Is this a thing?

fat

(Failed) #21

A bit off topic, but your mention of juice reminded me of something that happened several years ago.

A friend of mine had diabetes and was in the hospital and I was visiting her. The nurse came in and did a fingerstick and said “Your blood sugar is quite high, I need to give you some medication. Do you want a glass of orange juice or Ginger ale to take it?” So many years of bad info on how to manage her diabetes. And it ended up killing her.


(mole person) #22

I wrote a post in another thread this morning that touched on this subject. However, I don’t generally talk about eating hunks of fat since most people aren’t interested in doing this. But I’ll add some thoughts here on why I think it really helps with satiation.

First, here is the post:

Eating unrendered meat fat offers two major benefits over any liquid fat (butter included as it is liquid at body temperature).

First, it is encased in a cellular structure. One ounce of unrendered beef fat has 19 grams of fat and 3 grams of protein. It’s also very nutrient rich compared to rendered fats.

This cellular matrix offers two big benefits with respect to satiation. First, it does activate satiation via engagement of gut stretch receptors. Secondly, the digestion is slowed by the protein matrix in the same way that meat protein from muscle meats slow digestion. Thus the fat is not free to rush quickly into your bloodstream and leptin release happens over a much more extended time frame.

I think for many people the rush of fats to the bloodstream, from lots of oils on a high fat diet, are responsible for that nauseated feeling that excess fat can give. I’ve yet to experience this a single time from unrendered meat fat.

This is how we evolved to consume fats. Oils and dairy are recent additions to our diet that we are not particularly well adapted to. Some people tolerate them better than others but that doesn’t mean that they are optimal nutritionally.


(Kristen Ann) #23

This is great Ilana, thank you.


(Parker the crazy crone lady) #24

Pork belly from my local butcher is much more satiating than oils and butter. It is also delicious, and no queasiness. I’m going to make it a regular part of my diet for quite a while. It has the cellular structure you talk about and good amount of protein.


(Kristen Ann) #25

On Monday, I asked one of the butchers if I could get big chunks of fat. I felt kind of silly asking, but he was so nice. He said he’d save me pork fat but the beef fat gets ground up for processing game. He told me to come back Friday for the pork.

Went to pick it up today and two other butchers there and didn’t know what I was talking about. The butcher from Monday ended up coming out and said he saved me beef fat too. He said he saved the best cuts of fat for me! I felt touched by his kindness.

Then I got in line to pay for it, 6 men deep (hunting season), and they all insisted I cut in line and let me pay first. Again, so nice!

Anyways I’m very excited. Ten lbs of pork fat and ten of beef. Both in big chunks like I wanted!

Looks like the pork fat has skin left on it. I won’t eat it, so I’m wondering how to give it to my dogs…


(K-9 Handler/Trainer, PSD/EP Specialist, Veteran) #26

Score!!
Build rapport with them, and you’ll be thought of right off the bat!


(Carol) #27

Do you like pork rinds? I think the skin can be used for that.


(Kristen Ann) #28

No, I think they taste bad and they gross me out. Though, I have used it for breading and that wasn’t so bad. So maybe I can save some skin for that, but I’ll still have a lot left over.


(Carol) #29

Can I have your pork skin? :laughing::rofl::yum:


(mole person) #30

Aren’t butchers awesome! They love to talk about their meats too. I’ve learned a lot from them. They really get tickled at the idea of skinny looking girls hunting for fat to chow down on too. :rofl:

I can see they gave you a good price too. I’ve got three butchers here willing to sell me fat and I’m so grateful for the one who’s just giving it to me because the other two want to charge over $3 a pound which feels like gouging for something they normally toss out. At the price you got I’d happily pay anywhere.

Let me know if you find any specific way you like to eat the beef fat. I don’t do pork fat myself as pork in general isn’t as easy on my health issues as beef so I only eat it rarely.


(Ivy) #31

What’s the difference with cooking it down over just blenderizing after cooking a bit? Is it better or necessary to do the cooking down/straining?


(Bob M) #32

You mean for suet? I tested eating suet. Bought some frozen suet and thawed it. Took it to work with my normal “meat” lunch. Suet is – chewy. And sometimes has “silver skin”, which is almost impossible to chew.

I didn’t mind eating suet, but it might take a bit of eating to get used to it.

If you do anything else to it, the “tallow” part starts coming out. For instance, before I tried to eat thawed suet, I tried cooking suet. You lose a lot of the tallow, so a lot of the “oil” (or more likely, liquid fat). You end up with something that’s not quite suet. All the “hard” stuff (protein?) stays in there.

It’s still edible, but I thought just eating raw suet was better and faster.


(Ivy) #33

Will it taste different if I cook it down to make tallow?

If suet gets put in the blender, is rendering tallow impossible?


(Ivy) #34

Somebody said here , Rendered fats like butter, oils, tallow and lard are much less satiating than solid meat fat that’s still bound up to it protein cellular structure and still contains all of the nutrition

So I did try that today. The rendered tallow has a different texture and taste than what I already have from a purchase on the website.

Not sure if there are directions going forward that have to do with the difference.

I’ll try what somebody said in another post:
Bake suet at 150 F for 1.5 - 2 hours. Eat.


(Bob M) #35

When I make tallow, I cut it into chunks, run those through the food processor until they are small, then put in a crock pot. But to show you how “hard” they are, you have to do small amounts in the food processor, and even then you’ll get binding.

If you cook it down to make tallow, it won’t be the same at all. Tallow is basically “oil”. Suet is oil + protein, collagen, connective tissue, etc.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #36

I’ve rendered tallow from beef fat. It doesn’t have much taste. Nor does lard, for that matter, especially compared with bacon grease. But many people apparently find that they don’t like the taste of tallow, or of lard, so they must have a taste. Come to think of it, I find the coconut taste of unrefined coconut oil to be a bit off-putting in certain contexts. To each his own, I guess.


#37

My experiences are very different regarding taste, I guess it’s differences between people and animals.
Tallow has a super strong, bad taste and smell to me, I feed it to the animals (and I rarely feed them anything even borderline edible for me). Lard can be subtly awful but kind of neutral (so it has little taste but that annoys me horribly), okay and amazingly tasty, it depends where one gets it. Butter has subtle flavor but it still can be quite nice. Lard from the local pig farm totally beats it though, hands down :smiley: Bacon grease is as bad as all the store-bought lard I tried but I admit I have tiny experience and didn’t try the most expensive bacon as I can buy so great cheaper meat products.
But it’s hard to compare butter with lard as they have very different flavors and it would be sad to stop eating any of them.
Coconut oil (the cheap one for cooking) is totally tasteless to me. It’s good for cooking but if I have lard and the dish isn’t at least potentially a dessert, I use that. (People traditionally used lard for desserts too, they still do sometimes but I don’t care. I tasted such things, eww. Good lard has a very strong taste, it can’t be masked with anything.)