After an hour or so in the fridge I took my pastry and rolled it out.  It was perfect, not a tear to be seen.  There were none of the usual issues that I've confronted in pastries with a butter based crust.  The lard pastry was supple,  and tender and a total joy to work with.  This has changed my whole outlook on pie pastry.

To demonstrate that lard crusts are versatile I've made two different filled pastry's - savory and sweet.  The sweet being a apple, raisin and cinnamon turnover and the second being an tuna, green olive and raisin empanada.

I divided the pastry into 2 pieces and rolled them out seperately.  The dough was easy to recombine once cut, making it easy to use all the dough.

I got a total of twenty pieces out of this batch of pastry -18 really nicely cut pieces and two that I rolled together at then end. 

Both of my fillings were totally cooked at the beginning.  So I didn't have to worry about the interior reaching a certain temperature.  Next I filled my rounds with filling and sealed with an eggwash.

Once done the whole batch went into the oven at 400 degrees.  The apple turnovers have cinnamon sugar on top, and the empanadas have sea salt and cracked black pepper.

I think it's my oven, but these babies took around 30 minutes to reach my desired brown colour.

Once they were finally done the pastry was both tender and flaky and worked deliciously with both the apple and the tuna filling.

My favorite was the tuna but Ross favored the apple.  Neither tasted like pork.

Lard is absolutely the way to go with pie crusts (savory and sweet) and I can safely say I'm never going back the the high maintenance butter version.