What is Tallow?

Beef tallow is rendered beef fat. It is cooked slowly over low heat and becomes a liquid, which you can store into containers, then later used for cooking.

At the start of the 20th century tallow was the most common fat used for cooking.

However, with the rise of Crisco, the AHA and the anti fat dietary dogma, tallow was replaced with polyunsaturated seed oils like Canola Oil.

The Food Pyramid in the 1970s was the nail in the coffin. It was deemed irrefutable that animal fats cause heart disease and had to be substituted for polyunsaturated seed oils.

Well that myth has been debunked. As we now know, Ancel Keys’ study disparaging fat was flawed. And Mark Hegstead, the head of nutrition at the USDA, was bribed by the sugar industry to shift the blame for bad health away from sugar and onto saturated fat .

Not only is animal fat not harmful. It may be beneficial to your health.

The real cause of heart disease was the toxic seed oils that replaced beef tallow and animal fats in the diet.

If you’re still cooking with seed oils, there’s nothing more important you can do in your life than switching to beef tallow. Seriously. Close your computer, dump your canola oil in the garbage where it belongs. And go buy some tallow.Tallow is a rendered form of beef or mutton fat, primarily made up of triglycerides. It is solid at room temperature. Unlike suet, tallow can be stored for extended periods without the need for refrigeration to prevent decomposition, provided it is kept in an airtight container to prevent oxidation.

In industry, tallow is not strictly defined as beef or mutton fat. In this context, tallow is animal fat that conforms to certain technical criteria, including its melting point. Commercial tallow commonly contains fat derived from other animals, such as lard from pigs, or even from plant sources.

Tallow consists mainly of triglycerides (fat), whose major constituents are derived from stearic and oleic acids.

The adjacent diagram shows the chemical structure of a typical triglyceride molecule.

The solid material remaining after rendering is called cracklings, greaves, or graves. It has been used mostly for animal food, such as dog food.