Lard perfectly "gets along" with any amount of salt, so it is impossible to spoil the dish. Cutting fresh lard into the correct portioned pieces and dipping them without sparing them in salt, you can enjoy its taste in a day. And if you pour all this with boiling water, then the bacon will cook even faster.
Salted lard is considered a primordially Ukrainian dish, but its fans all over the world are countless. Whoever has tasted this product at least once will certainly try to master the technology of its salting, especially since this procedure is quite simple. And yet, there are some cooking secrets.
Experienced Tips
The most valuable benefit of lard is that it cannot be oversalted. In order not to think about how much salt you need, you just need to pour it in a thick layer into a bowl or deep container and dip the bacon from all sides, pressing each piece into the contents. The salt is used coarsely, without any additives.
Whether the salting is successful depends on the quality of the bacon. Too soft and too hard are not good. Experienced buyers can identify with simple finger pressure, but you can ask the seller for a knife. For a soft and a knife is not needed, because the finger will "sink" in it, and in a hard one, even a sharpened knife will encounter obstacles in its path if the structure of the fat is heterogeneous, lumpy. A thick skin will also indicate the stiffness of the product. Pay attention to the color: white-pink is desirable, not gray-yellow, which is a sign of stale bacon.
Salt can be of any thickness, but 3-4 cm is considered optimal. Choosing only greasy or meat-greasy pieces is a matter of taste. Too much meat is also undesirable, as it will take more salt and as a result, salted pieces will taste harder and more salty. Such lard will not quickly saline, and it is better to expose it to subsequent smoking.
Fastest salting recipes
There is a lot of controversy about how long it takes to salt lard. Some eat it within a day, someone claims that you need to stand for at least a week. I must say that it depends on the size of the pieces and the salting recipe. And there are a great many of them, although there are only three ways: dry, hot (cooking) and in brine. If you want to eat it as soon as possible, then the lard of the recommended thickness should be cut into cubes about 3 * 10 in size. Even with dry salting (just dipping in salt), it will be ready the next day.
To make the bacon more aromatic and pungent in taste, spices are added: garlic, black or red ground pepper, bay leaf. All this can be grated before dipping in salt, or you can mix directly with salt. It is better to cut each garlic clove into thin slices or grate, then its smell will be more pronounced. But those who like to eat lard with a bite of garlic are limited to a minimum of ingredients: lard and salt.
Salt can be salted even faster than in a day. To do this, the pieces are folded into a jar and sprinkled with salt and garlic in the course of the case. At the same time, you can put water on the fire and bring it to a boil. Then a jar of lard is poured with boiling water and left to cool completely. This usually happens after 3 hours and means that the salted lard is ready to eat.
