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Fat Rendering and Medium

Rendering fat, or using fat as the carrier for flavour

39 rungs across 29 volumes

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Africa

Senegal & Gambia

Break the groundnut emulsion for mafé, the same way, for the same reason, everywhere it is cooked

Mafé sits alongside ceebu jën and yassa as one of the three anchor dishes here, and the physics do not change whether the fat is peanut oil in a Dakar kitchen...

Guinea, Sierra Leone & Liberia

Extract palm butter by boiling, pounding and sieving, and stop before you squeeze it bitter

The traditional method boils fresh palm fruit, pounds it in a mortar carefully, without cracking the hard inner kernel, mixes the pulp with water, then sieves...

Guinea, Sierra Leone & Liberia

Break the groundnut paste's emulsion by frying it out, then rebuild it with a second fat

Raw groundnut paste stirred straight into liquid gives a thin, unstable, raw-tasting sauce.

Ghana & Nigeria

Fry the pepper base properly, and stop calling it a step

"Frying the stew" is not a step in making obe ata.

Ghana & Nigeria

Control your palm oil deliberately

There are three legitimate states and you must choose one on purpose.

Côte d'Ivoire, Togo & Benin

Manage red palm oil as a pigment and a flavour, not as a frying medium

Red palm oil's colour and much of its aroma are carotenoids, and carotenoids are heat-labile.

Mali, Burkina Faso & Niger

Shea is a fat that sets, so use it where setting is the point

Substituting sunflower oil for shea butter is not a small change.

Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau & São Tomé

Two fats, two moments

Why it works. The mechanism is in the arsenal above and the numbers decide the colour of every red dish here: 59 per cent beta-carotene loss at 200°C over two...

Cameroon

Use crude, high free fatty acid red palm oil, and never refined

This rung is load bearing in the literal sense: get it wrong and one of the eleven dishes below becomes physically impossible.

Gabon, Congo & the Congo Basin

Break the palm emulsion on purpose

If you cooked abenkwan in Volume Three or sauce graine in Volume Four, you already know this technique.

Ethiopia & Eritrea

Cook the onion dry, and cook enough of it

A very large quantity of onion, minced to a coarse paste, cooked in a heavy dry pan over low heat, alone, with no fat and no added water, until it has released...

Kenya, Tanzania & the Swahili Coast

Cooking in the oil phase, including breaking the coconut on purpose

The opposite move, and just as deliberate.

Kenya, Tanzania & the Swahili Coast

The pilau brown

The colour of a good pilau comes from onions and spice, not from turmeric and not from browning the rice.

Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles & Comoros

Roussir the base, then obey the cari, rougail and civet grammar

Everything in Réunion and Mauritius starts with onion taken past soft to genuinely coloured.

Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles & Comoros

Vanilla is a savoury seasoning, it lives in the pod wall, and it goes into the fat

The rung that will most surprise a British cook, and it is genuinely indigenous rather than a French import.

Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi & Mozambique

Coconut and piri-piri: an emulsion problem and a solubility problem

The base of Mozambican coastal cooking is coconut milk plus piri-piri plus lime plus garlic, and two pieces of physics govern all of it.

Angola, Namibia & Botswana

Choose the palm oil's temperature state on purpose. There are three of them.

State one, raw or barely warmed, below roughly 60°C.

Angola, Namibia & Botswana

Kapana is cooked on a plate, not a grate, and the fuel underneath it is a different fuel

The plate. A steel plate is welded into a grill stand with a flat top and the wood burns underneath it. Because the surface is solid, rendered fat stays under...

Asia

Iran

Treat tahdig as controlled starch chemistry, not luck

The crisped rice crust at the base of the pot is not a happy accident of a particular cook's hand.

Armenia and Azerbaijan

Parboil, then let the fat crisp underneath

Azerbaijani plov uses a two-stage method called demleme: rice is first parboiled in salted water until tender on the outside but with a hard, visibly opaque...

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan & Turkmenistan

Dry radiant searing in the qazan

Kuurdak and its Turkmen cousin gowurdak both depend on the same physics: meat and offal fried hard in a heavy cast iron qazan over live fire sears fast enough...

Uzbekistan & Tajikistan

Build the zirvak, then trust it

Plov's zirvak, the fried meat, onion, carrot and spice base under the rice, is where the entire dish's flavour is decided, and every credible source on the...

Europe

Northern & Central Italy

Control the fat's temperature deliberately, whether rendering slow or frying hot

Guanciale renders differently from pancetta because its fat is structured differently, and the whole point of a good carbonara or amatriciana base is rendering...

Burgundy, Lyon and the Rhône

Blanching lardons before rendering

Blanching lardons before rendering. A brief boil in cold-started water removes much of the curing salt and gives an initial firming pre-cook that lets the fat...

Burgundy, Lyon and the Rhône

Purging and preparing snails and crayfish for a clean finished flavour

Purging and preparing snails and crayfish for a clean finished flavour.

Gascony, the Southwest and the French Basque Country

Salt first, submerge second, and let the fat do the sealing

Confit's actual mechanism is the fat itself: meat salted roughly 24 hours to draw out surface moisture and season through, then rinsed, dried and cooked...

Gascony, the Southwest and the French Basque Country

Render fat from a cold pan, and respect what searing actually does

Magret's defining technique, per Daguin's own method as it has been passed down: the breast starts skin-side down in a cold pan, so the fat renders gradually...

Gascony, the Southwest and the French Basque Country

Poach foie gras gently enough that it never fully liquefies

The au torchon method: liver seasoned, rested wrapped tightly in film for 12 to 24 hours so seasoning penetrates evenly, then rolled into a tight cylinder in a...

Paris and the Classical Table

Hold a genuinely controlled low temperature, the way confit already did

Classical confit works by submerging meat in fat and holding it at a controlled 80 to 90°C for hours, too hot and the meat dries out, too cool and it does not...

North Germany and the Baltic Coast

Rendering smoked fat into a braise

Grünkohl mit Pinkel and Eisbein mit Sauerkraut both work the same way: a smoked, fatty meat, Pinkel sausage or a cured pork knuckle, is cooked slowly alongside...

Austria and the Habsburg Table

Brown the butter properly before it meets the dumpling

Kärntner Kasnudeln's traditional finish, foaming browned butter, Nussbutter, poured hot over the boiled dumplings, depends on carrying the butter's milk solids...

Poland

Treat schmaltz as the whole flavour logic, not a substitute for butter

A British reader is likely to reach for butter or a neutral oil in any dish of the second half here without thinking twice, and that instinct should be...

Castile, Madrid, Extremadura & Aragón

Render Ibérico fat and trim as a cooking fat in its own right

Iberian ham fat and trim are treated in Spanish sources as a genuine flavouring fat, not kitchen waste.

England, the South and the West Country

Steam in suet, and trust the fat to do the work

Grated cold suet worked into self-raising flour with a little salt and cold water gives a pastry that behaves nothing like a rolled shortcrust: it does not...

England, the South and the West Country

Roast slow, baste in dripping, and build the gravy from the fond left behind

A proper roast joint depends on rendered fat repeatedly basted over the meat as it cooks, carrying Maillard-browned flavour back onto the surface and keeping...

Oceania and the Pacific

Solomon Islands, Vanuatu & New Caledonia