How to Use More Bacon Fat

Bacon fat.

Hot drippings.

Reserved grease.

In my meandering through my grandmother’s old recipes, I can’t count the times I saw the need for a well greased, hot skillet and the varied names she used for bacon grease. I thought to myself how strange it is that we’ve no proper source at the market for bacon fat. It’s not jarred or canned. It’s not mass produced. It is made a la minute — when you need it. I imagine her standing over the hot burner, perhaps a cigarette in her lips — painted red, frying up a ration of bacon, thinking to herself that she would need a tablespoon or two to add to the green beans or as the beginnings of a roux.

This is beginning of her cooking and it is also much of the beginning of cooking in the south. Pigs were easy to raise, easy to slaughter and their prodigiousness throughout the whole of southern cooking is nearly ubiquitous. Take bacon and a hot skillet and you have the start of not only a great meal but also a cuisine.

And so my mind naturally goes to what do you do when you’ve no bacon and you need some fat to get a recipe going? The answer lies in the reserved bacon fat you’ve kept in an air tight jar in your refrigerator. For my grandmother, I imagine a jar might have also been an empty aluminum can of green beans or tomatoes from several weeks ago, covered in more aluminum foil. But I assure you an air tight jar with a clamp lock is best. There is magic that happens when you take a tablespoon of bacon fat and lay it down on a hot skillet. The air sings. The smell fills your soul.

So how do preserve this magic fat? You can approach several ways — from the perfect to the just fine. The best way is after you’ve made your bacon, allow the hot drippings to cool slightly but not solidify and pour through a fine mesh sieve over a Pyrex measuring cup. This will catch all of the burned bacon bits. Then fill up your jar and pop it into the refrigerator. Here it will last for several weeks (some might say years). I do it this way when I’m feeling cheffy. Most of the time, I take my existing jar from the refrigerator and just pour the grease in burned bacon bits and all. Other times, I allow the grease to solidify and spoon the grease in.

Perfection has its place and it wasn’t necessarily found at my grandmother’s stove for an everyday dinner. Or even a special one. Life isn’t perfect and when you cook and eat three meals a day for 72 years, that’s nearly 80,000 meals. So don’t sweat it. Bacon fat is primeval fat and in order to tap into the tenor of the South, you need to have that little jar.

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