[lylejantzi3rd]

Tallow is popular right now, but plain old butter is just as good, easier to work with, and doesn't make everything it touches taste like beef.

[koolba]

> and doesn't make everything it touches taste like beef.

That last one is not necessarily a bad thing. You haven’t truly had popcorn till you’ve had beef tallow popcorn.

[antonymoose]

I used to work across the street from a “New Southern” style eatery, beef tallow biscuits are to die for.

[esperent]

It's great until it cools down and the fat hardens. Then it's gross.

[Larrikin]

The main point of cooking with any oil that isn't a neutral oil is to impart the flavor into the food.

[hluska]

That’s really the purpose of beef tallow. It starts at suet, which both butcher shops I frequent consider a waste product, then you chop or grind the suet, render it down for around eight hours and use it for cooking. It adds flavour where there wasn’t flavour or where the existing flavours didn’t pair as well with other foods.

It works really well with certain foods. As an example, poutine is quite popular now. A classic poutine calls for a brown sauce, which is a gravy made with equal parts beef and chicken stock. If you cook the fries in beef tallow, you get the full depth of the brown sauce.

Or if someone you really like is coming over for a steak and some beers make steak frites. Blanch the fries first, let them dry completely, deep fry them, let them cool and then when the steaks are cooling, put some tallow in the cast iron, let it flash and then drop your fries in to fry them a final time.

This concludes this week’s episode of Cooking with Greg where I impart food knowledge that tried to kill me. Tune in next week when I talk about more of the reasons I had a heart attack in my late thirties. :)

[zabzonk]

butter burns more easily, unless clarified. for things like chips/fries i've always found goose or duck fat to be best, but high end UK chip shops swear by beef lard.

[itsdrewmiller]

Why would confidently assert this? They are very different and useful for different purposes. Do you cook at all?