Pork trimmings are too valuable to throw away. Whether you’ve just broken down a whole hog or trimmed the fat cap off a pork shoulder, those scraps of fat, meat, and skin can become lard for baking and frying, homemade sausage, rich stock, crispy cracklings, and more. Here’s how to put every piece to use.
Render the Fat Into Lard
Rendering is the single most useful thing you can do with fatty pork trimmings. The process is simple: you’re slowly melting the fat out of the tissue until you’re left with clean, liquid lard and small crispy bits called cracklings.
Cut your trimmings into small, uniform pieces so they cook evenly. Some people grind the fat first to extract every last drop. Place the pieces in a heavy pot or Dutch oven and cook on the lowest heat setting your stove offers. No water is needed, though adding a splash to the bottom of the pot at the start helps prevent scorching before the fat begins to melt. Stir occasionally. Once the pieces have shrunk and turned golden and the liquid is clear, strain everything through cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer into glass jars.
The whole process takes two to four hours depending on how much fat you’re working with. You want gentle, barely-bubbling heat. High temperatures darken the lard and give it a stronger pork flavor, which is fine for frying but less ideal for baking.
What to Do With Your Lard
Lard is one of the most versatile cooking fats you can keep in your kitchen. Its high smoke point makes it excellent for deep frying (think French fries and doughnuts), pan frying, and sautéing vegetables. It produces flakier pie crusts than butter, and biscuits, cookies, and cakes made with lard come out remarkably tender and moist. You can also pop popcorn in it, use it to grease baking pans, or spread it on bread for grilled cheese instead of butter.
Beyond cooking, lard works well for seasoning cast iron and conditioning wooden cutting boards, rolling pins, and spoons.
How Long Lard Keeps
Homemade lard lasts four to six months at room temperature and six months to a year in the fridge. Store it in clean, airtight glass jars. Lard that has gone off smells sour or rancid, and the difference is obvious. If you’ve rendered a large batch, freeze what you won’t use within a few months.
Make Sausage
Pork trimmings are the foundation of nearly every sausage tradition, from breakfast links to bratwurst to summer sausage. The key is getting your fat-to-lean ratio right, and those trimmings are how you dial it in.
A good starting point for most fresh sausages is 70% lean meat to 30% fat. Bratwurst and richer sausages often go as high as 50/50, which gives them that juicy, snappy texture. Summer sausage works well at 70/30 or 60/40. If you’re mixing pork trimmings with leaner meat like venison or wild game, the fat from your trimmings is essential for keeping the sausage from turning dry and crumbly.
Temperature matters when you’re grinding. Keep your meat and fat chilled to 32 to 35°F before and during grinding. Fat that warms up will smear into a greasy paste instead of staying as distinct white specks in the meat, and that smearing ruins the texture of the finished sausage. Chill your grinder parts in the freezer for 30 minutes before you start, and work in small batches.
If you don’t have a sausage stuffer, loose sausage works perfectly well. Season your ground trimmings with salt, pepper, sage, and red pepper flakes for a simple breakfast sausage. Form patties and freeze them individually on a sheet pan, then bag them for easy weekday breakfasts.
Make Pork Stock
Trimmings that include bone, cartilage, or connective tissue make excellent stock. The collagen in those bits breaks down during long simmering and gives you a stock that sets into a jelly when cold, a sign of rich body and flavor.
Use roughly one to one and a half kilograms of bones and trimmings (about two to three pounds) per three liters of water. Place the trimmings in a pot, cover with room temperature water by at least an inch, and bring to a gentle simmer. Skim any foam that rises in the first 20 minutes. Add aromatics like onion, ginger, garlic, or peppercorns if you like, or keep it plain for a more neutral base.
Simmer for at least four hours and up to eight. Six hours is the sweet spot for most batches. You want lazy bubbles barely breaking the surface, not a rolling boil, which makes stock cloudy and greasy. Strain, cool, and refrigerate. A layer of fat will solidify on top, which you can lift off and use for cooking or discard. The stock underneath will keep for about five days in the fridge or several months in the freezer.
Turn Skin Into Cracklings
If your trimmings include pork skin, you can make cracklings (chicharrones) at home. These crispy, airy chips are surprisingly easy to produce.
Cut the skin into small strips or squares, removing as much of the underlying fat as possible (save that fat for rendering). Spread the pieces on a baking sheet in a single layer without overlapping. Bake at 325°F for one to two hours, checking after the first hour. The pieces should puff up and turn golden. Thicker pieces take longer, so pull out the ones that finish early. Season with salt immediately while they’re still hot.
The leftover bits from rendering lard are also cracklings. These are denser and chewier than the baked version, almost like pork popcorn. Salt them while warm and eat them as a snack, crumble them over salads, or fold them into cornbread batter.
Use Trimmings as a Flavoring Base
Small amounts of pork trimmings add depth to dishes where you’d normally reach for bacon or oil. Dice fatty trimmings finely and render them in the bottom of a pot before building a soup, stew, or pot of beans. The crispy bits left behind work like lardons, and the rendered fat gives you a flavorful base for sautéing onions and garlic.
This technique is especially useful for braised greens, refried beans, fried rice, and chowders. A few tablespoons of diced pork fat can replace bacon in recipes where you want pork flavor without the smokiness. You can also press small strips of fat into slits cut in lean roasts (a technique called larding) to keep them moist during cooking.
Curing and Preserving
Trimmings with a good balance of lean meat and fat are ideal for curing projects like pancetta, guanciale, or salt pork. Salt pork is the simplest: pack trimming pieces in a heavy coating of kosher salt in a nonreactive container, refrigerate for a week or two, and you have a shelf-stable flavoring ingredient that keeps for months. Salt pork is a classic addition to baked beans, chowders, and braised vegetables.
For more advanced projects like cured sausages or bresaola-style dried meats, the standard ratio for curing salt (Prague powder #1) is one teaspoon per five pounds of meat. Curing requires careful attention to salt ratios and temperatures, so it’s worth following an established recipe closely the first few times.
Sorting and Storing Your Trimmings
Not all trimmings are created equal, and sorting them before you start saves time. Separate your trimmings into three categories: pure fat (back fat, belly fat, fat caps), meaty scraps with some fat attached, and skin or connective tissue. Pure fat goes to rendering. Meaty scraps go to sausage, grinding, or the flavoring-base pile. Skin and connective tissue go to stock or cracklings.
If you’re not ready to process everything right away, vacuum seal or tightly wrap the trimmings and freeze them. Pork fat freezes well for six months or more. Label your bags with the cut of origin and the date. When sausage-making day arrives, partially frozen trimmings are actually an advantage since cold fat grinds cleaner and doesn’t smear.