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Your Nana Was Right About the Fat

Beef Tallow Is Back. And Your Great-Grandmother Never Stopped Using It.

I kept seeing the word everywhere. Tacos made with tallow. Fries cooked in tallow. Menus in San Diego practically leading with it like a badge of honor. And I kept thinking — what is that? I knew it was some kind of fat. I knew it was having a moment. But I wanted to actually understand it before I came home and started talking about it like I’d known all along.

So I looked it up. And then I called my nana. Not literally — she’s been gone a long time — but in my head, I absolutely did. Because it turns out she already knew everything I was about to discover.

What Tallow Actually Is

Tallow is rendered beef fat. Specifically the fat from around the kidneys and organs, slow-melted down until it becomes a clean, shelf-stable cooking fat that your great-grandmother kept in a ceramic crock on the back of the stove and used for absolutely everything. It has a high smoke point — right around 400°F — which makes it genuinely excellent for high-heat cooking. Frying, searing, roasting. The stuff that makes food taste like food.

We abandoned it somewhere in the mid-twentieth century when the vegetable oil industry convinced everyone that animal fat was the enemy and that a highly processed, industrially extracted oil made from seeds was the healthy choice. The crocks came off the stoves. The nanas were overruled by science that, it turns out, wasn’t quite right.

Now it’s back. And the chefs who are using it aren’t doing it for nostalgia — they’re doing it because it works.

The McDonald’s Fries Confession

Here’s the part that stopped me cold when I read it: McDonald’s used to fry their french fries in beef tallow. Right up until 1990. And if you’re old enough to remember McDonald’s fries before 1990, you already know where this is going. In 1990, under public pressure, they switched to vegetable oil.

A lot of people will tell you the fries have never been the same.

They’re not wrong. The flavor that made those fries legendary wasn’t a recipe. It was the fat.

Why It Belongs in the Remixology Kitchen

Here’s why tallow isn’t just delicious — it checks all three GAP boxes.

It’s anti-inflammatory. Beef tallow, particularly from grass-fed cattle, is rich in conjugated linoleic acid — CLA — which has been studied for its role in reducing inflammation. Compare that to the refined seed oils it replaced, which are high in omega-6 fatty acids and have been linked to exactly the kind of chronic inflammation we’re trying to move away from.

It’s nutrient-dense. Tallow carries fat-soluble vitamins — A, D, E, and K — that your body actually needs and that processed vegetable oils simply don’t provide. These are the vitamins that require fat to be absorbed, which means the fat you cook with matters as much as the food you put in it.

And it’s ancestral in the best sense. Not in the precious, performative way — in the practical way. Humans have been cooking with animal fats for thousands of years. Our bodies know what to do with them. The century we spent replacing them with industrial alternatives is the outlier, not the norm.

Try It Tonight: Tallow Sweet Potato Fries

If you want to start somewhere, start here. Cut your sweet potatoes into wedges, toss them in melted tallow — about a tablespoon per potato — hit them with salt, and roast at 425°F until the edges are deeply golden and a little crisp. The tallow gives you an exterior that vegetable oil just can’t match at that temperature. It’s not greasy. It’s just right.

You can find tallow at most health food stores now, usually near the other specialty cooking fats. Look for grass-fed if you can find it — the nutrient profile is meaningfully better. It keeps for months at room temperature, smells like nothing until it hits a hot pan — and then it smells like the reason people kept coming back to McDonald’s for thirty years.

Your Nana Didn’t Need a Label

She didn’t have a GAP framework. She didn’t read nutrition labels or follow anti-inflammatory protocols or think about polyphenols and gut health. She just kept the fat from the Sunday roast and used it to cook Monday’s dinner.

Turns out she was doing everything right.

The remix here isn’t complicated. Sometimes the original was already the best version — and all we had to do was come back to it.

Follow the remix on IG @remixology