What I do with freebie meat scraps...

My son turned up yesterday with a kilo of chicken liver for me to turn into paté. He wants a jar of it in return for the whole kilo, so I get free chicken liver! He also used the purchase to entitle him to ask for free trimmings, so I got those too.

It was a pretty typical batch of meat trimmings so I thought I'd make a thread to show you what I do with them.

First I split the kilo of chicken liver into three portions and popped them into the freezer. Then I had a closer look at the real freebies.

First I popped them onto the scales.



Nearly one and a half kilos, or a bit over three pounds.

I tipped the whole lot into a big bowl to sort out.



There seems to be a good bit of pork skin and fatty bits and chicken skin, so a batch of rendering is on the cards for this morning.



Half a cup of water in the bottom of the little slow cooker seems to be the right amount. This gets everything flowing but evaporates away completely around the edges of the slow cooker lid by the time I've rendered the lard out of the scraps.

I sorted out the pork skin, fatty pork trimmings and chicken skin and put them in the slow cooker.



It's important to leave room for expansion if there's pork skin involved. The collagen in it absorbs water and it expands and attempts to climb out of the crock pot.

I throw a cloth over the slow cooker and weight it with a bit of gneiss to stop the collagen escaping.



Then I go through what's left and sort it into stuff with bones in and stuff without.



Not much bone this time, and most of what there is is the gristly bit off the top of a couple of pork shoulders. Also some weird chicken offcuts, and chicken knees, and some bits I didn't waste time attempting to identify. I put those bits in a bag in the freezer for next time I do a batch of bone broth.

The meaty bits are mostly pork trimmings with one bit of beef trimming. I'll probably cook those up this afternoon when I've rendered the lard out of the fattiest bits.

A few hours later a lot of the fat has rendered out.



I decanted most of it into a stainless pan then put the slow cooker back on to render a bit more out. I find if you don't drain most of it off, the rest of it doesn't come out.



I use a glass to store the lard and pour it in there as it starts to cool down.

The glass means that I can see if it's all fat or if there's some stock at the bottom, which needs to be used differently.

Just for fun, I'm weighing it so I can figure out how much lard I get out. Not that it's especially relevant to anything as it's a free bag of random scraps, but I find it interesting.

More lard will be added bit by bit so I need the actual weight of the glass so I can figure out the final weight of the yield of lard.



Half an hour later, a load more fat has rendered out. I decanted that into the stainless pan with the first batch and then transferred it to the glass.



This is about as much rendering as I'll do with this batch. I transferred it to the stainless pan to cool down. As it cools, it releases more fat, which can then be drained into the lard pot.

I've found that I can get more fat out if I keep rendering it, but that leaves the scrappy bits of fat and skin unusable. The skin is a superb source of collagen, so I find it's good to not cook it until it's hard and inedible.

The trick then is to find the best way to use it.



Having removed the contents of the slow cooker, it now looks like this, complete with sticky bits at the corners.



So I put another half-cup of water in, and off we go again, cooking up the meaty bits this time.



I had the less-fatty, non-bony bits in the fridge.

In theory they could all be cooked up at once, but there were too many to fit in the little slow cooker at once and there weren't really enough to make it worthwhile doing battle with the giant one.

So they're going in after I've rendered the fatty bits.



There they go. I'll probably get a bit more lard out, but not so much as it's not so fatty and there's not so much of it.

There should, however, be some nommy bits of meat to add to rice dishes. And pasta dishes. Or whatever you want really...



There. More fat has come out of the fatty bits as it's begun to cool, ready for me to decant into the glass.



This is the yield of lard so far...



And now I wait for the fatty and skinny bits to cool down...

The fatty and skinny bits have cooled down and congealed a little, which will make them a whole lot easier to handle.

I tipped them out onto a silicone sheet.



I put all the skin on one side, all the fat on the other, and some bits of meat that had been attached to the fat in the middle.

The 'fat' will go hard and weird if I render it out any more but there's still a lot of flavour and collagen in it so that will be put on one side to go in paté. It's cheaper than butter, and lower cholesterol, and higher in collagen so it's a good thing to put in paté. I've found that if I don't add fat, it's tastes dry and naff and I end up using butter with it. But if I put enough of these fatty bits, all blended up with the liver, it's fine without butter. Which seems like a win to me!

The skin has good flavour, and an absolute ton of collagen, but the texture is weird. I've found that if cut it up into small pieces and freeze it, I can throw a handful in with the rice-and-lentils as it cooks and it adds flavour and nutrients.

The meaty bits I pulled off the fatty trimmings just get chopped up and added to the skinny trimmings to add a bit more flavour to the rice.



I put the rendered out fatty bits in a glass which can go into the freezer until I next make paté.

The rest is cut up into little bits with scissors, which I've found is a much, much better way to do it than messing about with a knife. It's also better to wait until it's almost cold before attempting to cut it else it's too gooey and gloopy.

Once cut, I spread them out on the silicone tray and shove them in the freezer. Then if I'm feeling organised I can pack them in bags and have the tray free for freezing other stuff.



Let's have a look at the meaty bits that have been in the slow cooker for the last few hours...



They looked pretty nommy so I took them out to cool down. I'm not sure if I'm going to freeze them or just stick them in the fridge to eat in a day or two.

The liquid left behind is a bit oily but not lard, more like nommy stock, so I didn't add it to the glass of lard.



It's in the fridge now, waiting for us to decide what to do with it.

The final score for lard was (516g, less the weight of the glass which was 353g)  163 grams of lard for Himself to fry his eggs in.



And I think that's it for today's exercise. I might cook up the bones tomorrow to make bone broth for cooking the rice and lentils in. Or I might leave it for a day or two. Soon, anyway!

That's great Burra - and all for free! I pay £1.10 for 250g lard. I wonder what my butcher does with his scraps?....

Looks like a wholesome winter delight! Fun fact: I now got used to quail sizes, so chicken carcass and eggs now seem ginormous to me!

i thought of you today, Burra, as i got a fabulous deal on pork, a bone-in and skin-on front leg, and brought it home and took it apart. The bones and nasties are in the crockpot making a Korean stew with potatoes, 12 servings were sectioned out and frozen, and the skin and fat are all on deck for crockpot lard rendering tomorrow. Easily 15 meals for 3-4 for 45 bucks (not counting what the lard will do for me).
We usually render out the lard and then take the skin and fry it up, which is very much appreciated here (anything that doesn't get eaten, I throw in cornbread, or Chinese stuffed buns), but I have seen a Chinese recipe where the skin is cooked to within an inch of its life in water, sliced into ribbons, and basically treated like a noodle. Not sure which we'll do, but no matter what it will be enjoyed. I love using the lard in cooking, I buy it maybe every two years, but now I'll have plenty for making biscuits as well.


For anyone interested in the pork skin recipes:
the "cook like a noodle" comes off a Korean recipe website (using shockingly bad automatic translation! the ingredients include "a restaurant")- the flavors and seasonings can be tweaked, but all the weird ingredients are just super aromatic and umami-- the pork is super bland and needs tasty seasonings. But the recipe shows the process. you note she starts with a skin that has almost no fat on it- for our purposes, I would take the skin off the pork I've rendered, if it's still very soft, just cut it off and scrape off anything that's not skin, and start from there. https://www.10000recipe.com/en/6886877/Stir-fried_pork_skin?srsltid=AfmBOoqz7m43Hw7jh9BZsDUOvotZHiIF3HdSZQY_DOaFawKkkmquci4h
the crazy one is "pork jelly", with the pork skin slices in aspic, basically. It looks like some serious work, but also something really interesting during the height of summer. Maybe come January I'll try it. https://www.chinasichuanfood.com/pork-jelly/

Burra, that’s great what you’re doing!!!   Too many times those bits end up the garbage.

Our local soup kitchen uses meat bits for making fried rice. Fried rice is a very popular meal here in Hawaii, and the cook can put all sorts of things into it. There is no set recipe. It’s just whatever is available, plus plenty of rice and seasonings. Fried rice is a good way to use up those little bits of meat and veggies that you don’t have enough to make a stand-alone meal.

Su Ba wrote:Our local soup kitchen uses meat bits for making fried rice. Fried rice is a very popular meal here in Hawaii, and the cook can put all sorts of things into it. There is no set recipe. It’s just whatever is available

Yup - that's basically what I do, especially on days when my partner is working. I keep a batch of rice-and-lentils in the fridge, cooked up in bone broth from the free bones, and throw in a handful of frozen chopped up meat scraps. Here's yesterday's lunch.



A handful of greens from the garden and anything that might be lurking in the fridge and it's a delicious, cheap, filling, nourishing meal.

Tereza Okava wrote:i thought of you today, Burra, as i got a fabulous deal on pork, a bone-in and skin-on front leg, and brought it home and took it apart...

Heheheh. That's nice to read!

I have seen a Chinese recipe where the skin is cooked to within an inch of its life in water, sliced into ribbons, and basically treated like a noodle. Not sure which we'll do, but no matter what it will be enjoyed. I love using the lard in cooking, I buy it maybe every two years, but now I'll have plenty for making biscuits as well.

That sounds really interesting. I can imagine that given enough water and sliced thinly enough it would make good noodles.

I was interested to learn that they've discovered that collagen doesn't break down completely into separate amino acids when it's eaten - some fragments get absorbed whole and the body recognises these and they act as a trigger for the body to produce its own collagen. Like the cells say 'Hey guys, there's all the right protein coming in to build collagen so let's go for it!'  So my idea has been to find ways to incorporate bone broth and pork skin into as many meals as possible in an attempt to get our bodies on collagen-building mode as often as possible. Here's a video, which hopefully has embedded at the right place. 18 minutes or so in if it didn't embed the way I wanted.



That's how I developed our new rice-and-lentil staple, always cooked in bone broth for collagen, glucosamine, whatever else comes out of the bones and joints. A handful of finely chopped pork skin in the whole batch for extra collagen. Plenty of protein from the lentils even if we don't put extra meat in. Turmeric and black pepper for their anti-inflammatory benefits.

When I first met my late husband he had terrible knee problems and I mostly fixed them by giving him glucosamine supplements. But he'd feel better after three months and stop taking them. Then three months later his knees would have deteriorated again to the point that he'd go back on them. The cycle only stopped when I bought a big slow cooker and started buying pork shoulder and cooking it up in the slow cooker and making soup out of the juices, because pork shoulder is fairly cheap in Portugal but stupidly expensive in the UK where we'd moved from. After that, if he tried stopping the glucosamine tablets he was fine.

My 'new' partner also has knee problems and I'm attempting to fix them the same way. He says the deterioration has stopped since I've been getting the freebie scraps and making bone broth and pork skins, and he's more active now, so I'm hopeful.

I have a batch on now - just a small one with the bones that came in the latest batch of freebies. I'll post photos later when it's finished and I've processed it.