ground meat

[Bourbon Red]

Yeah - if you're grinding it into the meat use fat - not lard. Backfat, leaf fat - whatever - but not lard that has already been rendered. That would be like mixing in butter - gets the fat in there but not quite what you're after.
Bacon - now there's a beautiful idea....

 

[~gd]

If you buy lard from the store, read the label CAREFULLY. Avoid anything that says "partially hydrogenated".

Thanks, WZ. Just so I know...why should I avoid anything that says 'partially hydrongenated'? (I know you know all the evils of the frankenfood world & I'm still trying to figure it all out.)

Oh, let me, let me!!!!
They bombard the fat with hydrogen so that it transfers (trans fat) the hydrogen molecules, changing the natural parings of molecules and making the fat into something unnatural. This method was developed earlier in the last century to get some harder fat from cheap fat for making soap. Then the food industry found out that you can make a Twinkie last for a century and that they can use very poor quality fat to do so.....voila, the prevalance of hydrogenated fats in processed foods.

The big problem is that our cell walls are primarily made of saturated fats (think pork fat, any animal fat, egg yolks, cream) and hydrogenated fats fool the body into building cell walls with it instead. But it doesn't behave the way the good saturated fats do. It creates dead spots on the cell walls, preventing normal cell functioning. It is implicated in many diseases today, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

It is PURE POISON.

The last time I read something like this it started out "Once upon a time.......Unless you are near death your cell walls are NOT made of saturated fats. Even lard contains more unsaturared than saturated fats (or it would make no sense to hydrongenate it). 'Trans' refers to the way the oil/fat molecule is folded, the opposite is "cis" in natural fats/oils the molecules can flip between the two different foldings. The hydronagenation process breaks the double bonds in the molecule that determine the degree of saturation (un=0, Mono=1, poly=many) and therefore makes the trans isomer more stable and more likely to be found. Calling trans fats PURE POISON is streching the truth a lot. Unhealthy under prolonged use maybe, but many NATURAL fats/oils have trans isomers.