Confit: a great way to get more fat in your diet!

Confit, which involves cooking meat in large amounts of fat and is delicious and a great way to get more fat in your diet. As a bonus any meat that is made into confit lasts longer. Duck confit is the most well known confit, but you can cook nearly any meat this way. The most recent issue of the Weston A. Price journal mentions how the real old fashioned Mediterranean diet included lamb cooked in its own fat and salt, which they stored and ate through the winter.

I first had chicken confit at Lot2 in Brooklyn. Since I have SOOO much lard from the NYC Paleo Meetup Meatshare and my CSA share from The Piggery, I decided to try it myself. Unfortunately, I made a HUGE mistake....

I only made two chicken thighs. You really do need more, it's so delicious and fairly easy. Furthermore, it has the luscious taste of a good fried chicken without the mess or the breading.

For this confit I used

• Lard from The Piggery
• Chicken thighs
• Salt, garlic, and pepper

Yeah, it's that simple. To prepare the chicken for confit, I put a little bit of the salt, garlic, and pepper on the skin and wrapped it up and placed it under a heavy dish, skin side down, in the fridge. A few hours later I took it out. I made it a little bed in my crockpot with squares of the unmelted lard to slow down the cooking a little since my crockpot gets a little hot. At 11:30, when I went to bed (I know, bad), I put the chicken skin side down on the lard bed and turned the crock pot on low. When I got up at 7 my whole kitchen smelled of warm fried chicken.

For the finished touch, I put in in my toaster oven on broil to crisp the skin. I wanted to save it for dinner, but I couldn't resist. I ate one thigh for breakfast. Between the crispy golden skin and the silky smooth fatty flesh, I was in heaven. It was like fried chicken...except it wasn't just the skin that was delicious! The whole thigh was amazing, even the little ends of cartilage on the bone, which had melted and then been crisped into a pork rind-like treat. There was excess fat left over, so I'll poach some root veggies in that when I eat the second thigh.

I'm normally not a huge fan of chicken...I LOVE the skin, but the flesh bores me to death. This solved that problem and the lard surplus too!