CaliToday (19/11/2025): Once relegated to the margins and scorned as artery-clogging, beef tallow—purified beef fat is making a dramatic comeback. Chefs, home cooks, and health influencers are championing its return, positioning it as a flavorful, whole-food alternative to modern seed and neutral oils. This resurgence is fueled by a blend of culinary history, evolving health debates, and a desire for more "nose-to-tail" consumption.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
A Storied History in the Kitchen
The use of beef tallow is far from a new trend; it’s an ancient one. Its culinary history dates back to Ancient Rome, where it substituted for caul fat in dishes like the hamburger-like isicia omentata, and was utilized as a primary frying fat. Babylonian tablets indicate Egyptians regularly used animal fats, including tallow, alongside vegetable oils for stews.
In European history, its use became central to traditional cuisine:
British Staples: Tallow remains a key ingredient in 18th-century British recipes such as Yorkshire pudding and meat pies, and is still used for frying traditional fish and chips.
French & Belgian Cooking: In Northern France and Belgium, tallow has long been the fat of choice for cooking French fries, prized for its flavor. French cooks also use it for braising meats, preparing confit, and building the roux for gravies.
The Modern Tallow Trend: Health, Culture, and Contradiction
The current "Tallow Renaissance" is deeply intertwined with contemporary health movements. Social media influencers and podcasters are promoting tallow as a healthier, "ancestral" alternative to industrial seed oils. This movement is often linked to the "trad wife" phenomenon, which romanticizes a return to traditional, agrarian lifestyles focused on whole-animal use.
This shift mirrors a backlash against the widespread adoption of vegetable oils in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when campaigners successfully pushed fast-food giants like McDonald's and Wendy's to abandon tallow to reduce saturated fat. Now, nostalgia and changing nutritional perspectives may be paving the way for the return of that rich, meaty flavor in foods like crispy French fries.
The Culinary Argument: Flavor and Function
For many chefs, flavor is the most compelling reason to embrace tallow. Dr. Eric A. Decker, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, notes that tallow’s high smoke point, around $480^\circ\text{F}$ ($250^\circ\text{C}$), makes it ideal for frying.
Decker explains that when potatoes are fried in tallow, they absorb the fat as they cool, infusing the potato with a rich, beefy flavor.
However, chefs are finding even more nuanced uses. Jacob Williamson, former chef at the Dallas Italian steakhouse The Saint, nearly eliminated butter in his kitchen in favor of rendered tallow.
"It has more umami, and if you want to intentionally impart flavor into food rather than using just a regular oil, that's definitely the way to go," says Williamson.
His favorite applications include:
Roasting and searing root vegetables.
Brushing it onto steaks before serving.
Incorporating it as a solid fat in baked goods, such as a snickerdoodle cookie made with wagyu tallow instead of butter.
Cost, Quality, and Health Reality Check
Despite the excitement, experts urge caution regarding quality and cost.
Quality Matters: Decker cautions that most grocery store tallow is unlikely to match the quality of freshly rendered tallow made from suet (fat surrounding the kidney). He notes that the value of tallow plummeted after McDonald's stopped using it, flooding the market with lower-quality products.
Price Barrier: Allison M. Kingery, a food scientist at Purdue University, points out that the high price point of quality tallow is a significant barrier to entry, making it considerably more expensive than both butter and common seed oils.
Saturated Fat Content: Theresa Gentile, a Registered Dietitian, stresses that tallow’s high saturated fat content (approximately 52% of its total fat) is a crucial consideration for cardiovascular health and cholesterol levels.
For Gentile, the most defensible reason to use tallow is sustainability as part of a genuine whole-animal butchery effort. She argues that for those buying pre-packaged tallow, butter is a more affordable, equally natural animal fat with less saturated fat. The current hype, she suggests, largely caters to those who "love to jump on different trends" rather than true proponents of sustainable nose-to-tail cooking.