Why use lard in pastries?
Butter produces extremely good crusts, yet lard holds two distinct advantages over an all-butter crust: • First, lard produces flakier crusts than butter. Butter begins to melt into the dough at a lower temperature; even the small amount of water present in butter may cause the dough particles to stick to one another rather than separate into the discrete layers that constitute a flaky pastry • Second, while butter (especially the European-style butters with their higher fat content) is primarily a saturated fat, lard by percentage is primarily an unsaturated fat Still, embracing the lard in pies comes with its own set of limitations. Whereas butter retains the properly malleable-yet-firm consistency for making pastries at a temperature range of 58 to 69°F, Harold McGee says that lard only has a workable range at a slightly higher temperature, up to 75 degrees. If you’ve ever worked with lard as well as butter pastries, you’ve noticed this critical difference between the two kinds of f
