Well, this is a big change. Steak ’n Shake, with 406 locations from the Midwest to Florida, but few on the coasts, is returning to using beef tallow in its french fries, starting in February. The company says that its customers deserve the best.
Tallow is the way french fries were originally made until various corn and seed oils became popular a few decades ago. With growing health concerns and new attention to health, that decision will now be reverted. It is more costly, but they are betting that consumers are ready for the change.
Mark my words: the much larger chains will follow suit this year, including McDonald’s and others. The difference is in the taste, of course, and the effectiveness of the cooking method. But the evidence is also in on the health benefits of animal fats over vegetable oils. The switch aids those who are concerned about excess weight, which nutritional guides increasingly argue is a consequence of vegetable oils combined with processed food and the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup.
It does feel as if the tide is turning, away from the trend that began in the 1970s, toward a wholly new understanding of the relationship between natural foods and health. This is a wonderful and essential change that could have a profound effect on American health, which is the worst in the world relative to what we spend on health care.
All science aside, cooking with animal fat is a joy. My own personal journey began with frying using lard instead of Crisco. My first impression stays with me: the food turned out flaky and crunchy rather than oily. Moreover, you find that the food absorbs less of the greasy stuff when you cook with animal fats than other options. Just from the point of view of good cooking, the choice is incredibly obvious.
The switch can occur in your own home, though it takes some change of habit. When you go to the store now, the cooking section is packed with corn oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, and you name it. You have to search for the lard and tallow if it is there at all. At some point in the past, I found that the more expensive the store, the less likely it was that they carried animal fat at all. I had to go to the “lower end” stores to find it.
Now of course you can buy online, and here is where you are likely to find the best prices too.
You might try an experiment at home to see the difference. Take a regular potato and cut it into strips or cubes. Use an iron skillet and put in your lard or tallow. They both have a high smoke point so this is not like using butter. It can get pretty hot before your house fills up with smoke but use medium heat just in case. Turn the potatoes as they brown to make sure they are completely cooked, remove and drain, salt and pepper and enjoy.
I guarantee: if you do this for guests, you will be celebrated as the chef of the century. That’s how magical animal fats really are.
As for baking, it works here too. Pancakes and biscuits are never better than when made with lard or tallow. It’s the same with pie crusts. Butter is wonderful but lard is just better. Try it for yourself. Cut in the lard with knives or whatever you use and see what happens. The texture is gourmet-level perfect, and your friends and family will be astonished at your skill.
It’s a bit strange to me that it has taken some half a century for people to realize this. It just shows you how sticky the dietary errors of the 1970s truly were in the American experience. Federal guidelines that came out at the behest of special interests were disastrous for several generations.
My own memory traces back to when my public school replaced the beef in hamburgers with soybeans. The kids caught on immediately and soybean burgers arrived already deeply discredited. We used them for food fights but no one would eat them. No one. They reverted within a few months.
But the war on protein had just begun. There was a series of panics. Eggs were declared to be bad and multitudes switched to substitutes. New kitchen gadgetry appeared on the market that would drain all fat from chicken and beef, supposedly making them “good for you.” Low fat this and that appeared on the shelves, deploying a clever linguistic confusion: who doesn’t favor less fat?
And so on it went as the mania against real food intensified over the decades. New diets that emphasized meat eating occupied niche markets but those niches grew over time. I hardly know anyone these days who has not experimented with the Keto diet, always with success, at least initially. It’s a version of the older Atkins diet but with the same message: the dietary guidelines were wholly wrong. We need to try another way.
Many of us are at the point of scrupulosity about this whole subject. I was at a local fair and there was a lady selling pies. I asked about what oil she uses in her crust and she said Crisco. I wanted to support her but just couldn’t bring myself to pay good money for bad food. Many of us are at this point. We want to know what is in this food. Just to make sure, we are eating ever more at home.
My prediction is that over time, the market will take care of this. The joints that use tallow are going to drain away business from those that use vegetable oils. You watch. Within twelve months or so, there will be a major change. And we will look back at the last 50 or so years and wonder what we could have been thinking.
By the way, have you been gifted any jars of home-rendered fat from hobby farmers? This happened to me recently and it was pure delight. I’ve been burning through that jar at a record pace and dread when it is gone. I’m already at that second level of concern: looking for the most naturally focused sellers of the product and eschewing the more commercial forms.
One can sense it in the air: the age of animal fat is returning. The experts of the past are on the verge of being completely discredited. It’s all part of the new focus on making America healthy again. With it will come new attention to problems in other areas besides food and get into the problem of pharmaceuticals and allopathic medicine itself. It’s all going to be rethought.
Look at it this way. With beef tallow on hand, you also have a leather lubricant, a skin conditioner, outside hair gel, and maybe even wound salve. It’s that powerful, better than anything that comes from a lab. When you realize why, many things change about how you think.
I have friends who predict we are on the verge of a one-hundred percent rethinking of what we have done to our bodies and health with conventional food and medicine. It’s long past overdue.
