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Dessert

To Melt and Clarify Fat

Clarified fat is made by melting suet or fat with cold water, boiling, straining, and removing sediment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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To Melt and Clarify Fat

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the suet or fat into pieces.

  2. Place the pieces in a pot and just barely cover with cold water.

  3. Boil until the fat looks shriveled, but do not burn.

Strain and clarify

  1. Strain the fat.

  2. Let it cool, then turn it out and scrape any sediment from the bottom.

Use

  1. Use the clarified fat for frying.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Suet or fat
Provides the fat that is rendered and then used for frying.
Cold water
Covers the fat as it heats, so it renders gently without scorching.

The step that matters

Boil until the fat looks shriveled, but do not burn. Water in the pot boils off as the fat renders; if the heat runs too high after the water is gone, the fat and its solids scorch, giving off-flavors and a darker, less clean fat.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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