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.

This morning I decided to use the bones to make broth.

There weren't many boney bits but I'm getting low on bone broth to cook the rice in so I thought I'd make some today using just the ones that turned up in the latest batch of freebies. Pork and chicken bits as far as I can tell.



I've added salt, sichuan pepper (seeds available! to anyone local-ish!) bay leaves and half a lemon.



These are the sichuan peppers. Loaded with seeds! It's the pink husk that is the spice, so there are loads of surplus seeds if anyone wants them.



I put as much water as I can safely fit in the crock and left it for a few hours...



A few hours later, the smell is heavenly. And it looks awesome.



I strained the broth through a sieve. Those bits can be left to cool then I can pick anything edible off the bones. If Himself doesn't find where I hid them first...



And this is the broth!

Oooops, left my favourite cocao mug in the background.



I split the broth into two portions, and made each portion up to two cups so I know exactly how much water to add when I make up the rice-and lentils.

At least one of those portions will be frozen. The bowls are a good shape to allow a frozen block of broth to be removed and packed separately in the freezer.



Only a few of the scrappy bits evaporated while I wasn't looking. I went through the left-overs and picked out anything edible. Meaty edibles can go in someone's lunch, or be frozen down. The gristly ends of the pork shoulder are now as soft as warm butter and might get cut up into teeny bits to put in the next batch of rice and lentils.

I'm afraid these bones will be thrown away. They are too sharp and small to risk giving to the dog, and if I attempt to compost them or bury them he will detect them and dig them out at the first available opportunity. If we have bigger bones, he eats them too but at least they don't harm him.



And that's it for today. After I've cleaned everything up.

I still have to show you all how I use the broth and some of the skinny-bits to make the rice and lentils. And probably the liver-paté exercise. And maybe a meal with the meatiest scraps. We get good value out those freebies!

What a great instructive post on how to use bits and bobs of meat!
America is used to very cheap food, especially meat.
I value the fat and collagen from meat more than the protein.
Fat makes a pot of anything better and it's harder to grow than carbs or protein.



We are currently rather unsophisticated in our carcass conservation.
Many meals start in the casserole sized electric skillet, with whatever fat is in the skillet from the last meal.
My wife pan fried some chicken legs last night and I will probably try rice in the pan tonight.
After we dish out the rice, we add some butter and fry eggs, which go on top of the rice.
The butter left in the pan might host burgers next, and the fat from that cook a pan full of onions that become the base of a white sauce.


When we purposefully process carcasses for stock and fat, I prefer to use a pressure cooker.
Not only is it very effective at extracting nutrients, the bones left behind are very soft, this no danger to animals.
Mind you, my family is also pretty effective at extracting nutrients without addition processing :

Any of the meaty bits that hadn't mysteriously evaporated when I wasn't looking were cut up into chunks and put on one side of the tray to be frozen. There were a few lumps of fat there too which were added to the fat pot for paté making.

I picked over the bones from the broth-making exercise and took anything worth eating and cut it up into smaller bits and put that on the other side of the tray to go in with the collagen-rich bits I use in the rice-and-lentils.



OK, paté making time.

This is His job!

The cast iron frying pan had just been used for cooking up some chicken breast for Sunday lunch and he used the left-over oil to fry up onions, mushrooms and garlic. Then a third of a kilo of chicken liver is added. My son had given me a kilo of chicken liver and asked for a jar of paté in return. I'd split that kilo into three and we usually get one full and one part jar of paté out of each third, which usually lasts us the right sort of length of time.



The frying pan does have a bit of a story. Soon after Paul Wheaton had published his first article about using a cast iron skillet, which was around 14 years ago, I'd decided to splash out and send off for one as I had no experience with them and they sounded a good idea. Plus my own little stainless steel frying pan had died an unfortunate death a couple of years earlier and I really missed having one around that size. My son was being home-schooled at the time (it was quite a while ago...) and I got him to read through the article as he was getting interested in cooking techniques. When the frying pan arrived, we opened the package together and he basically ran off with it and did exactly what Paul had recommended in the original article and triumphantly demonstrated how well a fried egg will slide around on it just a few minutes later.

I was impressed! And happily shared my experience with all my facebook friends.

A week or so later one of them also reported his own success story. He'd seen an old cast iron frying pan for sale for the princely sum of 50p on a stall at the Railway Preservation Society's open day, snapped it up, spent a couple of hours restoring, and was happily using it. Part of me was very happy for him, but I'm sorry to say there was a bitter, jealous part of me that just thought he was a jammy git and how it wasn't fair that I'd had to splash out serious money to import a brand new one to Portugal while someone back in Wales had managed to pick one up for 50p just like that.

I bit my tongue though and just congratulated him.

But then a lot can happen in 14 years, and now He is in Portugal with me, and cooking paté up in that self-same 50p cast iron frying pan for us all while my son has successfully claimed my original one.  I even just admitted to him how jealous I was all those years ago. Which he found highly amusing...

Anyway, into the pan with the liver...



When it had cooked up enough, we added half of that glass of rendered-out fatty bits, which still have quite a bit of fat in them. Most recipes say to use butter but this stuff is free and tasty and lower in cholesterol and has some useful collagen in it, which is what held it together while the lard rendered out. It blends up nice and smooth into the paté and seems an excellent use for it.



We left it to cook up a bit more, then He stuck it in a better shaped pan and whizzed it up with a stick blender and transferred it to a couple of glass jars.



We usually fill the fancy one up to the top and put whatever's left in the other one, but this time we filled the other one up to the top as that was the payment to my son for the liver. There are still two portions of liver left, and one of rendered out fatty bits which I need to stick back into the freezer, so there will be more to come. I'm sure my son will end up with another jar, too, if he gets through all that one.

There's still two batches of bone broth and those meaty bits and collagen bits to use yet too, so more posts to follow...

Burra Maluca wrote:
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.

So I rendered my lard on Saturday, and thought I would make fried rice on Sunday with the meaty bits. But after reading this we decided to try something new. There was a lot of skin in the lard pot, and after getting as much as I could out of them I turned them out on the board and diced them, then we fried them up in the frying pan with some soy sauce, brown sugar and chili oil, going for a Thai-style caramelized ground beef thing, just using the skin and pieces. I put a portion over dandelion leaves from the garden and we ate them with noodle soup (in the broth that I cooked my pork ribs in on Friday, leftover stacking for the win....).
What was left, today went into a tapioca pancake sandwich (or what i hear people in the US calling cassava now).
It goes really well with greens, and I'm thinking of my knees as i eat it!! get stronger, buddies!

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

Nancy, ask!  I get free beef fat from our local butcher (pretty sure all the pork fat goes into his sausages), and bones too.  I render down the fat for our main cooking fat and make stock from the bones.  I used to pay a very nominal amount for "dog scraps," though not since the dog died.

I'm currently experimenting with the beef cracklings left over from rendering the fat.  I've whizzed them up in the food processor to add to stews--no one in the family has complained yet (they sort of blend in with the broth during cooking).  Also tried adding the whizzed up bits to meatballs, to bulk them out (sort of worked but pretty greasy during cooking).  I do sparingly eat them as is, though they aren't as tasty as pork cracklings/scratchings;  they kind of remind me of cold popcorn:  just add salt.  

Anybody else have a good use for the cooked connective tissue that remains after rendering beef tallow?

I think it's time I showed you all my rice-and-lentil mix, made up with turmeric, black pepper, bone broth and collagen rich 'skinny bits'.

I use white rice because my other half isn't keen on brown. And split red lentils because they go with the rice better in my opinion. Lentils rather than beans because they cook in the same amount of time as the rice does so I can throw it all together in one pot. I start it off on the gas stove and then put it in the hay-box for a couple of hours to do its thing.

I use one cup of rice and one cup of lentils. Then around a teaspoon of ground turmeric, which is as much as I can cope with before it overwhelms me.



Then grind some black pepper on.



Then add a good handful of 'skinny bits' cut into small pieces from the pork skin left over from rendering and stir well.



Then at least two cups of bone broth, made up to four and bit cups with water.

The pans I use are vintage enamel ones, fairly heavy, bought second hand. Not ultra cheap but I do really like them. They are heavy enough to retain heat quite well and nice looking enough use as storage bowls in the fridge. I bought them as a bit of a treat to celebrate the introduction of the hay-box.



I bring the mixture to the boil, stirring well because enamel is a little inclined to stick. Then simmer for a minute with the lid on so the lid heats up before I put it all in the haybox. If I don't do this then it tends to absorb too much heat and might cool the mixture down too much to allow it to cook just in the residual heat.



Then I pop the whole thing into the haybox, cover with bits of folded blanket and pop the insulated lid on and leave it for a couple of hours.



When it's lunchtime, the rice and lentils are perfectly cooked, all the water has been absorbed, all the flavours have mingled beautifully and nothing has stuck. The haybox is hands down the best way to cook rice I've ever used.



We had some veggies stir-frying and just added a lot of the hot rice and lentil mixture to it and gave it a stir.



There - pretty as a picture, cheap, nourishing, and designed to help your knees as it's loaded with stuff to help repair joints.



I still need to show you all a couple of sample meals involving the 'meaty bits' having shown you what I do with the bone broth and the skinny bits in the rice and lentils, and the fatty bits in the paté.

Here's one of my favourite ways to use the meatier scraps - pasta with a carbonara style sauce, green peppers, meaty scraps, parmesan and parsley.

Pure comfort food on a rainy day...

Biscuits and gravy today, with galega cabbage, using rendered-out meaty bits instead of sausage.

It was the first chance I've had to test the teeny, tiny little wok I was given which is just the right size to make gravy for one. And the biscuits were cooked in the old stove-top oven that my son rescued out of a rubble pile for me.