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June 26, 2026 · 8 min read

Fat of The Land - Part 8 - The Fats We Forgot

By Raiden DeLuca

For most of human history, people cooked in the fat that came off the animals they ate. They rendered it, kept it in a jar by the stove, and fried and roasted and baked with it without thinking twice. Then in about a century we replaced almost all of it with oil pressed out of corn and soybeans and cottonseed, and we mostly forgot the old fats existed. The last few posts explained why an animal’s fat is stable and good, and this one is about the obvious next step, which is to cook with it.

Why animal fat holds up to heat

Heat is hard on fat. It speeds up oxidation, and oxidation goes after the double bonds in a fat, the bendy spots where the structure is weak. A saturated fat has none of those bends, a monounsaturated fat has one, and a polyunsaturated fat has several, which is why the polyunsaturated seed oils break down fastest under heat, throwing off oxidation products and the harsh compounds that build up in old fryer oil. Animal fats are mostly saturated and monounsaturated, so they hold their shape in a hot pan. It is the same oxidation rule from the four kinds post, applied at the stove. The irony is that the official advice in this country runs the other way, steering people toward the polyunsaturated seed oils for everyday cooking, which are the worst-suited to heat of any fat on the shelf.

You might also pick an oil by its smoke point, on the idea that smoke means the fat is starting to break down. It is a fair instinct, and smoke is loosely tied to oxidation, but the two are not the same thing. Smoke point is only the temperature where a fat starts to visibly smoke, and a fat can be oxidizing and forming those harsh compounds well before it ever gets there, while a refined oil can have a high smoke point and still be fragile polyunsaturated fat underneath. When researchers heated a range of oils and measured what came out, smoke point did not predict which ones held up. Stability did, and stability comes from saturation.

From most stable to least

Among the animal fats, the order runs by how little polyunsaturated fat they carry. Beef tallow sits at the top, around half saturated and most of the rest monounsaturated, with only a few percent polyunsaturated, and that stays true no matter what the cow ate, because the rumen rebuilds the fat, as we covered last post. Lard comes next, a little softer and higher in monounsaturated fat, still low in the fragile kind. Duck fat follows, richer in polyunsaturated fat. Schmaltz, which is rendered chicken fat, sits at the bottom.

Schmaltz is the odd one out for a reason we already met. A chicken is monogastric, so its fat mirrors its feed, and a bird raised on grain and seed-rich feed lays down a lot of polyunsaturated fat, up around a fifth of the total. That makes schmaltz the softest and least heat-stable of the animal fats, and it makes where the bird came from matter more for schmaltz than for any other fat on the list. Tallow is forgiving of how the animal was raised, and schmaltz is not.

What rides in the fat

Stability is the practical reason to cook with these fats, but it is not the only thing they bring. Fat from a grass-fed animal carries the fat-soluble vitamins that came up in the grass-fed post, vitamin A as beta-carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin K2, along with the better fatty acid balance and the CLA. These nutrients are stored in the fat, they stay there when it is rendered, and they hold up to the heat, so the benefit goes right into your food and then into you. It is the mirror image of what happens with a fragile seed oil, where the thing riding along into your food is the oxidation instead.

The catch is that those extras only show up if the animal lived the way it was supposed to. Grain-fed feedlot tallow is still stable, since the rumen and its microbes settle the kind of fat that gets stored no matter what the animal ate, but the vitamins and the better balance come from green pasture, from an animal eating what it was built to eat. So the quality of the fat is downstream of the life of the animal, which is the thread running through this whole sub-series.

What sits by my stove

I am not all the way there. Most of my cooking happens in butter or tallow now, and when I use the air fryer I still reach for avocado oil. Where I want to land is tallow, ghee, and butter for nearly everything, and I am moving that way a little more all the time, with the studying behind this series pushing me along. It is a slow switch, replacing things as I run out rather than throwing everything out at once, which I would happily do if my wallet allowed it.

It started, the way it did for a lot of people, with seed oils in a nonstick pan, which in hindsight is two problems at once. I swapped the pans out for better ones and changed the fat I cook in, moving toward tallow and butter and away from the seed oils. The pan and the fat are not the whole story on their own, since the bigger picture is the entire way I eat, but I feel the difference, and the clearest sign of it is a number from my bloodwork a few weeks ago. My hs-CRP came back at 0.4. That is high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, one of the most useful everyday markers of low-grade inflammation in the body, the slow background kind tied to most of the chronic diseases people end up with. Optimal is generally considered under 1.0, so 0.4 is well down in the range you want, the reading of a body that is not quietly fighting a fire it should not have to. I do not think that is luck. It is the kind of thing that tends to follow when you stop eating damaged, oxidized fats and go back to the ones the body was designed to run on.

Where mine comes from

Right now I buy my tallow from a local farm at the farmers market, where I can talk to the person who raised the animal. With the next half cow, Maddy and I are taking it a step further and asking for the trimmings so we can render our own. Rendering is simple, you melt the hard fat down low and slow and strain out the bits of meat and connective tissue, and what is left, once it cools, is clean white tallow you can keep by the stove.

The reason I trust my tallow is not a label, it is that I know how the animal was treated, I have a relationship with the farmer, and I can smell and taste how beefy and rich it is next to the flat, dull stuff on the grocery shelf. It is localization winning again, because the closer you get to your food the better the food gets, and rendering your own fat from an animal you can drive out and see is about as close as it gets.

The best design was there all along

God made these fats well suited to the exact cooking we were always going to do over fire and heat. The fat an animal stores is stable, it carries the fat-soluble vitamins, and it tastes good in a hot pan, which is less an accident than the way it was built. The corruption is the same story as the rest of the series. We pulled the stable, nourishing fat out of the kitchen and replaced it with a fragile oil that has to be bleached and deodorized before anyone will eat it, and we called that progress.

The design only delivers when the rest of it is honored. The fat is best when the animal lived the way it was meant to, on pasture, eating grass, and treated well, because you cannot separate cooking in good fat from raising the animal right, any more than you can pull one piece of how we were made to eat out from the rest. The best design was there the whole time, and the work is simply coming back to it.

If you change one thing after this, make it the fat in your hottest pan. Pour off the seed oil, get some good tallow, from a farm if you can, and sear in that instead. It is the easiest swap in the whole series, and one of the ones you will actually feel.

The fat I lean on as much as tallow is butter, and it has enough going on, the milk solids, the grass-fed difference, raw versus cultured, and ghee, that it gets its own post. That is where we are headed next.

Sources

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

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