Lard

[Ladka]

Thank you everyone for the explanation.
I never thought of my rendering tallow or lard as a "refining" process. But strictly speaking, yes, I remove the membranes from the fat (and the butcher has removed anything which is not fat) to obtain pure fat.
In fact, my rendering pig fat has been only for culinary purposes in order to obtain pure lard and cracklings (in that case the butcher didn't remove all the meat so there were more cracklings). Now that I started making soap from home rendered lard (and tallow) my principal goal is to obtain pure fat and the cracklings are less important.

 

[earlene]

The one you posted a picture of is a carried by Costco as a Kirkland brand. It also has Cargill's name on it, so it is at least packaged by Cargill (I think they are a distributor, but could also be the manufacturer). It is a Vegetable Shortening and not true lard, if you look closely at the whole label. It says this: Manteca Vegetal Liquid y Cremosa, which translated means Creamy Liquid Vegetable Shortening. Then the ingredient label itself says Soybean Oil as the first ingredient, with no mention of any pig fat in any language, only the additives after soybean oil are listed.

My son and I had a conversation last year about the very fact that some vegetable shortenings are actually labeled as Lard, but have absolutely no pig fat in them. Apparently this is something more common than I would have ever suspected because I thought Manteca only meant lard, however that is not at all true. It means butter, shortening, fat, grease, and the list goes on with various fats, including lard. But to specify which fat it actually means, one really should add a descriptor, which in this case is 'Vegetal' or in the case of actual lard, it would be 'Cerdo' or in some cases I have seen 'Lardo''. So lard is really 'manteca de cerdo', not just plain manteca.

So ALWAYS look at the ingredient list, not just the product name.

Why did my son and I have this conversation, you may ask. As a vegetarian I pay attention to how foods I eat are prepared, and one day my DIL was making tamals using a fat that was labeled manteca. So I asked if that was what she was using, and it was then that I learned that not all things labeled manteca contain pig fat from my son.

Another thing about that particular shortening that could be confusing is that it says 'Liquid' in which case, it would not even be an animal fat, would it? II used to think shortening was always a soft solid until it is melted, right? Reading up on Liquid Shortenings, I found they are indeed liquid and they are less likely to foam during frying and some other stuff about differences of types of shortenings. Who knew? Not me, now I know more. I love learning new things, even when it is from my own children.

 

[SPowers]

It says vegetable shortening. It's not lard. Lard would say lard or Manteca. I've never seen lard at COSTCO. I check when I go. The one you finally posted is Lard but not from Costco.

All lard is refined I believe. Doesn't matter though. As long as it's lard it works. I've purchased many different kinds.

I was just on a Costco Bus Center site and Fry King is 1 of 3 lg quantity lards they carry. The others were Viva, and Butcher Boy (one of BB's was labeled 'deodorized' lard). None are in stock.