We don't need a lot of different cooking oils on carnivore. The ones available to us- butter and animal fats- are the best out there. They are stable, minimally processed, and contain great fatty acids.
A fantastic way to take advantage of the simplicity of carnivore is by making your own cooking oils using leftover fat from your meats. You'll save money and contribute to sustainable, waste-reducing, whole-animal carnivore practices.
The fat that comes from beef or mutton is usually referred to as "tallow", while the fat that comes from pork is called "lard", although tallow can sometimes refer to a mixture of different animal fats and all animal cooking fats can also just be called "suet". "Schmaltz" is chicken fat commonly used in Jewish cooking. Regardless of the names, leftover fat from any type of meat can be rendered into cooking fat.
The cooking fat I use the most is lard from bacon. Cooking bacon always results in a good quantity of leftover liquid fat, which I always save, but I recently decided it was time to stop throwing away leftover beef fat and start making my own tallow as well.
These procedures are so simple that you may not even need to reference these instructions again after doing them the first time!
Instructions
- Roughly remove any excess meat from the fat. Any non-fat will be leftover as useful cracklings.
- Add the fat to a pan with a small amount of water for the fat to bathe in. The water will keep any of the fat pieces from burning and keep it cooking more evenly without you having to stir as much.
- Bring to a simmer, and then reduce the heat to maintain the simmer.
- If the water cooks off and there isn't yet enough fat rendered for the fat pieces to bathe in the fat instead, keep adding more water (carefully- remember the fat will be hot at this point and fat and water don't mix!)
- Stir occasionally and continue to cook until the leftover fat pieces are almost entirely dark and crunchy. These are your cracklings, basically tasty, crunchy, fried pieces of fat which are tasty and useful for other dishes.This took a little over an hour for my medium sized amount of fat.
- While the fat is at least still warm, strain the fat and cracklings. You can do this a number of different ways. Setting a mesh strainer over a funnel into a jar would be most efficient if you have all the materials. I used a mesh strainer over a mixing bowl, and then poured the tallow into a jar and saved the dry cracklings.
The fat will cool into a beautiful off-white solid at room temperature. Animal fats are stable enough to be kept at room temperature for a long time, but can be stored in the refrigerator for extended periods of time and in the freezer almost indefinitely.
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