Used and old fats

Growing up, my Mom kept a couple old metal coffee cans under the sink.

One contained bacon fat and other shortening that solidified at room temperature. No, she didn't cook with it...when the coffee can was full, she'd toss it in the trash.

The other stored oil that she'd used for frying stuff. As a true Mom in the 1970s, we would eat homemade tempura one night, paella the next and stuffed shells the day after. Our dinner table was a cornucopia of ethnic foods. Any oil used for frying stuff was strained through a paper towel into the coffee can where it waited to be reused. At some point--when it started to smell or taste off--she'd toss the can and start a new one.

(I imagine that metal coffee cans are now collectors' items. Now I only see coffee sold in bags, plastic tubs and cardboard tubs.)

Today I was making bacon for lunch. When I was finished, pulled out a tiny (1 cup) tuperware container from my fridge and added the ~2t of bacon fat to my collection. Unlike my Mom, I use it for cooking.

It got me to thinking: Was my Mom just frugal (reusing oil) & cautious (not wanting shortening to solidify in the kitchen pipes)? Or did everyone do this a generation ago? Do people still do it?

Granted, I'm single, but at the rate I'm going it might take me a decade or more to fill a one-pound coffee canister with bacon fat and other solids. Most of the time I use the rendered fat on the spot in other cooking. Rarely do I have more than a couple teaspoons to save. And frying with oil? I used a couple tablespoons while preparing some pan-blacked salmon the other day, but I can't think of the last time I filled up a pan and honest-to-goodness fried something. Even if I did, would I save the oil after? Who knows. At the rate I fry, it might be another decade before I have another need for it and by then it would surely be rancid.

So I'm curious: Did your mom store fats like mine did? And does she still? (I'll have to ask my mom, but I'm guessing the answer is no.) Do you reuse frying oil? Save solid fats instead of pouring them down the drain?

Mine definitely had the can and promptly tossed it when it was full--and she did it to protect the pipes from clogging. I never saw her re-use a drop of it. And no, there is no longer a can of fat anywhere in the vicinity of her kitchen Between changes to the size of the household and the diet of the inhabitants, it is no longer needed.

I do save bacon fat for a few days if I have any extra but since I don't eat it very often and tend to use it with something else I'm preparing at the same time, it's not regular enough to warrant a dedicated container. And on the rare occasions when I deep fry (almost exclusively during the summer), I have poured the oil back in the container. Seems like I usually use a whole container in the fryer and, consequently, was able to refill the same bottle after I was done. If it doesn't smell rancid the next time I need to deep fry I'll reuse it--otherwise it gets tossed. I'm not particularly careful about pouring grease into my kitchen sink though I won't pour a whole fryer's worth down--for that, I'd funnel it back into the bottle to toss if it's reached its useful lifespan.

You really really shouldn't pour fats down the drain. They do nasty things to the sewer system.

During World War II,

The Straight Dope wrote:Salvaged kitchen fat was used to produce glycerin, an ingredient in drugs and explosives.

(source). My mother kept fat and oil in a metal coffee can too.

Disposing of oil and fat is a pain in the neck: do you waste containers you'd otherwise recycle just to have something to put the fat in, every time you have excess oil or fat? Soak it up in paper towels? Even worse. Just dump it in the trash bag? Risky of a messy puncture.

So we keep a large peanut butter jar under the sink, in which any oil or fats get disposed. We found out the hard way to let them cool off (melted a jar once), but so long as it's not the only fat in the jar and there isn't too much we can usually pour straight out of a hot pan. When it gets full, it goes in the trash.

That being said, I do have a container of rendered bacon fat (about a cup), and another of duck fat (about a cup and a half, just from the excess skin before roasting, Another cup or so rendered out during cooking, but it's too strong-flavored from the spices it was roasted with -- star anise and chiles -- to reuse).

My mom would pour it into a can or other receptacle and toss it out immediately. She did not save it or cook with it. It went into the garbage. Now I cook with so little oil that I do not even have to save a can.

When I first began dating my husband, I discovered that he did this because he got it from his mother. He told me it was so the sink wouldn't get clogged but his thing was keeping the fat in the freezer than tossing after it got full. We still do this now that I am the primary but I keep it out on the back porch.

I do re-use oil for frying as well but mostly just the oil I use for homemade crab rangoon or empanadas.

Yes indeed, my mom kept a container under the sink for bacon and other fats; I can't remember now, but I don't think it got reused. If I have leftover bacon drippings, I admit that I pour them down the drain. I read you are supposed to use very cold water to do so, but in my mind, this is counter-intuitive, so I use very hot water and run it for a long time. I know, I know ...

My grandma kept the can and so did her mother apparently. Grandma was not so much of a cook and would toss the can when it got full. Great grandma, on the other hand, was know to cook with the fat and even serve it as schmaltz with bread.

My mom has always cooked on the lighter side and on the rare occasion she would cook bacon, she would nuke it.

In my own kitchen, I've always kept the can, even since college. Bacon fat has a rich smokiness that I've always loved to reuse for sauteing soup and stew bases. Bacon fat never lasts that long in my kitchen. Call it a reverence for the old fashioned ways (and a knack for animal fat indulgence) but I save all sorts of rendered fats nowadays. I also tend to cook in large quantity, so I often produce deli quart container's worth of fats at a time. I've currently got on hand: a quart of beef tallow (from cooking off 25 portions of marrow bones), I've left this on the counter for over 6 mos. and it is still fine. This stuff really kick starts an old school diner chili recipe like nothing can. Also on hand: 2 quarts goose fat, apparently a 10- 12 lb. goose renders about a quart of fat. I just used a quart and a half to fry up some frites that were well, totally banging. I've got a quart of five spice infused duck fat from a confit project in the freezer too. Like my great grandmother, when I'm feeling cheeky I'll spread some schmaltz on a piece of toast!

My mom, and I continue the tradition is to keep bacon fat in the refrigerator and use as needed. Bacon fat gets used in place of oil in some recipes such as cornbread, pancakes, waffles, green beans, fried potatoes, and when I want some of the flavor in other dishes.

My mom used to keep the fat (and mostly toss it, except for chicken fat that was frozen and used in recipes) until we got a dog. Then the dog ate the fat. She had a beautiful coat, but died of a heart attack at an early age. No lie.

The parents changed their diet over time, so far less fat was used that would be needed to be disposed of.

Our hamburger and sausage is pretty lean so usually a papertowel is all it takes to soak up the drippings. If we have excess, it goes to the barn cats for an extra treat at feeding time.

We save and treat bacon grease like gold. It goes in an old coffee mug in the fridge. We use it to fry eggs every morning, and other cooking as needed.

Our favorite use:



We still make popcorn the old fashioned way. People have been eating the microwave stuff for so long, they have forgetten what real popcorn should taste like.

Tim

My West Virginian grandparents kept bacon grease in a can on the stove too, and used it in everything. My grandpa made eggs with it, and I was too young to enjoy it. I liked my eggs dry, and his were moist, and I'd probably love 'em now.

I have a few gladware containers in the fridge that have strained fats (one is bacon, one is duck).

Don't put grease/fats down the sink. When the fat cools and solidifies, it sticks to the pipes, contributes to build-up and clogs, and will eventually back up the system. Better to put fats in the trash.

HI,

In the corner of my cooktop, I have a salted peanuts can. In there are all the discarded oils I will never use again. When it is full, it is discarded. The age old explanation why, it is done for the plumbing.

Some years ago, I found one of these discarded cans full of fat quietly sitting on the patio. Could not imagine how it ended up there. I later learned my Dad thought he would make soap with it. He remembered his Mother adding lye to make soap. I dumped it anyway.

In my refrigerator, I have a small container with bacon fat. I have another container of rendered pork fat. In a quart mason jar, I have oil devoted to deep fat frying. This has been used several times, it is strained and returned to this jar afterwards. Since we rarely deep fat fry, it lasts a very long time.

Since fried foods taste best fresh, I left some falafel mixture in the refrigerator to cook as needed. My Dad decided to help himself. He took this oil and dumped it into the mini-fryer to heat. It boiled instead, which surprised him. Only then was I asked to check it out. He had ginger syrup instead of oil, which look roughly the same in the fridge.

Regards,

I have a small mustard jar filled with bacon fat in the fridge. I sometimes fry eggs in it and use it for red cabbage and some other searing tasks. Other fats go into a glass jar in the pantry; when the jar is full it goes in the trash. Since we have been grinding our coffee beans for many years, we haven't had a coffee can. Cabbagehead's mother used the smaller cans to bake Boston brown bread years ago. I would like to try the same, but I don't want to buy ground coffee just for the can!

My situation is a bit like Cathy2's:

I've got three glass jars in the fridge containing different fats. One is reserved for bacon fat which is often added sparingly to various recipes. The second contains filtered fry oil (initially from a batch of duck confit). The third is a random junk fat jar of stuff I don't want to pour down the drain. I'll toss it in the trash when it's full. We've got enough plumbing problems as it is.

If I have leftover bacon drippings, I admit that I pour them down the drain.

Let me guess, you rent rather than own?

I always save bacon fat and also have a small jar of lard - whenever I trim a little fat off a pork chop, I drop it in a Pyrex cup and render it in the microwave. Alos have maybe 5 lbs of nice firm beef fat in the freezer waiting to be rendered or added to sausage/hamburger.

If you wish to make soap with fats that you have saved, you can get a good idea of how much lye to use with this calculator:

https://www.thesage.com/calcs/lyecalc2.php

You can weigh your total amount of fat and estimate its composition. Once you enter the amount of fat, in your chosen units, the calculator will give you a recipe and directions. I save unused but not very good oil-- like expired canola oil that's a little rancid, or lard I saw on sale really cheap at Target, to make my own coffee soap. I always add some fresh coconut oil, as it makes a good lather. I dissolve the lye in COLD coffee and add some coffee grounds to the soap as it starts to "trace". The resultant coffee soap is great for kitchen and garden use, although my recipients of coffee soap Xmas gifts last year did not seem too impressed.

Take heed of all the safety precautions for using lye. Also, I find that an immersion blender works well for emulsifying the lye-oil mixture, as the reaction can only proceed on the oil-water interface.

Cheers, Jen

Pie-love wrote:although my recipients of coffee soap Xmas gifts last year did not seem too impressed.

People don't always appreciate the effort it takes to make something. Sorry, I feel your pain.

***

Last year the drain from the kitchen was rotted out. While I am careful not to send fat down the drain, those scatter bits cling to the pipes anyway. The reaction I got later, you would have thought I was sending gallons of fat down the drain.

Regards,

Bacon drippings, schmalz, duck fat and tallow go into the freezer, but of course. And I cook with all of them. When the containers are full, I pitch the fat down the drain, but in a very special way: while they're still hot in the pan, add a good dollop of detergent, mix with very hot water, and pour down the drain. The fat is denatured by the detergent, and rendered soluble. I do this in the house that I own, AND the flat that I rent.

Geo

Cathy2 wrote:

Pie-love wrote:although my recipients of coffee soap Xmas gifts last year did not seem too impressed.

People don't always appreciate the effort it takes to make something. Sorry, I feel your pain.

***

Last year the drain from the kitchen was rotted out. While I am careful not to send fat down the drain, those scatter bits cling to the pipes anyway. The reaction I got later, you would have thought I was sending gallons of fat down the drain.

Regards,

I agree about home-made gifts. Part of the problem is that I also give home-made caramels-- hard to top that. I love the coffee soap though-- gets the onion stink off my hands!

Cheers, Jen

Geo wrote:Bacon drippings, schmalz, duck fat and tallow go into the freezer, but of course. And I cook with all of them. When the containers are full, I pitch the fat down the drain, but in a very special way: while they're still hot in the pan, add a good dollop of detergent, mix with very hot water, and pour down the drain. The fat is denatured by the detergent, and rendered soluble. I do this in the house that I own, AND the flat that I rent.

Geo

Just out of curiosity, if you already have them in containers and frozen, why not pitch the lot in the trash? If you want to save the container, you can probably scrape the fat out.... My concern is that it takes a substantial amount of detergent to solubilize all that fat-- seems like a waste of detergent. What do you think?

I clean the pan at the same time. That is, the pan gets cleaned AND the fat solubilized at the same time. But the majority of my large fats remainders I save in the freezer and later cook with them. Thus there are two paths for fats: big lots get saved for use in cooking, small amounts cleaned with the pan.

Geo

Geo wrote:I clean the pan at the same time. That is, the pan gets cleaned AND the fat solubilized at the same time. But the majority of my large fats remainders I save in the freezer and later cook with them. Thus there are two paths for fats: big lots get saved for use in cooking, small amounts cleaned with the pan.

Geo

Ah, that makes sense!
Jen

ppezalla wrote:

If I have leftover bacon drippings, I admit that I pour them down the drain.

Let me guess, you rent rather than own?

No, no; we own "this old house." Actually, the only times we've had drain issues is when I put a bunch of raw sweet potato peels down the disposer. Let's just say it wasn't pretty. I think one other time I accidentally dropped an onion top down the disposer (something my dad burned into my brain to never do); that episode was pretty ugly, too ...

I save bacon fat in a jar in the fridge for later cooking uses (if I'm not nuking the bacon on paper towels). I don't have surplus of other kinds of fat usually. If I skim some fat off the top of a soup or stew after chilling, it's solid and goes in the trash.

I don't do much deep frying, and when I do, I usually do it in a wok, which gives you more frying surface with less oil than deep fryers. Any leftover used oil I pour into a jar or bottle or cottage-cheese container and pitch. I don't fry often enough to try to save the oil for reuse.

Any significant quantities of animal fat, I keep. Generally, it's chicken fat. I make broth/stock about once every two or three weeks, and all the solidified fat that rises to the top to be skimmed after chilling, I save in a Ball jar for frying onions and other stuff in. Same thing happens with the trimmings for barbecue pork butt or brisket. I save all the fat and render it in a slow cooker to use for cooking later on.

My mom didn't exactly keep a tin of fat around, but my dad would often save the rendered fat from beef/chicken/bacon to keep around to spread on bread with some salt and perhaps onions for a snack. I do that from time to time, myself.

Deep frying oil I strain and reuse. It'd be a waste of money not to--there's a significant amount of oil that goes into deep frying, and, as long as you strain it, it doesn't go rancid very quickly.

As for the drain issue, my parents dumped any drippings they did not save down the drain all the time, and now I own their house. It's been almost 35 years in this house (although I've lived in it for 25 of them), and it hasn't been an issue yet.

My mom & I spent Christmas at my brother's house in St. Louis, so I asked both of them if they keep old fats. Not surprisingly, neither does. But, a related and funny story...

One day while I was in St. Louis, my brother was at work and I made myself oatmeal for breakfast. In looking for some sugar, I came across an unmarked jar amid his baking supplies filled with something that looked like sugar & cinnamon. I tasted a bit only to discover it was actually salt with some other unknown substance. Fast forward to that night when I'm in the living room & overhear my mom & brother in the kitchen. My mom asks what something is and my brother replies: "That's pretzel salt." Ding ding ding...I realize that they're talking about the jar I discovered that morning. "Why," I ask my brother, "do you have a jar of old pretzel salt?" Apparently they buy pretzels in huge containers from Costco or Sam's, and there's a lot of leftover salt in the bottom, so my brother saves it to salt his back steps during the winter. LOL...why not? (I still don't understand why the container is kept with baking supplies, but the back door does lead directly into the kitchen.)

It must be genetic. When my Dad worked in Manhattan in the 1970s, he'd get a coffee every day that came with a couple packs of sugar. (Knowing NYC, he probably got the coffee from a takeout place, where coffee, sugar & creamer were handed to him in a paper bag. Does any other city in the country put takeout coffee into bags?) My Dad didn't use sugar in his coffee, so he would throw them in his desk drawer & periodically bring a bag full of sugar packets home. As kids, we'd then be tasked with tearing open the packets & emptying them into the sugar canister.

Great story. The pretzel thing is a new one but I would routinely save packets of salt, pepper and sugar from take out orders and they would be in my desk maybe for years. But you never know when you might need one.

Binko wrote:
As for the drain issue, my parents dumped any drippings they did not save down the drain all the time, and now I own their house. It's been almost 35 years in this house (although I've lived in it for 25 of them), and it hasn't been an issue yet.

Sigh, the real problem isn't generally inside one's own plumbing, it is that all this grease gets into the municipal sewer system and causes problems downstream, as it were. Googling "can I pour fat down the drain?" or any variant of this will get you tons of municipalities who practically beg you not to do it.

I live in a suburb that had flooding in 2010 and now has embarked on a big public information program to raise awareness of how this practice only makes things worse.

Tossing a can of grease into the trash seems like the right thing to do.

Cathy2 wrote:In my refrigerator, I have a small container with bacon fat. I have another container of rendered pork fat. In a quart mason jar, I have oil devoted to deep fat frying. This has been used several times, it is strained and returned to this jar afterwards. Since we rarely deep fat fry, it lasts a very long time.

I was reading a Cook's Illustrated the other day where some queried on how to best store used oil for frying. The best method was to strain, cool and store in the freezer. While it can be done in the refrigerator, too, it lasted longer in the freezer.

Regards,