Animal Fat In Food

1. How To Render Animal Fat: Making Lard And Tallow
2. How To Render Fat And Why
3. Why Animal Fat Is Good For You
4. Is It Time To Bring Animal Fats Back Into Your Kitchen?
5. Benefits Of Eating Suet And Tallow
   1. What Is Rendered Animal Fat (tallow)?
6. Edible Animal Fat Market Size, Share And Growth Analysis By 2030
7. Animal Fats Are Back
8. How To: Rendering Animal Fats
9. Animal Fats And Oils

Animal fats can be a healthy part of any diet, especially from a grass-fed and pasture-raised animal. Learning to cook with lard, tallow, and schmaltz is easier and healthier than you might think.

Whether you’re rendering fat from scratch or buying good quality animal fat, there’s never been a better time to reintroduce this classic kitchen staple back into your culinary repertoire.

Animal fats have been through a lot in the last 30 years. Once a staple in kitchens across the country, lard and tallow were largely eliminated from American cuisine in the early 90s when fat-free diets became popular.

How To Render Animal Fat: Making Lard And Tallow

At the time, margarine and vegetable shortening became the new popular kids on the block — it was down with natural fats and in with super-processed, high-in-trans-fat alternatives!

We now know that those synthetic, processed trans fats have nasty health consequences, and studies are now confirming the wisdom of a traditional diet with plenty of natural animal fats. (And grass-fed bone broth too!)

Now the pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction and animal fats are making a resurgence. Maybe you’ve noticed the appearance of duck fat-fried potatoes on your local bistro menu or you’ve made an astonishingly perfect pie crust using lard instead of shortening.

How To Render Fat And Why

Or perhaps you’ve read about the health benefits of using animal fats, many of which are rich sources of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids. Whatever your reason for wanting to introduce more animal fats into your diet, there are plenty of reasons and resources to get you started.

Animal fats have been vilified for so long that it’s refreshing to see a resurgence in public interest around the once-taboo ingredient’s many health and culinary benefits. Both lard and tallow are high in vitamin D and omega 3 fatty acids and lack any of the trans fats which are prevalent in commercially prepared vegetable shortenings.

Depending on the recipe, food that has been prepared using animal fats tends to be crispier, flakier, and ultra-flavorful. If the fat is prepared properly before rendering, that is, all the meat has been removed, it should be fairly flavorless and odorless.

Why Animal Fat Is Good For You

Readily available animal fat is an added bonus of the tip-to-tail lifestyle, it would be incredibly wasteful to dispose of fat instead of finding a use for it — whether that’s in the kitchen or elsewhere.

Even small animals like squirrels are a potentially good source of animal fat, I’ve found it largely comes down to trial and error in terms of which fats are best for cooking with.

The type of animal is top of the list, but other factors include where on the animal’s body it’s harvested from, how and what the animal is fed, and the season it’s harvested.

Is It Time To Bring Animal Fats Back Into Your Kitchen?

When preparing and rendering animal fat, it’s important to have some basic knowledge about the different types of fat that are located throughout the animal’s body.

For example, if you plan on rendering your own lard from pig fat, you’ll want to focus on leaf lard and back fat.

Leaf fat, which is also called suet in the context of beef, is the fat surrounding the kidneys. The fat taken from this location, whether you’re making lard or tallow, is particularly valued for its tasteless and odorless properties.

What's The Difference Between All The Fats?

We carefully render leaf lard for making homemade pie crusts, and frying our favorite sugarhouse donuts during spring, when we’re busy all day making maple syrup in the sugarhouse.

Back fat, which comes from the back of an animal, tends to be firmer and more intensely flavored. While it can be rendered, it’s often left on the cuts of meat (think pork chops) or incorporated into traditional charcuterie (like salami). Back fat will give a porky flavor to whatever you’re cooking, which is great in the context of some foods like vegetables, but not so great for baking.

Caul fat, which is also known as “lace fat” due to its lace-like appearance, surrounds the internal organs of certain animals and fowl such as cows, sheep, pigs, and ostrich. Instead of being rendered down into a more scoopable form, caul fat is used as a casing for sausages, roulades, and pâtés.

Benefits Of Eating Suet And Tallow

Like wine and cheese, the different flavors showcased by animal fats are partially dependent on the season they’ve been harvested (officially, this is referred to as the “terroir” of the animal).

The taste of bear fat, for example, is superior in the autumn, when the animal has most likely been feeding on seasonal nuts and berries — in some blueberry-rich areas, such as Montana, the fat actually takes on a blue tinge.

Pig fat is especially susceptible to the diet of the animal, even as much as 6 weeks can make a difference in terms of taste.

What Is Rendered Animal Fat (tallow)?

Italy’s prosciutto di Parma and Spain’s Jamon Iberico are two world-famous examples of cured ham that has come from pigs with distinct dietary restrictions, both of which come with a hefty price tag if purchased from a reputable source.

When it comes to animal fat (or meat, for that matter), there’s always the debate about the benefits of wild vs. grass-fed vs. conventional.

Current research shows that wild and grass-fed animal products have a higher ratio of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids to less-healthy omega-6 fatty acids.

Edible Animal Fat Market Size, Share And Growth Analysis By 2030

Wild animals tend to be leaner and gamier, but have even higher omega-3 counts. The nutrients and taste of the fat will differ from animal to animal, even if they’ve been hunted at the same time of year.

If you don’t hunt your own animals, I’d recommend checking out your local butcher shop for the best-quality animal fat. Since it’s still a largely undesirable product (much to your benefit) you might be able to find a butcher who’s willing to set aside and sell (or give away) fat that’s been trimmed from the animal of your choice.

Incorporating pastured pork fat into wild game recipes can add incredible flavor and richness to otherwise lean game meat (venison, elk, etc).

Animal Fats Are Back

While differences in season, feeding, and location can make a big difference, the type of animal is usually what most people consider when choosing which animal fats to use and how to use them.

Generally speaking, animal fats produce superior pie crusts and extra-crispy deep-fried recipes, there’s a good reason lard and tallow were the go-to pantry ingredient prior to the invention of vegetable shortening.

To render pig fat into lard, you’ll want to use leaf lard (which is the fat that is stored around the kidneys) or back fat (also called fatback, this is the fat that is stored along the animal’s back, shoulder, and rump).

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Save pork belly for curing into homemade bacon, or cooking fresh. The pork fat in the belly is marbled into the meat, which makes it especially good for cooking but difficult to render separately. (More on bacon grease later.)

Pig fat that has already been rendered into lard is fairly easy to come by in butcher shops, grocery stores, and online. If you have access to a freshly butchered pig or half-pig, getting your hands on leaf and back fat to render will be much, much cheaper than buying it from the butcher.

In my post about rendering leaf lard, I rave about how delicious homemade donuts are that have been fried in lard. In addition to donuts, lard has a long list of uses in the kitchen, including:

How To: Rendering Animal Fats

Lard has many other non-culinary uses, so if you find yourself with more lard than you need in the kitchen it can be used to:

Besides being a welcome treat as-is, pork belly contains more meat than other types of pig fat and isn’t the best cut of meat for rendering. To render clean lard, you’ll need to slowly render the fat without any meat present, which will give you a neutral taste that’s more versatile.

That’s not to say that bacon drippings aren’t tasty, they’re amazing. That said, they’re not as versatile as neutral animal fats carefully rendered. Neutral isn’t always better, and the flavor of bacon goes well with both savory and sweet recipes.

New Venture By Tyson Foods Turns Animal Fat Into Diesel Fuel

To collect bacon grease, simply pour warm (not hot!) bacon grease through a mesh sieve lined with paper towel or cheesecloth into a heat-proof container.

Store collected bacon fat in the fridge for up to 3 months, or keep it in the freezer indefinitely — you’ll just have to take it out of the freezer about 20 minutes before you plan on using it so that it’s soft enough to scoop with a spoon.

If I don’t have any large-scale beef projects in the near future, I like to save and store beef fat from smaller-scale recipes in the freezer. When I’ve saved up about 2 to 5 pounds of fat, I’m ready to render it down for beef tallow.

Animal Fats And Oils

Purify the tallow, which makes it ideal for using in candles and skincare products in addition to its many uses in the kitchen. Like many other animal fats, beef tallow is solid at room temperature, and I find that storing it in pint jars makes the most for our space.

If you want to buy beef fat that has already been rendered, I’d suggest checking out your local butcher or farmers