Why The Right Fat Can Transform Your Cooking

Cooking fat isn’t exactly the sort of ingredient people get excited about. But behind every impossibly crisp chip, flaky pie crust, and golden roast potato is often a fat doing far more work than it gets credit for.

Most people don’t think very much about the fat they cook with, and to be fair, why would they when you can just reach for a bottle of vegetable or canola oil sitting beside the stove, pour some into the pan, and get on with dinner? It’s cheap, neutral, gets the job done, can’t knock it really. But in a time before seed oils became the go-to, kitchens around the world relied upon a very different set of characters. They used things like beef tallow, pork lard, duck fat, and goose fat. And these weren’t for particularly special occasions either; it’s just what they had on hand.

Nowadays, most home cooks can’t be bothered with all those, but there are those out there—chefs, mainly—who still seek them out for what they can add to a dish. Depending on the kind of fat in question, you’ll find different melting points, different flavour compounds, and sometimes a different chemistry entirely. It can make such a difference that just changing the fat can, at times, matter more than changing the recipe itself.

Beef tallow

Ask anybody who had fries in McDonald’s till up to around the 1990s, and they’ll tell you that the fries today could never compare. It’s not just nostalgia colouring their judgement, because in the decades before, the fries were fried almost exclusively in beef tallow.

Made by slowly rendering beef suet, tallow has an unusually high smoke point, meaning it can withstand blistering temperatures without breaking down. And this is one of the reasons why it’s so beloved for high-heat activities like searing or deep-frying.

Potatoes, in particular, seem to adore the stuff. As they fry, moisture races out of the surface, allowing the tallow to build an especially rigid crust. What you then get are chips that break open with an audible crunch, giving way to a fluffy, steaming centre.

Beyond potatoes, tallow lends a subtle roasted savouriness to whatever it’s cooking. It’s not to the point where it’ll have your carrots tasting like steak or anything, but it adds just enough to make everything seem that little bit richer than before.

Pork lard

Lard probably suffers from one of the biggest image problems in cooking. First of all, I don’t know if it’s just me, but the word “lard” just doesn’t sound very appetising. Then there’s the commonly held misinformation that it’ll make everything taste like bacon. How I wish. I’d get more than a little use out of something like that. In reality, though, good-quality leaf lard, rendered from the fat around a pig’s kidneys, is unexpectedly neutral. If ever there was a time that your pie crust tasted overtly porky, chances are that the lard simply wasn’t rendered particularly well.

Where lard really shines is baking. Unlike butter, lard contains very little water. As pastry bakes, tiny pockets of solid fat melt away, leaving behind delicate layers that make for exceptionally flaky crusts. Generations of bakers swore by it for good reason, and it’s why many still combine butter and lard today: butter for the flavour, and lard for the texture. Outside the oven, it also makes an excellent frying fat whenever you want the ingredients themselves to take centre stage instead of the oil they’re cooked in.

Duck fat

Then we have duck fat, arguably the most aristocratic of this cohort. Melting at a surprisingly low temperature, it imparts an almost silky mouthfeel that coats food without making it feel too heavy. Yeah, the flavour is definitely noticeable, but it’s not a particularly loud-mouthed one; it’s more of a softly spoken wallflower instead. It’s a very rich fat, which, if I’m going out of my way to procure a very specific kind of fat, I would want it to be. It’s got this savoury, almost buttery quality to it, with just enough poultry character lurking in the background to remind you that you’re cooking with something a little more special.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with roast potatoes. Parboil them first, rough up the edges a little, then roast them in hot duck fat, and thank me later. You’ll find those jagged surfaces crisp into a million tiny shards of crunch, all while the inside stays at scarcely believable levels of creamy. It feels like a potato that shatters when you first bite into it before transitioning abruptly to a centre that feels like it could very well be mashed. It’s also brilliant with mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, or even just a fried egg if you’re feeling a touch indulgent.

Of course, these three only barely scratch the surface. Britain’s long-running love affair with goose fat is well documented, while schmaltz has been a staple of Jewish cooking for longer than anyone can pinpoint. Then you have even stronger-tasting options like mutton tallow that still play an important role in traditional cuisines around the world.

I’m not saying you should throw out every bottle of vegetable oil in your cupboard and switch exclusively to animal fat, far from it. The point I’m simply trying to get across is that different fats can bring different facets to your table. By all means, reach for the conveniently placed bottle of sunflower oil, or what have you, when you’re whipping up something easy, but the next time you’re roasting potatoes or baking a pie, try reaching for something your great-grandparents would have found a little more familiar instead. It might just be the thing you didn’t even know you were missing.

Opening image: 亮亮 王 | Pexels