I've been doing battle with grease lately.  Cooking for one on a student
budget means lots of stew -- it's cheap, it's easy, and you only have to wash
one pot.  The only problem is, it always seems to come out very greasy.

The usual fix seems to be to leave it in the fridge overnight, and then skim
off the fat from the top.  That works great, but it takes time and planning
ahead.  The other fix I've seen -- those upside-down-teakettle-style
separators that let you pour the broth out from under the fat -- seems
designed for gravy and soup.  I can't imagine using one of those on anything
with chunks in it.

I'm also having some conceptual trouble with grease.  Fancy restaurant food,
from what I can tell, gets its richness from lots of fat.  Cheap diner food
gets its greasiness and heartburn-inducing quality from... lots of fat.  The
difference might be the kind of fat, but that can't be the whole difference:
eggs fried in too much butter are just as greasy as eggs fried in too much
oil.  

So all I really need is a way of avoiding grease other than "buy expensive
lean meat" or "cook it in advance."  But if someone can explain the difference
between "greasy" and "rich," that would be nice too.  And if anyone's got a
way of turning my greasy stew into _rich_ stew, instead of just making it
leaner, then that would be heavenly.

36 responses total.

Hmmm... gravy is basically grease-fried flour.  What you could do is use
ground beef, brown it first, and then you'd have a lot loose grease in the
skillet to either turn into gravy or else dump.  You could also bake a
bread-type topping onto your stew, like cornbread.  Grease would then be
absorbed into the bread.

In my experience a thick surface layer of fat can be reduced by
spooning it off into some other container.  (A small ladle is nice for
the purpose, but any spoon will do in a pinch)   


Also cook meat on some sort of a rack, when feasible.

What I used to do often was to stew chicken, eat just the chicken &
vegetables for the first meal, then scrape the fat off the leftover
broth&stuff before the second meal.  (I save chicken fat & use it for
frying eggs, greasing bread pans, &c)  The chicken is especially
tasty if I start with some leftover broth. 

Chicken fat makes especially good soap for washing dishes.

<blinks>

Do you mean that you can make good soap out of it?

Well, she said "for washing dishes", and I'll take Sindi's word for it.
And that's if you want to go to all the bother of making soap.

Are vegetarians allowed to make soap from chicken fat?

Haha. That totally reminds me of this guy I used to work with. He 
always had weird issues. ONe time he mentioned that he was frustrated 
because his roommate was using Ivory soap which was leaving soap scum 
in the bathtup. He asked me if I thought it was ethical for him to tell 
his vegan roommate that ivory bar soap is made from animal fat (which 
it is) in order to get him to switch to the liquid ivory soap which 
isnt made with animal fat. I always want to send that one in to Randy 
Cohen of the NYT.

It sounded like Sindi was saying you could use chicken fat _as_ soap.  Making
it _into_ soap seems a lot more plausible.

Soap is made from fat and lye.  I have used cow fat (tallow) and pig fat
(lard).  You need to follow directions carefully as lye is dangerous.  It is
first mixed with water.  Then you pour one ingredient (forget which) into the
other and mix it together and pour the result into an insulated container to
set overnight and react chemically.  Soap is made by the reaction of the fatty
acids from the fat (which are broken loose from the 3-carbon glycerol) and
the -OH group on the alkaline lye, producing a long-chain molecule one end
of which is fatty and grabs onto fats, and the other end reacts with water
to hold the two of them together so the fat will 'dissolve' in the water.

I made brown soap once by adding a bit of cocoa powder.

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*shrug* I guess that's why there's the vegan category.

They might as well be nudists, too, because quite a few clothes they 
wear were manufactured with the use of fossil fuels... sometimes their 
shoes are petroleum products, too.

But I'm being snarky.  No one remembers that "Mike the Vegan" section 
in Dilbert?

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Depends on your vegan, I suppose.

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*shrug*  Anyway, back to Sindi's idea, it's more in idea of low-impact 
living, and reducing waste, which I *think* she promotes more heavily 
than strict vegetarianism, i.e. better to put chicken fat to use than 
waste it because it was an animal by-product.

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Right.  Just to bring things a little closer to topic, of course.

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What ever floats your boat-- or cuts your grease, as it were (being 
the original subject).  I just didn't think drift was fairly typical 
for this conference very often.

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A-ha, so you're the problem!  *grins*

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We went to a talk that preceded a vegan potluck, where someone explained that
a large part of the profits from raising cows comes from the sale of leather,
and that this keeps the cost of cow meat down so that more cows are killed,
and therefore it is bad to wear leather.  He spent a lot of money on new belts
and shoes that looked like leather but were not leather.  We wear used
footwear that does not kill any cows, or use petroleum products to
manufacture.  We also wear used cotton t-shirts so don't worry a whole lot
about how the cotton was grown as our wearing them does not increase the
amount of pesticide used.  The vegan group also had a talk about organic
cotton by someone who sells it locally.  Since we don't get our food used,
we tend to buy it organic (or get what the farmers could not sell by 3 pm and
would have thrown out or fed to pigs).  Another pre-potluck speaker explained
how it was bad to buy even organic eggs (remember that vegans don't buy eggs)
because the supply would run out and then people who would have bought organic
eggs would buy non-organic eggs.  All of the people who come to these potlucks
except us burn fossil fuel to get there and we bike.  Some of them drive from
Detroit to help make the world a cleaner place to live in.  Or maybe they are
religious vegans.

I ain't giving up my jacket.

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We also prefer not to kill other animals (mosquitoes excepted).  Add to that
the fact that you eat more pesticides by eating animals than by eating the
food they would have eaten.  But now I am eating milk and eggs because they
have more concentrated calories.

(In general, only one tenth of the food ingested at any particular level
of the food chain makes it to the next higher level.)

Eggs and milk have a somewhat better ratio than dead pigs and chickens, which
in turn are better in that respect than dead cows.  Pigs have been bred over
the centuries to convert things inedible to humans into edible pig, including
in China human feces.  There are little clay funerary models of outhouses
built over pigsties.  They also ate garbage in NYC, and what people in some
towns put into special underground garbage cans for collection.  In Macedonia
they were given day-old bread.  Now US pigs are given corn and soybeans.  Cows
get soybeans so they will have more protein to make more milk, even though
the primary advantage of using cows for milk is that they have internal
bacteria for creating their own amino-acid precursors.  (They can convert
grass to protein, unlike most other mammals).  Chickens would eat grass and
weeds and insects if left on their own to do so but are instead raised in
factory cages on corn.

Part of the reason that animals are raised on such high-protein diets is that
it lets them gain weight faster on a smaller patch of land.  It doesn't make
environmental or ethical sense, but it does (unfortunately) make some economic
sense, at least given the current state of things in this country.

I am sure that all those farm subsidies to the corn growers contribute 
to that. 

Getting back to the original topic in 0... Since I'm trying to do a bit more
cooking and would like to at least somewhat reduce the fat content, any more
ideas of reducing the grease? Or are there better oils than others [or butter,
crisco, etc] for cooking things like eggs and such?

One thing I do when cooking ground meat: after browning it, I put it into a
colander to let the grease drain out, then rinse the meat in running water
[while still in the colander], then put it back into the pan and add whatever
else I need before reheating or cooking in a crock pot.

Supposedly ground turkey has less fat than ground cow or pig.  Olive or peanut
oil have no less calories than other oils but have more monounsaturated fat,
which is said to be healthier.
Jim offers you squirrel, possum, raccoon, or groundhog from his garden.
He said he will deliver.  Fed on pawpaws and pears and mung beans and Chinese
cabbage and pumpkin.

Switching to olive oil, walnut oil or peanut oil for cooking and salad
dressings will help you get the least harmful fats.  Crisco and margarine in
particular are sources of trans-fats that are really not good for you.  I
switched to lard for pie dough, and other recipes where a solid fat is
necessary for texture.  

Butter is high in saturated fat, but I sometimes use it for taste reasons.

You might be surprised how often you can just leave the fat out of a recipe
without doing much harm to the final product.  

You may want to read up on the low-carb diets if you are experiencing
diabetes-related symtoms.  There is a fair amount of research showing that
some people are simple too good at converting and storing carbs.

It made for great survival when food supplies were unpredictable, but is now
counter productive.  

In any case, some people's genetics lead them to be more influenced by how
their body processes carbs than how much fat they consume.  At the beginning,
however, getting a nutritionist to help you calculate your protein replacement
needs, and total daily calorie needs will go a long way.  Learning to eat
small amounts, when you are hungry, and only enough to make you feel slightly
full will help you lose weight, no matter what is going into your mouth.

Eating unrefined starches (whole grains, whole wheat flour) is better for your
health in many ways (unless you are having trouble digesting things).  Butter
is supposedly healthier than lard.  You don't need either of these.  You do
need some monounsaturated fats in your diet because your body can't make
those, but it can make saturated fats.  Fish has that type of omega-3 and
omega-6 oils.  Canned mackerel is cheap (about $1/can) and oily.

But you can't beat lard for pie dough (and other pastries) or butter for
taste.  Just because I don't NEED it is reason to give it up in my book, as
long as you don't over do them.  Everything in moderation.  And I do use a
lot of whole wheat flour and whole grains, they have a much better flavor than
the refined stuff, but some things are just better with all purpose white
flour.  Like a nice hot, fluffy biscuit dripping with butter and honey, about
3-4 times a year.  Fat of choice for said biscuits is either lard or butter.

"Everything in moderation."

Including moderation!  ;-)

If you're going to use ground turkey and are health conscious, be sure 
to get ground turkey BREAST.  It's much healthier.

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