What is the Difference between Margarine, Shortening and Lard
With advent and development of biological science, the numbers of food recipes have been increased rapidly. it is a definite reality that every person wants to eat delicious and well-cooked food. However, it is also fact that people become bore from same recipe very soon, even being very delicious. This nature of human being compels him to advent new and new dishes in food recipes. There might be any person who does not know about Margarine, shortening and lard. But still there are lots of people, which are not very clear about the exact difference between these three food recipes.
Margarine
Margarine is the common spreading that we use on our bread on daily basis. Similarly, the use of margarine as cooking and baking material is also frequent. Margarine is made from vegetable fats and oils and this is the reason that it is semi-solid material at room temperature. Being an emulsion, margarine is a mixture of fats and water, but percentage of water is just 16 as compared to fats percentage.
Shortening
We often use shortcut pastry or crumbly pastry as a base material for pie and tart. In fact, this is shortening that is used in preparation of such pastries. The reason is that, crumbly pastry must not be elastic and without shortening, we cannot achieve this property in crumbly pastry. Shortening is 100 percent hydrogenated vegetable oil with very low percentage of water that is the clear reason behind its semi-solid appearance even at room-temperature.
Lard
Lard is fats just like shortening that is used as baking material as well as spread, but it is necessary that this fats material must be obtained from pig. In short, you can say that lard is the edible oil that we obtained from pig parts. Beside baking and spread material, the use of lard is also common in manufacturing of soap and biofuel.
Margarine vs Shortening vs Lard
Both lard and shortening are very closely related things, but the clear difference is that lard is specifically obtained from pig body parts instead of other shortenings that are commonly obtained from vegetable source. No doubt, all these three food materials i.e. margarine, shortening and lard are hydrogenated oils, but margarine contains milk ingredients and water that are not the parts of shortening and lard. Moreover, margarine does not burn at higher temperature just like shortenings. Similarly, shortening and lard produce smoke at higher temperature that is not the property of margarine.
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