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America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a Reason
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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there's a few treats we still use lard or tallow for but that's pretty much it, and only once-a-year at most.
still use real butter or bacon drippings for frying eggs, though. ain't gonna give that up.
I did that for a few days recently. I felt like shit on the bacon or bacon grease days. It wasn't tasty enough to justify. I'll stick with a thin layer of olive or vegetable oil for my eggs.
Using butter over vegetable oil definitely is justifiable, though. I really only do it with baking for that home-cooked flavor.
And of course I'm not going to give up bacon here and there. I'm just not going to buy a package and eat it over a week in other dishes.
It's expensive AF, but duck fat is not saturated.... And omfg is it good
Anytime we get a duck I spend a long time skinning it and rendering the fat, because holy crap it is so good, and the de-fatted duck meat is easier to work with anyway. I do also render lard if we have pig, and other than that keep butter, olive oil and avocado oil on hand. Not really for health, any of that, it's to have good food but I do think less processed is likely healthier.
Chicken fat, schmaltz, is good for cooking too - put 4 salted, skin on, bone in chicken thighs in a cold iron skillet skin side down, turn on the stove and let them cook until the skin is brown, flip and finish, remove, then into the hot pan chopped greens, saute them in the chicken fat with a little white wine, so good.
Beef tallow is not delicious, though. It just doesn't taste good.
Tallow doesn't go much for flavor, but the oil texture on things like fries is pretty solid. It's like when you work with duck, and that oil just lightly clings to everything, but not unpleasantly. Perhaps I'm just nostalgic for my stint in 90's fast food :)
https://foodstruct.com/compare/duck-fat-vs-lard
Duck fat is about 33% saturated fat. Lard is 39%.
So it's less saturated, but a long way from not being saturated.
It is delicious, though.
Should have said not AS saturated
Less saturated, more fat / volume and higher levels of mono and poly which is good.
none of the fats are "unsaturated"
In terms of saturated per TBL, it's kind of middle of the road, lower than lard and tallow and coconut, higher than canola, vegetable, avocado or chicken fat.
I'm one of the universe's lone people who doesn't really care for bacon, so I've never fried an egg in bacon fat, but making an omelet with margarine instead of butter was why my omelets sucked for years. Catloaf said olive oil, but I don't think I would like the flavor.
I achieved omelet perfection with butter. To the point that I took one of the only (non-"can you believe how disgusting this looks/sounds?") food photos I've ever taken in my life:
There's also vegetable oil and margarine with butter flavor btw. that is way healthier.
I don't know of any long-term studies that show that margarine in the US is healthier than butter.
Outside the US, margarine can contain trans fats, and those are far worse for you than any form of animal fat.
Hi, thanks for your answer.
Are you aware of a study that systematically compared margarine and butter in that regard? I searched on Google Scholar but wasn't able to find any trustworthy bigger / international papers. Some small scale ones looking only at a handful of products in Pakistan but nothing that feels really reliable.
In Germany someone sent 19 popular margerine, butter and hybrid brands to a laboratory in 2015 to debunk the myth of trans fatty acids in margarine. Indeed, all plant-based products scored significantly better. Butter and ghee had 4 to 10 times higher amounts of trans fatty acids.
The author of this study (if you want to call it a study) wanted to proof exactly that. Therefore, I personally would take its outcome only with a grain of salt. But as I didn't find any more trustworthy sources, I'd be glad to see yours.