And this is how I recently acquired some beef fat. And it wasn’t just any beef fat; this friend of a friend had purchased a side of beef from my friends at Rose Ranch who raise grass-fed cattle in Jones. Though I had never worked with beef fat, I am usually game for a kitchen adventure.

I assumed I was working with a generic chunk of beef fat (called “tallow” when rendered), until I later read Jennifer McLagan’s description of suet (suet is the fat that protects ruminants’ kidneys) in her book Fat: “You will realize that there is a papery membrane holding this hard, brittle fat together.” (See video below.)

According to McLagan, suet doesn’t need to be rendered. I have purchased suet from Cocina San Pasqual, and it doesn’t look like the fat I rendered (pictured below). I’m a little flustered by fat terminology, so I e-mailed McLagan some questions. For now, I’ll just call this “tallow,” even though it might be suet. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like all suet is tallow, but not all tallow is suet. Anyone?

Tallow is solid at room temperature, and McLagan says the high saturation “makes it stable when heated and slow to break down or turn rancid, so tallow is a perfect fat for frying.” Until the ’90s, McDonald’s used tallow for frying french fries. Also, tallow is one of six ingredients in my Cross Timbers Farm bar soap. Suet is prized for pastries and English puddings. For practical purposes, it really makes no difference to me if this fat is suet or tallow. But I would like to know, just for my personal satisfaction.

What am I going to do with the tallow? I’m going to make some pasties and fry some sweet potato fries. Also, I might trade some with a friend for a houseplant or some other type of fat.

Rendered tallowUnlike lard, the tallow didn’t require much tending and was never in danger of burning.Beef tallow and suet are comprised of 50% saturated fat. It didn’t take long for the freshly rendered fat to cool and become solid.

Fascinating, no?

Check out my other adventures with animal fats.

Check out my earlier post (as well as the comments) on vinegar-making for helpful tips and informative web links.

We were a TV-less household for almost two years. (But not really in the purest sense; we sometimes caught our favorites — Glee, 30 Rock, and The Office — on Hulu.) I really enjoyed the big box’s absence. Or, at least I thought I had. Curling up on the couch tonight and watching 30 Rock on a screen across the room was pretty damn enjoyable. I was actually giddy. Maybe now I’ll finally be hip to pop culture? Doubt it.

I popped up some corn and popped open a beer and happily loafed away the evening.

I used Elise’s technique for “perfect popcorn,” but instead of canola oil, I decided to experiment with using rendered chicken fat. It was delicious. Now, if I could just get my hands on some Oklahoma popping corn.

Isn’t this a gorgeous photo? This is at the spring walk. Photo by Chelsey Simpson.

Jackie divvies up wild onion.

Curly dock in April (2008).

Curly dock in September. Jackie said the seeds could be ground and used to make crackers. I brought some seed stalks home; I hope to get some curly dock growing in our yard.

Kentucky coffee tree. The seeds (in those big, black pods) can be used for—you guessed it!—a coffee substitute.

More photos here.

Check out my blog posts from the 2008 and 2009 wild-food walks.

Also, here’s the full playlist from the September 25 edition of The Midnight Special radio show.

I didn’t know how to tell you, so I’ve put off this post for some time. I killed my vinegar mother—the gelatinous substance that turns wine into vinegar. Over a year ago I acquired a mother from Jackie Dill, the self-sufficient, wise wildcrafter of Coyle, OK. And since I was so grateful that Jackie shared her mother with me, I’ve felt guilty about wasting it.

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My basic understanding of the vinegar-making process is this: a mother is the name for the bacteria that develops on fermented liquid. She eats up the alcohol and creates acid. This could happen just by ignoring an open container of wine for weeks or months, until the right wild bacteria finds the wine—same concept as sourdough yeasts and the open fermentation of beer. Maybe this bacteria is more prevalent in certain geographic areas? I’m not sure. Regardless, you can speed up the process by buying or acquiring a vinegar mother like I did. The mother is put in a glass or ceramic container or an oak barrel and is fed a diet of red or white wine. You need to pick which wine you’re going with and stick with only that type. You can keep her alive indefinitely by feeding her alcohol.

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There seems to be two main approaches to feeding the mother: 1) add a glug of wine to your mother every day or so or 2) add a bottle at once and let the mother do its thing. I chose the latter and ignored the mother to a fault. I have to admit—I was intimidated by this whole process, which is, I think, why I neglected/forgot about the hungry, vinegar-making blob at the back of my pantry. I basically starved her to death since she eventually ate all the alcohol and I didn’t give her any more. Although I killed the mother, I was still able to get some delicious red wine vinegar out of the experiment.
My first try at vinegar making has been an education I hope to build on once I get another mother.

The vinegar mother that I got from Jackie Dill. It came in pear wine vinegar.

I strained and reserved the pear wine vinegar so I could use the mother to start my red wine vinegar. I covered the container opening with cheesecloth and slid it to the back of the pantry. Instead of fearing and ignoring the vinegar for 9 months, I should have tasted the liquid every couple of weeks to check its progress.

Out of sight, out of mind. Nine months later I finally strained the mother out and pasteurized the vinegar. In retrospect, it was hasty to assume the mother was dead. I should have tried to keep her going by adding more wine.

My vinegar-loving friend Nicole and I had a taste test between my store-bought and homemade red wine vinegar. As you can see, the homemade vinegar is much deeper in color and body. Its taste is rich and mellow compared to the store-bought vinegar, which makes my eyes water and my mouth pucker.

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If you’re interested in learning more, these websites are helpful:
http://www.gangofpour.com/diversions/vinegar/vinegar1.html
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/the-virtue-of-homemade-vinegar
http://chefsblade.monster.com/training/articles/782-making-vinegar-with-a-mothers-love
http://www.squidoo.com/Vinegar_Starter_Culture

I’ve come to enjoy meal planning. This is how I do it:

My meal planning routine comes down to lists: 1) frozen food; 2) food I want to make; 3) shopping lists to fill the gap between what I have and what I need.

1) frozen food list
I keep a list of the contents of the freezer. This was initially a way to save energy by reducing the amount of peeking in the freezer. But it has also turned out to be a helpful way to plan meals and make shopping lists.

Frozen meats

Frozen food

2) list of meals/dishes
My meal planning routine includes time for flipping through cookbook indexes looking for ways to use ingredients I already have on hand (for example, now I would look for recipes using a lot of potatoes or cucumbers) or I anticipate getting from the food co-op or farmers’ market (like eggplant). Or I look through saved websites or blog posts for recipes that sounded promising or exciting. I bookmark the cookbooks and write down the recipe names on a piece of scrap paper, sometimes noting the recipe source so I can easily find it later. I usually try to include a meal or two that uses non-perishable or frozen food like pasta or meat from the freezer. There might be a lack of fresh food, but I know we have the makings of a meal, even when the refrigerator or pantry look bleak. For example, meatloaf is always an option since eggs, tomato paste, frozen ground meat, and breadcrumbs are staples.
These meals aren’t planned for certain days, but there is usually a balance between quick-and-easy and more elaborate recipes. Once the planning and shopping are done, I usually decide what to cook a day or two in advance, depending on my schedule and the status of my fresh ingredients.

What's cookin'?

As I make the list of meals, I reference the frozen food list and refrigerator contents, while making note of any items I need to buy. Which leads us to the third list:

3) shopping list
I try to group items on the shopping list by source: farmers’ market, Buy For Less, ethnic grocers.

Read about Chelsey’s similar system. Also, Bob Waldrop has two recent blog entries on meal planning.

Do you have a meal-planning system? Please share. What are your go-to meals or staple ingredients? What delicious meals have you prepared when, at first glance, it seemed there was no food in the kitchen?

Here’s how ya do it:

Fresh lard

Cube the lard and add about one cup of water. Slowly melt the fat over low heat for a couple hours.*

Once the lard is melted, strain and reserve the cracklings, if you want to use them for cornbread, etc. Pour the lard into a bowl with two cups of water. Chill the lard/water mixture in the refrigerator until solid. Magically, the lard solidifies on top of the water and lard debris. Lard debris: meditate on that.

Scoop off the solid lard and discard the water and debris. Slowly reheat the lard so that you can funnel it into storage jars. Store the lard for about three months in the refrigerator or one year in the freezer.

Lard is soft at room temperature. Kind of pretty, huh?

Homemade biscuits using lard.

Yum.

I used this recipe to make pizza dough with lard.

It turned out pretty okay, but needs some work. It was too crisp—like a saltine cracker.

Why render lard? Although there are vats of hydrogenated lard (read: trans fats) at the grocery store, freshly rendered lard has gone from being a kitchen staple to a fat for the margins—back-to-the-land types or whole-food gourmets. Little use for excess fat and the demand for lean meat, has resulted in selective breeding for lean animals. According to USDA statistics compiled in Fat by Jennifer McLagan, “in 1950 a pig yielded 33.2 pounds of fat, but in 1990 this figure had fallen to just 10.1 pounds.” Crazy! Now we use brining techniques to make pork more palatable. Like all fats, lard is a mixture of saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. If you care about this sort of thing, the surprising part is that lard is mostly monounsaturated (approximately 45%). For me, the attraction to lard comes from the ability to render it myself. I can’t make olive oil or canola oil or vegetable oil. I probably can’t afford to make as much butter as I need. But I know where this pork fat comes from and I can easily render a batch twice a year. And it makes for better biscuits and pie crusts, to boot.

*I rendered two batches of lard: one on the stove, the other in the oven. I found the stove-top method to be superior because I had finer control of the heat and I could easily check on it. I like to check it a lot; I’m still paranoid from my first attempt at rendering lard.

Homemade Jam
64 ounces of strawberry jam for $29
     5 pounds of organic strawberries from Peach Crest Farm = $25
     Sure-Jell pectin = $1.44
     7 c sugar = $2.56
45¢ per ounce

Store-bought Jam
Smucker’s Organic Strawberry Jam
12-ounce jar for $2.99
25¢ per ounce

Sure, there are external costs—transportation, water, time, energy, scale—that have not been included. And if I were able to buy a gallon jar of of Smucker’s organic strawberry jam, it would probably work out to an even cheaper price per ounce. But, I’m just looking at these numbers for curiosity’s sake. The stuff I made is some of the best damn jam I’ve tasted. Perhaps I’m a little biased? And I know the story behind it: the kitchen faucet broke and water leaked all over the floor during the sticky jam-making process!

I took a suggestion from the cookbook I used and added three tablespoons of balsamic vinegar to the jam for a “robust” flavor. Other suggested variations/additions are vanilla bean, black pepper, or lemon zest.

Without marinades and rubs, it’s the fat that makes chicken taste so good. This is abundantly clear when you take in the smell of schmaltz: comforting, savory, golden, rich goodness. And apparently it’s good for us. It’s approximately 45% monunsaturated fat, including palmitoleic acid, which is thought to boost our immune system.

I’ve used schmaltz to make dumplings, to stir-fry henbit and spinach, and to make a cream sauce for poached chicken (recipe below).

Here are chicken necks I ordered from Downing Family Farm (through the Oklahoma Food Co-op).
I trimmed off the skin and froze the necks for future stock-making.

I cooked the skins and a little water in a skillet over medium-low heat for around two hours. I’m a little fuzzy since it’s been about two months since I did this (so much for New Year’s food goal #9). But basically I took it slow since I was trying to gently melt the fat. After I drained and strained the rendered fat, I turned up the heat to get the remaining bits of skin to crackle.

Chicken cracklings, also called gribenes.


Freshly rendered chicken fat. Chicken fat is soft at room temperature and lasts about two months in the refrigerator, or a year in the freezer. When it turns bad it still has that nice schmaltzy undertone, but the initial scent is sour. I’ve had a batch go bad, so in the future I will store a small jar in the frig and freeze the rest in small batches.

Poached chicken with cream sauce. Very good!

Poached Chicken
Adapted from Crockery Cookery by Mable Hoffman
:: 1 stewing chicken* (5 to 6 pounds)
:: water
:: 1 stalk celery, halved
:: 1 carrot, peeled and halved
:: 1 small onion, halved
:: 1 tsp. salt
:: 3 or 4 sprigs parsley
:: 1 small bay leaf
:: 2 whole cloves
:: 1/2 t thyme leaves

Sauce
:: 6 T chicken fat
:: 1/4 c flour
:: 1 c chicken broth (taken from the slow cooker)
:: 1/2 t salt
:: 1/8 t pepper
:: 1/4 c chopped parsley
:: 1/2 c cream

In slow-cooker, cover chicken with water. Add celery, carrot, onion, and salt. Tie parsley, bay leaf, cloves, and thyme in small square of cheesecloth. Add to pot. Cover and cook on low for 7 to 9 hours. Melt chicken fat in saucepan. Stir in flour and cook over low heat for several minutes. Gradually stir in broth; simmer until smooth. Add salt, pepper, parsley, and cream. Just before serving, beat in remaining chicken fat. Remove chicken from pot; slice and serve with cream sauce.

*We got a huge, fresh chicken at the Alexander Family Farm near Austin, Texas. We were able to buy it directly from Mr. Alexander the day after the chickens were slaughtered and processed on site. Why can’t we do that here in Oklahoma? More on that some other time.