The Pros and Cons of Cooking With Beef Tallow

If you follow health and wellness trends and your algorithm is a stream of cooking videos, you’ve probably come across beef tallow recently. If you’re not familiar with tallow as an alternative cooking fat, that’s okay — it’s still nowhere near as popular as its cousin, butter, or even vegetable oils. However, beef tallow is on the rise in some circles. It’s having a moment, it seems. Or, you could say it’s having another one. The whole “what was once old is new again” adage comes to mind, as a cooking fat that my grandparents used is now trending online. Of course, many like to cite McDonald’s and its now infamous use of the flavorful fat for its fries until the chain stopped using it. Many home cooks also ditched beef tallow.

If you’re still scratching your head and haven’t seen it in the wild or tried it, consider this a quick education. Beef tallow is simply the fat trimmings from a butchered cow — the undesirable parts that are removed before a cut of meat ends up in a display case — which are then rendered. Rendering is the process of slowly and gently heating the fat until it liquifies and then straining it through cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer. You’re left with pure beef fat that is solid at room temperature. Here, we dive into the pros and cons of using tallow in the kitchen, with some experts weighing in, to help you pick up where your grandparents left off.