Rendering and cooking with beef, lamb and pork fat
The Prudent Carnivore II
Making Use of the Fat
By Shannon Hayes.
Shannon Hayes is the host of grassfedcooking.com and the author of The Farmer and the Grill and The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook. She works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm, raising grassfed and pastured meats in Upstate New York.
As we make our way into 2009, all of us farmers, locavores and sustainable foodies have much to celebrate. “Eating locally” is no longer regarded as some obscure practice of subsisting on cabbages and rutabagas. Grassfed meats have garnered a position in most ecologically enlightened diets. And best of all, those priggish low-fat pundits who purse their lips at the table whenever a life-loving soul honors a baked potato with a swathe of butter and a hefty pour of gravy are finding themselves shushed, poo pooed, or simply marginalized to an end chair and ignored in conversation.
Still, there is much work to do. If we are going to have food justice in the United States, where every American can have a diet of local, clean, ecologically beneficial and healthful sustenance, then we must also have prudent food use. The increased demand for sustainable grass-fed and pastured meats is a blessing for us farmers, but a more efficient use of our harvest is in order. This is imperative if we are to ensure broader access to our food for all the members of our communities, regardless of income. For the second installment in the Prudent Carnivore series, I’d like to examine some major food waste that I see in the meat cutting room: fat.
The folks at the Weston Price foundation have done their job in helping us to understand the importance of good, clean fats in our diets. But they come at a price. Grass-fed butter in our area ranges from $7 to $12 per pound. Olive oil can run anywhere from $8-$16 per pound. Yet the fat from our grassfed beef, lambs and pastured pigs, which would sell for less than a tin of Crisco, wind up tossed into the refuse bucket on cutting day, destined for the compost pile.
I don’t make my own butter (yes, we have a dairy cow, but I personally regard any milk with the layer of fat removed as “skim,” and can’t bear to drink it). Thus, rendering our animals fats is a way to control our food costs. I use butter for flavor – to dress my potatoes, adorn my pancakes, and season my squash, but in most cases, I opt for our rendered animal fats when frying and baking. They are also the primary ingredient in our soap. I use tallow for our general bathing soaps, and lard for my husband’s and father’s shaving soaps.
One of the wonders of cooking with animal fats is that they have high smoke points. The smoke point is the temperature at which a cooking fat starts to break down and give off smoke. Smoke points are important considerations when frying because super-hot fat can make a kitchen stinky, suffocating, and deeply annoying to spouses and children, causing a considerable strain in family relationships (I’ve learned from experience). Also, once fats exceed their smoke points, they contain free radicals, which have been linked to increased risks of cancer. Whereas the smoke point for extra-virgin olive oil and butter are 320 and 350 degrees respectively, the smoke point for lard is 370 degrees, and tallow is a whopping 420 degrees.
Better still, lard, lamb fat and tallow used for deep frying can be re-used, thus doubling (or, in my home, tripling or quadrupling) the investment in acquiring and rendering it. Last week I used 8 ounces of tallow to fry a batch of doughnuts for my family, strained it, then used it again to make French fries, strained it once more, stored it in the refrigerator, then used the remaining portion yesterday to sauté vegetables and make the base for a gravy. Drew Kime, author of How to Cook Like Your Grandmother, suggests placing a slice of potato into your melted fat for five minutes once you are done cooking and before you filter it to absorb any flavors that are leftover from coking (1).
Each of the animal fats have different properties that make them better suited to different kitchen activities. Lard, which is less saturated, is much softer, making it easier to work into pie crusts, corn bread and biscuits. French cooking has long instructed us to pair our shell bean dishes with lard(2). Examples include Potée Alsacienne, a dish of red kidney beans cooked with fresh pork and sausages, or cassoulets, which require a bounty of goose or pork fat (in my favorite recipe, I use both) as well as lamb, pork, cracklings, goose and sausages. A country paté is dry and crumbly without a generous coating of lard spread thick on top, like a buttercream frosting. Although its smoke point is lower than tallow or lamb fat, lard is a better choice for frying any foods that you might want to serve cold, such as fried chicken. When frying foods in tallow or lamb fat, you will want to enjoy them hot, as the highly saturated fat may leave a coating on your tongue if you eat them cold. Lard, on the other hand, will not do this. So if you plan on taking cold fried chicken on a picnic, opt to fry in the lard. If you want fresh hot doughnuts that don’t smoke up your kitchen and cause grease to cling to your hanging pots, use tallow or lamb fat. Tallow is also good for suet cakes for your birds, for searing steaks at high temperatures, as well as some traditional British treats, like Christmas puddings and mincemeat. Some folks claim that a combination of tallow and lamb fat make good candles, but I’ve yet to experiment with that.
Rendering fat has the mystique of some ancient process to be undertaken only by seasoned backwoods farm women working over outdoor kettles, or sophisticated chefs with extensive clean-up crews. In truth, with today’s modern kitchen equipment, it is extremely easy. The simple method I describe below works for rendering beef, pork or lamb fat.
Leaf fat, that fat that surrounds the kidneys, is regarded as the best fat for rendering. That’s because it is free from impurities, and is 90% fat, making its conversion to lard or tallow very efficient. However, when working with pigs, if you insist on using only leaf fat, you will be letting a lot go to waste. The layer of fat on a pig bordering the meat is 80% fat, and makes a perfectly lovely lard (3). The second layer of fat, closer to the skin of the pig, is the hard fat. It melts less readily, and is best used for sausage making or barding (the process of covering a piece of lean meat with fat prior to cooking)(4). Nevertheless, a pig supplies ample amounts of fat for making lard, particularly the old-style breeds, which were often nurtured expressly for this purpose.
Once you’ve acquired a nice bag of fat (I like to work in volumes of 5-9 pound batches), settle into your kitchen and cut it into small pieces, ideally less than one inch long, taking care to discard any bloody or fibrous spots. Toss the good bits into your pot until it is no more than 2/3 full. It has been said that heavy pots are best for rendering, but I’ve come to favor a lighter good-quality stainless steel pot. It is easier and safer to carry, and clean-up is a breeze.
Many books instruct you to layer your fat on top of water to prevent it from burning, but I’ve found this step unnecessary. Most modern stoves have a simmer burner that will cook the fat at a low enough temperature to prevent scorching. If your stove doesn’t have this, then use a crock pot. To help ensure a nice color, sprinkle a half teaspoon of baking soda over the fat before you start to cook it. There is no need to stir it in. Turn the heat on to the lowest possible setting, and put the lid on the pot, taking care to leave it slightly ajar so that the water can escape. Allow the fat to simmer for several hours, returning every 90 minutes or so to stir it carefully with a wooden spoon. After about 4 hours (more, if you have a really large batch, less if you’re working with a smaller amount), you will notice that the cracklings – browned bits of crisped fat – will be floating on the surface. This is your cue to turn off the heat. Allow the fat to cool while you set a colander over a large stainless steel, porcelain, or glass bowl (not plastic!). Line the colander with cheese cloth, then pour the fat through, straining out all the cracklings, leaving a clear, golden liquid in the bowl. Let the fat cool 5-10 minutes longer before pouring it into wide-mouthed containers to be stored in the refrigerator or freezer. To keep your fat from souring, store it in a cool, dark place. Rendered fat will keep up to two years in a refrigerator, or indefinitely in the freezer. As for the cracklings, if working with pork, serious fat fans can drain the remaining cracklings over brown paper. Salt them for a snack, or add some to your biscuits or cornbread. My old copy of Stocking Up suggests making a spread by chopping them finely with onion, salt, pepper and herbs, then simmering them with ½ cup of white wine or broth until the mixture is thick and bubbly. The spread can be packed into a container and refrigerated…and sounds like a heavenly complement to cocktail hour.
So the next time you reach for butter, commend yourself for choosing a healthful, sustainable fat for nourishing your family. If you are using it to swipe across your bread or whip up your potatoes, have at it. But if you are about to grease your skillet for sautéing veggies, whip up a batch of cornbread, slow cook a bean dish, make a base for your gravy, sear a steak, bake popovers or Yorkshire pudding, then consider the wasted fat in the cutting room that could, with a few simple steps, be put to excellent use in your kitchen and on your budget. Make a note, and the next time you visit your farmer, be sure to ask for some fat for rendering.
Sources:
1. D. Kime, Cook Like Your Grandmother blog
2. W. Root, The Food of France. Alfred A. Knopf, 1958.
3. C. Hupping Stoner,ed., Stocking Up. Rodale Press, 1977
4. P. Montagné. The New Larousse Gastronomique. Crown Publishers, 1960.