Then, based on your taste, add a few peas of simple black pepper, and if you want to give the brine color, then you can also put onion peels in it. It will tint the lard a little, and it will end up with a slightly golden, or rather brownish hue.
Marinate lard
After adding all the components to the brine, you can put the fat itself into it. Further, it should boil again, and there should be boiled for about 5-10 minutes. In this case, the fire should be small. In general, the time here is determined only by the size of the pieces of bacon themselves. If you cut them into larger pieces, then, accordingly, they will have to be cooked longer.
When you cook a little in this way, then you need to take a slotted spoon and get it out of the pan. At the same time, immediately from the pan, we send them to the jar, all the same hot. You need to fill the jar with lard to the very top, and then pour it all with the same brine from the pan. We close the lid, and that's it, forget about the lard for 2 or 3 days. This time is enough for the brine to soak the pieces well, and the aroma from all the spices to stick well in them.
You can store this fat under a simple plastic lid, or you can even roll it up.
And here is the video recipe. Everything is prepared here as simply as in our recipe. Take a look.
