Mangalitsa Lard Chicken Confit
By: Barnaby Dorfman
Published: November 1, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I visited with Heath Putnam of Wooly Pigs at our local West Seattle farmer's market. We caught up a bit and discussed the development of our respective businesses. Just like Foodista, Wooly Pigs is a startup and Heath is an entrepeneur developing the market for a product. I was happy to learn that his wonderful Mangalitsa pork is now being served in some of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, including Frascati. It's not surprising that great chefs are adopting this amazing product with exciting potential health benefits of lower saturated fat. As I was about to move on to another stall, Heath asked if he could give me some lard. I said sure and he pulled out a large white tub of rendered Mangalitsa lard. Heath gave it to us free of charge. He explained that it was rendered with the skin on, which gives it a smokey bacon-like flavor since the skin crisps up and burns in the rendering process. As a result, the lard isn't good for sweet recipes (unless you want them to taste like bacon), such as pie crusts. In return, Heath just asked that we test it out and let him know what we make with it.
If you are like me, you have an almost instinctual negative reaction to the thought of eating lard...just typing that sentence makes me a bit queasy. But if you think about it, lard isn't that different from butter, which I happily slather on bread and pop in my mouth. What's the difference? Mostly I think it's cultural, Americans just aren't used to cooking with it anymore, but we love the taste. When you get those fantastic creamy refried beans in a Mexican restaurant...it's the lard. The richest, flakiest pie crusts I've had...made with lard. So what savory dish could I cook with it? I'd been wanting to try making a chicken confit and I thought, why not try it with the lard? After researching a number of different duck and chicken confit recipes, I did what I usually do, which is to combine several different approaches tailored to my favorite flavors. I did a whole Thundering Hooves pasture raised chicken and even though I've never had or seen anyone confit the breast, I included it. That part was a mistake, it came out dense and dry. But the leg, thigh, and wing meat were extremely tender and moist. After the long confit cooking process, the skin was very soft, but I wanted to crisp it before serving. I  first tried to crisp the skin in a frying pan on the stove, that was my second mistake. The skin stuck and the meat was so delicate that the whole thing fell apart. Next I placed it under the broiler to brown and that worked beautifully. The end result was an amazing combination of wonderful crackly skin surrounding the most fall-aparty chicken meat I've ever had, all infused with the unique rich flavor of Mangalitsa.
Click below to get my Mangalitsa Chicken Confit recipe.

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November 1, 2009

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Amy at Work

Re: Eating Lard, 
A friend traveling through Russia told me tales of being served slices of lard + vodka shots.  
It would be exciting to see more recipes calling for lard and other rare animal parts.  What about those pioneer cookbooks with recipes like Raccoon pie?