As the name implies this is the Cooks Kitchen. A place to share your favorite recipes, preparations and secrets of how you cook, be it in the kitchen, the tailgate of your truck, shore lunch or campfire.
Strain it through cheese cloth for fish frying later.
Yep, I'm 75 and have low cholesterol and echo cardiogram showed great shape in there but why I don't know. For the first thirty plus years of my life or so we ate a lot of bacon and always strained the grease through cheese cloth and saved it for frying later. Many people just used a big blob of Crisco to fry in. I know when we went to the Boundary Waters the best eating fish there ever has been were fresh walleye fillets so fresh you had to flip them quick to keep them from curling too bad fried in that bacon grease. The pan next to it was full of sliced potatoes and onion and crushed garlic and salt and pepper and this was a feast never forgotten even if it's 35 years or so.
Any of you other guys grow up in houses where bacon grease was saved? I thought about it this morning when I slow fried 4 bacon slices with eggs and cooked the bacon crisper than we always used to and used a half dozen paper towels and smashed them flat and got every bit of grease off them. Not the way we used to eat bacon for sure. Now we just let the grease set up and scrape it off into the garbage, never down the drain.
Oh yeah, for frying now it's either Canola Oil or Peanut Oil, though each have their advocates and detractors.
I still save bacon grease as well as duck grease. Top chefs use both. I had a four way bypass done thirteen years ago and I have blood work done every six months. The meds I use stem to work fine. My cardiologist says my blocked artery’s are almost certainly due to my genes. But I do eat a healthy diet. I’m a old gezzer to with maybe not to many years left so I enjoy my food ! But I don’t suggest you follow my example.
Anybody who throws out succulent bacon grease should be put on some sort of watchlist!
I rarely cook bacon, merely because it's messy, but fondly recall the treat of fried bacon grease-soaked bread. Vegetables are things my food eats.
My mother used a short, aluminum store-bought pot that looked like a small coffee pot without the spout that was embossed with "Bacon Grease." She kept it next to the stove. Just thinking about it brings back the memories of awakening to the aroma.
That's how my aunt cooked. Plenty of lard, bacon grease and eggs. Best fried chicken I've ever had. The milk was from their cows and was at least a third cream.
dave potts wrote:That's how my aunt cooked. Plenty of lard, bacon grease and eggs. Best fried chicken I've ever had. The milk was from their cows and was at least a third cream.
She did finally die-- at age 106!
My grandma in Colorado made it to 99. Bacon, butter, and cream with everything. She said that if you ate a bowl of oatmeal every morning, you'd live to be 100. She must have taken one day off the oatmeal diet for a little extra bacon.
Never any bacon fat left over when I was a kid .After the bacon, black pudding and eggs were cooked sliced bread entered the pan soaking up all the fat and fried until crisp , very tasty but not very healthy.
Mother saved bacon grease and used it frequently in other dishes and preps...she was considered one of the premier cooks in our town and extended family. We ate our own canned garden vegetables and put up our own country hams etc. She and my father both lived to their mid 90's.
My Mother used (still has it) a canister (aluminum I think) with top, and a removable strainer under-top. Size of approx. one quart. Top lid has a red wooden knob. We always had bacon grease at the ready for frying stuff. Great with Squirrel, great with panfish!
I was brought up on a small farm. There was always a side of bacon hanging in the cool shed. My dad would go out and cut a thick slice off the side, lay it on some hard rye bread and sprinkle salt on the beacon....lunch.
My mother always had a pot of bacon grease on the side of the stove and whenever there were bacon drippings left she would just add it to the pot.
The chilled and congealed bacon fat was used in further frying or was spread on rye bread for a quick snack. It was best when there were small pieces of bacon still in the spread.
You guys are killing me with the bread soaked in the bacon grease remains and fried crisp. A luxury that would send modern day vegans screaming through the kitchen. Even the red meat eaters like us have backed off on the grease we used to eat, at least most of us have. One of the nieces always cooks a turkey for the big family dinner totally wrapped in bacon and I eat as much of the bacon as the turkey.
I saw a TV show, they visited a very popular, old, Southern restaurant, where they have used the same cooking grease for ninety years. Each night after closing, they strain the grease through cheese cloth.
Ha, this is so great to read. My mom stored bacon grease in a coffee can, and it sat on the stove to be used and replenished. But as far as living long though you're eating "heartily," we gotta remember how hard people worked back then, how physical a life they led, how they rarely lounged around, walked everywhere and did not indulge after dinner watching movies till late while munching terrible things. As many of us do today.
I was in a restaurant last week and took a casual look around, over half of the people there were kinda...wide.
The fear of animal fats instilled in us in the previous few decades is a hard thing to shake, but, if we avoid nitrites and fake smoke flavoring, the most unhealthy part of the bread-in-grease treat is the bread! Stay active, skip the sweets, and the body will do what it's done for millennia...
Flykuni nails it on the head. I'm overweight, many people I know are overweight, and so are many people I see on the street. However, I do eat much healthier than my parents and grandparents did at my age, and they were far from being fat. They just worked physically on a farm more than 10 hours a day while I work behind a desk... they could wolf down 4500, 5000, 5500 calories a day and it wasn't an issue as they would burn every single one of them every day, not unlike Olympic athletes. Meanwhile, many people eat 2500-3000 calories and barely burn 1500 of them...
My parents not only saved and reused bacon fat but beef dripping too. Beef dripping is still used in a high proportion of the fish and chip shops of Northern England, there's kind of a north-south divide between dripping and oil users.