What’s the Difference Between Lard and Tallow?

A very common question I get about our products is, What is the difference between lard and tallow?

They are both types of rendered fat, and both have been around for a VERY long time. I’ve observed that very old words often have multiple meanings, or maybe the current meaning has shifted slightly away from the original meaning. All that to say, not everyone who reads this will agree with my explanations of these ancient foods. However, I want to try to shed some light on what I know about the subject.

The basic difference is what animal these fats come from. Lard is Pork Fat. Tallow is Beef Fat. (Tallow may also include lamb or other ruminant fat, and even if that’s true, the following would still be generally true.)

A fun fact for you is that rendered Chicken Fat is called Schmaltz. And yes, it’s a thing. You see it in the pan after you’ve roasted a nice plump chicken.

Lard, Tallow, and Schmaltz are all rendered fats.

What does “rendered” mean?

Every healthy mammal’s body contains fat in two areas: under the skin, and around the kidneys. What that fat is NOT is free liquid oil, floating around in the body. Nope. The raw fat from a cow or pig or chicken must be removed from its surrounding connective tissue before it can be useful as a cooking oil. That’s a very simple process (UNLIKE the extraction of seed oils from tiny, non-oily, non-mammalian seeds and grains like cottonseed or corn). All you have to do is warm the connective tissue up gently, and out melts the liquid fat. The fibrous (for lack of a better word) tissue left behind is “crackling,” and makes a very hearty snack when you crisp it up in a skillet.

This process is called Rendering, and it ends with the two byproducts: Crackling and liquid Rendered ___ (Lard, Tallow, Schmaltz). Crackling is a bonus, but the liquid oil is what we’re really after. You don’t really need to include the “rendered” part because the names of those products imply that the extraction has already taken place, but it can eliminate ambiguity that can come with those super-old words. In fact, I don’t even know what raw pig fat is called. Pig fat, I guess! Ha. Raw beef fat is called suet, but even then… some people use the word suet when they mean rendered tallow and vice-versa.

What is the functional difference between Lard and Tallow?

Source

Lard can actually come from two different places on the pig. Pigs are fat factories, after all! Depending on how the pigs are raised and what breed they are, much of the fat can be found under the skin, and would be called Back Fat. Back fat produces a lard that is much lower in saturated fat, and I hypothesize that it’s this area that would tend to be richer in Vitamin D if the pigs are raised on pasture, since the skin is where vitamin D is manufactured. The other area pigs store fat is around the kidneys (like all mammals), and kidney fat tends to be higher in saturated fat, and therefore will be stiffer and harder at a given temperature. Either one from a pig tends to be much more unsaturated than Tallow, meaning it is softer and more pliable.

Beef fat principally comes from the kidney area. A very fat cow will have fat under the skin, but it’s not thick like on a pig, therefore it will tend to be more difficult to harvest. Plus, since beef hangs much longer than pork after slaughter, the skin fat is usually left in place to protect the underlying meat from oxygen and moisture loss.

Taste

Lard is a delightful replacement for Crisco (or should I say, Crisco attempted to replace lard!). Lard is the best choice for pastry and other baked goods. Rendered correctly, it will have very neutral flavor. Generally speaking, pork back fat will tend to taste a little “porkier” than pork kidney or “leaf” fat, but done right, either one is very mild in flavor. I had a chef once tell me that his favorite way to make chocolate chip cooks is using lard!

In my opinion, beef fat has quite a “beefy” flavor, even when rendered quickly and carefully. If you are just getting started into incorporating animal fats, and maybe have that lingering fat phobia that I did when I first started, I might suggest starting with lard and working your way up to Tallow Level. Who knew real food could be so much like a video game? Haha. But you can use that natural flavor to your advantage. Tallow is an excellent frying oil, and it makes the World’s Most Delicious French Fries. Did you know that McDonald’s used to fry in tallow when they first opened their restaurant chain back in the 1940’s? But the cholesterol scare lobbyists pushed for them to eliminate animal fats from their frying oils, so now to achieve the same authentic flavor, they have to add “essence of beef.” Sad, huh?

Texture

In its solid state, tallow is similar in texture to cold butter. It is crumbly and hard when cool and therefore will not make a great choice for pastries, since it is not very pliable. Because tallow is highly saturated, it solidifies easily at room temperature and can leave a filmy feeling in your mouth after eating if your food has cooled down too much.

Lard, however, tends to stay liquid after being melted, and is a great choice for sautéing vegetables or browning meat. It is quite soft at room temperature and is very much like Crisco in possible uses.

Nutrition

Remember, lard comes from pigs, and pigs are akin to little Vitamin D factories when they are raised outdoors. Lard is the best natural source of vitamin D on earth, only second to cod liver oil. When piggies are out on pasture, soaking up the sun all day, their hormones help them create vitamin D, which is stored in their fat. Bacon is officially a health food. But only from pasture-raised pigs!

Commercial pigs, sadly, never see the light of day EVER. They are born inside and live inside until that very last day. CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) pork is among the saddest commercial “foods” that there is, because confining these animals under such stressful conditions does a great disservice to their piggy personalities, and it also does a great disservice to pork lovers everywhere because they are missing out on this wonderful, natural source of vitamin D. You can’t get much natural vitamin D if you never see the sun.

Additionally, many commercial pig operations add Ractopamine to the feed, which tends to unnaturally force the pig’s body to reduce stored fat and increase muscle, so that the final cuts will have more profitable muscle and less fat. I think it’s rather tragic considering all the benefits of pork fat, not to mention the delightful taste of Real Pork.

Tallow’s benefits include all those associated with grass-fed beef. When you hear someone spout off the list of great things about grass-fed beef, guess what? MOST of those benefits are ONLY found in the fat. Higher Vitamin E, Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), and Omega-3 fatty acids. And tallow, of course, being pure fat, is chock-full of all of them! On the other side of that coin, however, is that commercially-raised cattle fed corn and soy, do not have these beneficial fatty acids in their fats. Once again, it’s all about what those animals are eating and how they are raised that ultimately determines the benefits the human consumer is able to obtain.

Here’s a fun little chart summarizing the main differences between Lard and Tallow. Find out how to get some here!

Fats are a delightful way to stretch a meal and increase its nutrient-density. I hope this article has been helpful and informative! Thanks for reading.

–Jerica

Not gray hair, mind you. I’m not sure there’s a cure for that, especially when you run a crazy ranch like we do! 😉 I’m talking about something else…

As I cooked breakfast a couple of days ago, I noticed on the mostly-empty package of pork breakfast sausage I had thawed a few days prior, that the edges of the meat had gone gray. Some people might call it brownish. It was pork, so it was a very light pink to begin with, and that, mixed with a faint brown, really looked grayish to me more than anything. It was certainly not the pinkish color one normally encounters when first opening a pack of our sausage. I knew it wasn’t spoiled. It was only days old, I had thawed it in the fridge, and it smelled great—like clean, sagey pork sausage!

Having done pretty extensive chemistry studies in college, I knew it had only grayed up because of its exposure to air, and this speculation was confirmed by noticing that the gray was only at the open edge of the package, not within the bulk of the meat, or along the sealed edges of the clear packaging. This is called Oxidation.

You’ve seen oxidation plenty of times. You know how if you make a bowl of guacamole and put it in the fridge overnight, the top will turn a terrible icky brown color, but underneath it will still be a beautiful yellow-green?

That’s oxidation.

It’s a natural process we are all fighting (most of the time—sometimes oxidation is good!).

Oxidation is why we’re aging. It’s what makes our cars rust. It’s what makes our guacamole turn brown.

And it makes our meat turn gray-brown in the fridge, unless…

…unless we do something to stop it! But WHAT?

I know you’re super busy, and this is a BIG can of worms kind of topic, so I’m just going to boil it down for you.

Meat naturally oxidizes when exposed to air.

It goes from red (or pink) to brownish-gray. The meat industry has figured out that customers don’t want to buy brownish-gray meat, but they also don’t like buying frozen meat (which is WAY fresher than “fresh” meat), so they have a couple of practices in place to prolong the shelf life of “fresh” meat.

My little breakfast sausage experience this week reminded me that you might not know about some of these practices, and you might find it surprising if your perfectly-safe raw sausage or hamburger turns gray-brown before you use it all up.

Industry Practices to Keep Meat from Going Gray

1. Add preservatives.

Sodium nitrate is the most familiar example of color-preserving-agent, and it is used to make bacon a really pretty pink color, in spite of the fact that it’s smoked and “cured” (aged). If you were to smoke plain ol’ pork belly, it would turn gray-brown–like the color of a patty of cooked sausage or a cooked pork chop. Now it is true that some vegetables are high in natural nitrites, and so if you add something like celery juice to your bacon brine, it can accomplish the same thing, but using a naturally-produced ingredient rather than a man-made product. Voila. Pink (naturally) bacon!

Nitrate is probably on the less-scary end as far as artificial additives go, but things like BHT raise my eyebrows a little higher. You don’t see BHT in plain meat products very often, probably because added preservatives always have to be labeled (as far as I know). And adding stuff like BHT to hamburger might not fly among savvy shoppers, but those three little letters might slip by pretty easily if they’re surrounded by other more benign ingredients like sausage seasonings.

2. Feed arsenic to the animals.

Blech. I know. But it’s true. Commercial poultry companies have found that by feeding small amounts of organic (carbon-based) arsenic, the meat will turn out pinker and more appealing in appearance. No, the arsenic doesn’t all get pooped out like they originally thought. And no, they still haven’t officially banned it in the US. And yes, they feed the arsenic-laden chicken poop to cattle, even the “organic” ones. Not kidding. It’s scary out there, folks.

3. Douse the meat in carbon monoxide.

By now, you probably think I’m making this stuff up to scare you. I only wish it was so! They poison the meat?? Yep, pretty much. And the reason it works is the same mechanism by which it would poison your body—myoglobin (the stuff that makes meat look red) has a strong affinity for CO (carbon monoxide), much more so than for regular oxygen, so it grabs onto the CO molecules and hangs on for dear… death? Meat that has “bonded” with CO can’t oxidize in the normal way, so it stays bright red for a longer period of time.

The benefit in the meat industry, of course, is that the meat can remain unfrozen without turning colors for longer periods of time… even if it has already spoiled! The literature is scarce when it comes to safety of this practice, and of course no label is required because it’s not considered an “additive,” but rather a “processing step,” even though some package types may still contain actual CO gas. Consuming the meat has been declared GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status, even though CO exposure has been linked with autism, and consuming meat exposed to CO does not have undetectable results.

Let’s get this straight. Meat packers are adding poison to food without labeling it because it’s poorly-researched effects are probably negligible. And they’re doing this, not to enhance safety or quality, but only to accomplish the appearance of those things by literally tricking the customer. And they’re doing it simply because people think it’s weird to buy frozen meat, but apparently they’re ok with not being aware that they’re buying meat that may have been sitting out for upwards of 2 or 3 weeks before purchase? Is this the kind of food production American consumers should be supporting?

It’s enough to give you gray hairs, isn’t it?

This is why it’s important to choose food producers that have your health in mind. Not just your dollars.

So how do we keep from going gray without poisons?

Well… it’s a pretty simple solution, really. We at Shady Grove Ranch keep the meat frozen. Meat products have a delightfully long “shelf” life in the freezer. And then after it thaws, well. It might just turn a little grayish-brown (ground meat in particular, since it has more surface area exposed to oxygen). If you practice safe thawing techniques, keep your fridge nice and cold, and wrap stuff up tightly if you don’t use it all right away, it should stay nice and pink until you cook it. It’s not going to hurt you if it turns a little grayish-brown due to oxidation. But you won’t have that problem because it’s so yummy, how can you wait any longer to eat it? 😉

Thanks for reading this far. We appreciate you investing in knowledge about how your food is produced!

Jerica

PS–In case you care to do more reading about this complex topic… And in case you want to order some meat that does not have arsenic, sodium nitrate, or carbon monoxide in it. 🙂