Are there any differences between the 4 culinary fats?  Yes. Yes, there are.

 

This is the text, or most of it (I went off-script about confit). The main reason for posting this is to share the links to the sources I consulted for this episode.  It probably looks better than a long list of links.

 

Fats. I want to make a show about fats, especially now that baking season is here.

Specifically I am looking at Crisco, oleomargarine, lard, and butter.

There is a ton of history about all those and that’s for a different show. I want to cover some of that history only as it relates to market forces and innovation and advertising.

There’s also the long term impact on health from when Crisco was presented as a substitute for lard. Before that it was used for candles. Mmmmmm.

Let’s start with butter. That’s probably the oldest fat used by humans.

Butter is mentioned in the Bible. One interesting tidbit I found when looking for butter information is that butter was used in Egyptian mummification. According to Elaine Khosrova, the Egyptians made a paste of butter, sawdust and dirt and used it “to plump the skin of their mummies.”

To the making of butter, the origin is lost to history but it is guessed butter was discovered as an accident in the transporting of milk. Milk being jostled is sacks on the back of a mule might have churned on the road and the brave taster discovered it was pretty good. That’s as good a story as any.

Butter comes from the butterfat in whole milk. The butterfat is part of the cream which rises to the top of the bucket when the cow is milked. Churning butter breaks up the fat globule into its constituent parts and the fats start to stick together. As the fat molecules attract more, they become enough to recognize as butter. What remains is buttermilk. Today’s version of buttermilk is far removed from what is produced from making your own butter. You can do that with a mixer and heavy cream and it’s much faster than the churn. The buttermilk produced from fresh butter is not a cultured product and it has no acidic tang. Generally its pretty plain if not maybe a touch sweet. If you’ve ever over-whipped cream for whipped cream, you know what it looks like when butter molecules find each other. Broken whipped cream is a one way street, so keep going. You can’t put the butter back into the cream. This article has a good explanation of fat globules and what’s happening.

Cream isn’t exactly an emulsion. The wee fat globules are in suspension and the aggitation breaks that suspension to make butter. Butter is an emulsion. It has butter fat, water, and milk protein. When butter is melted it separates into those different part. The milk proteins float, the butter fat is the yellow part and then the water is on the bottom. To make Ghee, cook the butter on low heat until the water evaporates. The milk proteins will sink and they will start to caramelize, to cook. They can burn, which, for ghee, we want to avoid. Strain the ghee through a coffee filter to keep out those caramelized bits and that’s it. At this point, from cream to ghee, that’s the full life cycle of a fat globule.

Churning butter seems to create an image of grandma sitting on her 4 legged stool churning butter with the chickens pecking and scratching around her. It’s a pure image and connotes wholesomeness and simplicity. The commercial butter industry is far from simple.

American butter must be at least-and usually is only-80% butterfat, 16-18% water and 2-4% milk protein. It might be salted which is 1-2% by weight, which works out to about a quarter teaspoon of salt per 4 ounce stick of butter.

European butter is usually 82% butterfat. Croissants are sometimes made with butter that can reach 85% butterfat and that’s a huge difference. If you wonder why the chain grocery store bakery croissants and the independent bakery on the corner have different products for different prices, the quality of the butter is one reason.

I’ll post this content as a blog post with links to some of the sites I used. One site has interesting information about the Kosher status of butter and mentions butter made from whey, the liquid left over from cheese making.

From Kosher to Treff, now let’s talk about lard.

Lard is the rendered fat from pigs. Rendered means it is slowly melted, much like butter is melted for Ghee, so the pure fat remains. Sometimes there are crispy bits leftover and those are hugely popular in just about all cultures as tasty crunchy treats.

Lard will return to solid at room temperature. Since lard is pork, it will have a mild pork flavor. Lard comes in at least two sources: back fat and around the kidneys. Leaf lard is the fat from around the kidneys and regular lard is made from the fat back. Leaf lard is very mild in flavor and has a slightly different crystaline structure—we’ve not talked about the crystals, but all fats have them. It’s relevant and another show—which makes leaf lard particularly fabulous for baked goods since that crystaline structure helps increase the flakiness of the finished product. Think fluffy biscuits and flaky pie dough.

As with most things done commercially, there’s various levels of quality. Most grocery store lards contain both lard and hydrogenated lard. I’ll get into hydrogenization in a bit.

Lard is easy to make at home. Not as easy to make as butter, but possible. Most procedures read to cut the pork fat into 1 inch cubes. That seems to make sense, but if you have a grinder, grind the fat. More surface area means a quicker render. It also means almost no cracklings. Everything comes at a cost.

Crock pots are good tools for rendering fat. Pork fat or beef far or duck fat or goose fat or chicken fat can all be rendered for that lovely fat and tasty cracklings. Low and slow, just like barbeque, is the way.

Two additions that seem to be more opinion than fact were offered. Add water, both recommended and not and firmly opposed, and baking soda, recommended and not addressed for preservation of white color.

If you don’t have a crock pot, but do have a wire pasta strainer and a Dutch oven, the cleverest way I saw was put the lard cubes into the wire strainer and put that into the Dutch oven. Place that in the oven on low, 225°, until it is fully rendered. Low and slow.

Your house will probably smell like rendered pork fat. Put the rendered fat into clean jars and store in the fridge.

Lard is a great fat for sauteeing, but also as a cooking vehicle itself, such as for confits, and flavored as a spread for bread. Fat back, in strips or thin slices like cheese, are used to bard or lard certain game meats that are very lean. The extra fat adds moisture and flavor to the dish. I used to be the butcher in a restaurant and the pheasant breast cages were larded with thin slices of fat back. We also barded venison loins. Barding is like sewing the long pieces of fat back into the meat with a special needed designed to hold the piece of fat.

Pork fat is a key ingredient in sausages and pates as well as some refried beans and tortillas.

In that fight for fat-free eating the FDA and USDA pushed for so long ago, and, frankly, they still do, lard is a 4 letter word. The fat eating public is getting savvy and that’s good for their health.

Lard is 40% saturated fat and butter is 54% Lard has no trans fats (More on that later) unless it was hydrogenated. Lard is a good source of Vitamin D with 1,000 international units per tablespoon compared to 9 IUs in olive oil.

There are concerns about Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids and that’s beyond the scope of this episode.

Commercial pigs are often fed foods high in Omega 6 fatty acids. If they eat it and you eat the pig, you eat the fatty acids. Everything seems to be a battle. If you can find local-ish pork, buy that. If there’s a pig farmer in your area, go make a new friend. Same goes for any of your meats. But, that’s not always possible. And Skippy the meat clerk putting the packages of meat in the grocery store cooler has no idea what that pig ate or where it came from. Again, sourcing your food is important, but not always easy.

Lard has more to consider than butter. That’s pretty clear. But, when we look at Oleomargarine, margarine nowadays, and Crisco, the issues with lard seem pretty simple.

Napoleon III wanted a cheap butter substitute for his military and the riff-raff. To incentivize the research, he made it a contest to see who could be first to invent this thing. Chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès invented Oleomargarine in 1869. He combined beef fat and skimmed milk to make his creation. I didn’t look to read how, but I’m sure that is out there. Since then all manner of substitutes have been created, some even is perpetual liquid at room temperature form. If that’s odd to you, there was once a squeeze margarine product.

In 1871 Henry W Bradley patented a margarine which was made from cottonseed oil and animal fats.

In 1902 whale oil was hyrdogenated and used in margarine.

Now, that’s a lot quickly. The key points, as I see them, are the use of cottonseed oil as a food and hydrogenization of fats for edible use.

I remember my grandmother talking about oleo. It used to be sold in the dairy case with the butter but was white. It came with a little packet of yellow dye which the customer, if preferred, was to add to the oleo to make it look like butter. It turns out that the coloring was not legally allowed to be added. And there were licenses required and taxes to be paid for selling oleo.

During World War I, oleo sales increased for the scarcity of dairy products. World War II saw the same demand for margarine increase.

My mother was a registered nurse and we used margarine all the time. Even that squeeze Parkay. I have no doubt she was doing what she thought was best, but I also know margarine was cheaper than butter and pennies mattered. If she knew then what is known now about fats and wellness, I doubt she would have continued with margarine. Years later she did change to extra virgin olive oil and butter and I had influence only on the EVOO.

Erstaz butter became popular then not for the fear of trans fats. The timeline gets busy fast, but the main point is that the government mandated trans fats must be removed from margarines, and nearly all foods. The scramble was on to fix those issues and in doing so they made a processed food a highly processed food.

Let’s put a pin in that for a moment and talk about Crisco.

There are a few things impressive about Crisco but not one of them is the product.

Cottonseed oil, the source of the ingredient for the original Crisco, was a pretty foul thing. Chemist David Wesson invented a bleaching and deodorizing process to make the normally dark and smelly oil clear, tasteless and odorless.

Candlemakers William Proctor and his brother in law James Gamble were up against stiff competition in Cincinnati, Ohio. By turning their focus to the shortening business, they were able to circumvent the issue of the meat industry’s price controls on lard and tallow, the ingredients used in their candles. Proctor and Gamble bought cottonseed mills and with the help of German chemist EC Keyser, P&G developed hydrogenation. A Weston A Price Foundation webpage reads, “By adding hydrogen atoms to the fatty acid chain, this revolutionary industrial process transformed liquid cottonseed oil into a solid that resembled lard.”

Crisco, Crystalized Cottonseed Oil, was introduced to the market in 1911.

That’s impressive thing one. Taking trash and making it useful. As candles it was probably better, but electricity was coming everywhere and candles weren’t the necessity they used to be.

Cottonseed oil shortening was not a new idea for baking. But Proctor and Gamble change the game. With clever circular logic and defining the thing with the thing they circumvented that crowded market of cottonseed shortenings by advertising this product as more cheaper than butter and is pure shortening. A January, 1913 ad in “The Ladies’ Home Journal” reads, in part, “Cake made with Crisco retains its original fine, soft texture—Crisco contains no water. It is all shortening. Butter is almost one-fifth water. Crisco is pure vegetable and is a far richer shortening than butter.”

TheConversation.com has a page about Crisco and the author writes, “Crisco marketers offered only evasion and euphemism. Crisco was made from “100% shortening,” its marketing materials asserted, and “Crisco is Crisco, and nothing else.” Sometimes they gestured towards the plant kingdom: Crisco was “strictly vegetable,” “purely vegetable” or “absolutely all vegetable.” 

Impressive thing number 2. Connecting cottonseeds to vegetables. They seem to be one of the first to do that and the idea has stuck.

Impressive thing number 3 is marketing. P&G published a cookbook, for free, with Crisco as the fat of choice in all the recipes. Very savvy.

Impressive thing number 4. Trust the brand, not the ingredients. Crisco sold very well for a long time and no one knew what it was. But, it came from modern processing and it was white so it was pure and safe.

Now Crisco is replaced with soy, palm, and canola oils. It is still hydrogenated and it’s still highly processed.

One main issue with Crisco was the trans fats. They had to make changes when the government got tough on those.

Trans fats are terrible for us. You know how I know that? The government said so. Page after page after page of reading for this episode I kept bumping into how terrible trans fats are and how they cause diabetes and insulin resistance and heart disease. It’s almost consensus science and not one time did any of them cite a source or explain how trans fats do the terrible things they do. They just do, okay? Trust the science.

I started down the trans fat rabbit hole and found confusion and discord and consensus. To sort it out and make it simple I asked biochemist Kyle Mamounis about trans fats and why are they bad. Kyle’s response was he’s not certain they really are all that bad. And fats and sugars is one of Kyle’s areas of focus. Trans fats is still discussed the same way saturated fats are—incorrectly–discussed and the same way—also incorrectly—sodium is discussed. They are discussed by hanging on to old science and old information to keep fear up and resistance low. And, if you look on the Google, it probably works. Nearly every page has some disclaimer citing the FDA or CDC about fats. Mostly missing is sugar.

One other key issue from these fats is cholesterol. We’ve been told there’s good and bad cholesterol and that 200 is the magic number and if you exceed that, here’s a handful of pills. Like saturated fat and sodium, the cholesterol narrative has been blown up, in part by the likes of Ivor Cummins.

The key issue with Crisco, and possibly other shortenings, is the seed oil. Vegetables don’t have oil. Corn is a grain. Soy is seed and so is canola. Avocado is a seed and olives are fruits and peanuts are legumes. Carrots don’t have oil. At least not enough to make virgin cold pressed carrot oil. Asparagus is a grass.

Trans fats is a good episode idea and it’s going to require some pretty serious reading.

What seems plain enough over the more than hundred years of shortening is stick to the foods granny ate and made. Meat. Vegetables in season. Butter and lard and tallow. And duck fat. Local meats if you can find them; online meats if local isn’t possible and fundage is possible. Funds is a big issue. It seems nearly every neighborhood has a few people raising chickens. Go make friends and buy fresh eggs.

This episode covered a lot. We learned about butter, lard, margarine, and shortening. Butter and lard are minimally processed and margarine and shortening are highly processed. In addition to that, butter and lard have pretty simple ingredients and margarine and shortening have many ingredients and complex processes. Foods as close to their natural state are the better foods to eat because it’s closer to what food in nature is.