Recipe Guide
Beef Tallow, the Kitchen Workhorse
For most of human cooking history, beef tallow was the default fat in a working kitchen. It still should be. 480°F smoke point, neutral savory flavor, shelf-stable for months — there isn't a better fat for searing steak, frying potatoes, or roasting vegetables.
Use time
5–60 min
Yields
~30 uses
Difficulty
Easy
What you need
- •1 tub Spring Lake Cattle rendered beef tallow (1 lb)
- •Heavy cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven
- •A reason to cook — steak, potatoes, eggs, vegetables, pie
- •Kosher salt
About the fat
Tallow is rendered beef fat — the suet from around the kidneys slow-cooked until it clarifies into a pure, golden, shelf-stable fat that solidifies at room temperature. Piedmontese tallow runs cleaner than commodity beef tallow because the breed produces less fat overall, so what's there is concentrated and high-quality. See specialty cuts for tallow availability.
Six ways to use it
- Sear a steak. Melt 1 tbsp in a ripping-hot cast-iron pan. The 480°F smoke point means you can crank the heat without filling the kitchen with smoke. Sear, baste at the end with butter, rest, eat.
- Fry potatoes. McDonald's fries used to be cooked in beef tallow until 1990 — there's a reason people still talk about them. Heat 2 inches of tallow to 325°F, fry blanched potatoes 4 minutes, drain, raise the temperature to 375°F and fry 2 more minutes. Salt the second they hit the basket.
- Roast vegetables. Melt 2 tbsp per sheet pan and toss with whatever's in the crisper — potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, broccoli. Roast at 425°F. Vegetables roasted in tallow brown deeper than vegetables roasted in oil.
- Season cast-iron. Rub a thin film on a clean, dry pan. Bake upside-down at 450°F for 1 hour. Repeat 3–4 times for a near-bulletproof seasoning that's better than flaxseed or grapeseed.
- Pie crust. Substitute tallow 1:1 for shortening or lard in any pie-crust recipe. The crust will be flakier, more savory, and brown more deeply. It's the secret of old-school savory hand pies.
- Eggs and tortillas. A teaspoon of tallow is the difference between a good fried egg and a great one. The same goes for a corn tortilla heated for tacos — tallow makes them blister.
Storage notes
- •Tallow is shelf-stable at cool room temperature for up to 3 months. Refrigerated, 6 months. Frozen, indefinitely.
- •If it smells off when you open the tub — sour or paint-like — it's gone rancid. Toss it. Fresh tallow smells faintly like beef and clean fat.
- •You can re-use tallow from the deep fryer. Strain through cheesecloth into a clean jar, refrigerate, use within a month. Each fry adds a little flavor.
- •Don't pour hot tallow down the sink. It will solidify in your pipes and become someone else's expensive problem.
- •Render your own from raw suet — slow-cook diced fat at 250°F for 4 hours, strain. Cleaner and cheaper than buying it.
Pick up a tub
1 lb of slow-rendered Piedmontese tallow. Shelf-stable, fridge-friendly, kitchen-essential.