ottawa foodies

I got a couple of pounds of leaf lard [pork kidney fat] at Around the Block Butcher Shop yesterday and rendered it down to a couple of cups of nice lard. However, it left me with a couple of cups of lardons as well.

Does anyone have a decent use for these little nuggets of piggy goodness? I don't feel very virtuous salting them and eating them as a snack.

There is still a small amount of fat in them, so the suggestions I see on Wikipedia make some sense. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardon

Personally I just eat them - screw virtue :-)

:D I love adding lardons to a frisée salad. I'll sneak some of the rendered fat into the vinaigrette as well.

If you've got that much, though, a stew-like dish may be the way to go. I could see either coq au vin or choucroute being perfect vehicles for lardony goodness.

Momomoto's suggestions are perfect. You could also try a carbonara pasta.

These aren't like bacon lardons though. There is no meat on them and they are neither smokey nor salty. With a bit more cooking they would merely be crunchy.

With that as their sole adjective, they may just end up in the city waste bin. I tried to cook them up a bit with some onion this morning for a bit of an egg fry-up, but they added nothing at all.

Oh, I was imagining bacon bits sort of dealies :-)

Our kids can eat a ton of these, hot and fresh from the rendering pot! Ok, I admit, I can eat quite a few myself.

One use we, (and some of our customers) have found to be successful is crumbling them very fine (by hand or food processor), then adding them to biscuit batter. The lardons can't be too cooked, or too fatty. You have to adjust the amount of fat in the batter, but when you get it right, WOW!

We've always called them pork scrunchions, dunno if I spelled that right. Lardons sounds much more fancy-pants, though. I'll have to remember that. But I think maybe traditionally pork scrunchions were from salted fat.

And, for what it's worth, the lardons from leaf lard will not be nearly as nice as the lardons from back fat. Both fat types come from pork, but they have very different tastes and uses. Maybe why they added nothing special to your egg fry up, Rizak

If you're looking for a fun name, the Dragonlady swears she saw them in Joy of Cooking, but with an extra vowel: LARDOONS. I kind of like that one.

I wish I had thought of replacement strategies before I put them in the bin. Anyway, my sister will probably love the idea of putting some in her biscuit mixture. I'm going to have to try it myself next time.

LARDOONS! That's great!

When I showed my husband that another term for scrunchion was 'lardon' the first thing he asked was 'Does that rhyme with hard-on?' ;-)