McDonald’s used beef tallow to fry their french fries until 1990. Then they switched to vegetable oil under public pressure. People have been trying to get back to that fry ever since — and now, thirty-five years later, TikTok has decided beef tallow cooking uses are the hottest thing in your kitchen.

Here is what is actually going on.

The Joan Rant: What Is This Even

Let me be clear about something before we go any further. Beef tallow is not new. It is not a discovery. It is not an ancestral superfood that the government has been hiding from you. It is rendered beef fat. People have been cooking with it for thousands of years because it was available and it worked. Then the low-fat diet era happened, the American Heart Association decided saturated fat was the devil, McDonald’s got publicly pressured into switching oils, and tallow disappeared from most home kitchens.

Now it is back. And the reason it is back is a combination of two things: one legitimate and one absolutely ridiculous. The legitimate thing is that the seed oil panic has pushed people toward animal fats, and some of that has a reasonable basis in food science that we will get to. The ridiculous thing is the section of the internet that is treating beef tallow like a medicine. The carnivore diet influencers, the ancestral eating community, the people putting it in their coffee — they are selling you a narrative that is several steps ahead of the actual evidence. I have no patience for that and we are not doing it here. What we are doing is looking at beef tallow cooking uses honestly, figuring out where it genuinely delivers better results, and buying it for the right reasons or making it ourselves for almost nothing.

Is the Hype Real?

It is complicated. And I am going to give you the full breakdown because you deserve the nuance.

Where the hype is justified: Beef tallow has a smoke point of approximately 250C (480F). That is genuinely high. Higher than butter (177C/350F), higher than extra virgin olive oil (190C/374F), higher than coconut oil (177C/350F), and comparable to refined avocado oil. For high-heat applications — deep frying, searing, roasting potatoes at maximum temperature — that smoke point matters. When a fat starts to smoke, it is breaking down and producing compounds you do not want in your food or your lungs. Tallow gives you serious high-heat headroom.

It is also approximately 50% saturated fat and 42% monounsaturated fat, with very low polyunsaturated fat content. This fat composition is oxidatively stable. That means when you heat it, it does not degrade and produce harmful oxidation products as readily as highly polyunsaturated oils do at high temperatures. This is real food science. This is not marketing.

The fry question specifically deserves a direct answer: yes, beef tallow produces a better deep-fried potato than most vegetable oils at home. The old McDonald’s fry was exceptional partly because of the tallow. The fat coats the starch differently, the flavour is richer, the exterior crisps without becoming greasy. This is why the carnivore crowd has a point — a small, specific, food-quality point — buried under thirty layers of unsubstantiated health claims.

Where the hype is not justified: Beef tallow is approximately 50% saturated fat. The current evidence on saturated fat and cardiovascular disease is more nuanced than 1990s guidelines suggested, but the research has not exonerated saturated fat at high intake levels either. The claim that tallow is anti-inflammatory, that it boosts testosterone, that it heals your gut lining — these claims are not backed by the kind of evidence that should change what you eat daily. Use it for cooking specific things. Do not put it in your coffee. Do not take it as a supplement. The food science supports using it as a high-heat cooking fat. Nothing more.

Joan’s Version: How to Do Beef Tallow Cooking Uses Right at Home

The best use for beef tallow in your home kitchen is roasting and frying. Full stop. Here is exactly how to do it.

For smashed potatoes or roasted vegetables:

  1. Preheat your oven to 220C (425F). You want it fully up to temperature before anything goes in. Not warm. Hot.
  2. Put your roasting tin in the oven with two to three tablespoons of tallow in it while the oven heats. The fat needs to be shimmering and almost smoking when the food hits it. This is what creates the immediate crust.
  3. Parboil your potatoes until a skewer slides in with only slight resistance — about 12 to 15 minutes for medium-sized potatoes. Drain them thoroughly. Let them steam dry in the colander for two full minutes. Wet potatoes steam instead of roasting. Dry potatoes crisp.
  4. Carefully add the potatoes to the hot fat. It will spit. That spit is water converting to steam on contact with 250-degree fat. Stand back, use a long-handled spoon, and do not panic.
  5. Roast for 40 to 45 minutes, turning once at the halfway point. Do not turn them more than once. Each flip breaks the forming crust and you lose the crunch you are building.
  6. Season with flaky sea salt the moment they come out of the oven. Not before. Salt draws moisture and you have worked hard to keep these dry.

For deep frying: Use tallow at 175C (347F) for most fried foods. At this temperature a small piece of bread should brown in 40 seconds. Maintain the temperature with a thermometer — do not guess. Let the oil recover between batches. Crowding the oil drops the temperature and produces greasy rather than crispy results.

What You Are Actually Paying For

Grass-fed beef tallow from specialty food stores or online retailers runs between 15 and 25 dollars per kilogram. Some of the boutique ancestral health brands charge even more. You are paying for the branding, the grass-fed credential, and the aesthetic packaging.

Here is the alternative. Ask your butcher for beef kidney fat or suet. This is the raw fat that renders into tallow. It is the cheapest cut in the whole animal — most butchers practically give it away because demand is low. You can get a kilogram for one to three dollars in most markets.

To render it yourself: cut the suet into small pieces, put it in a heavy pot over the lowest possible heat, and let it melt slowly for two to three hours. Strain through a fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth into a clean glass jar. What you have in that jar is pure, clean beef tallow that is chemically identical to the thirty-dollar product. Store it at room temperature for up to a month or in the fridge for up to a year.

The grass-fed credential does matter marginally — grass-fed beef fat has a slightly better omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and higher vitamin content. But the cooking performance is essentially the same. If your butcher has grass-fed suet, great. If not, conventional suet rendered at home still outperforms everything in the specialty tin for the applications we are talking about.

The Three Mistakes in the Viral Version

  • Using tallow for everything. Tallow has a distinctive beefy flavour. This is wonderful in roast potatoes and fried things. It is less wonderful in delicate fish, in light vinaigrettes, or in anything where the fat is meant to be neutral. Use it where the flavour is an asset. Use olive oil, butter, or a neutral oil everywhere else. The ancestral eating crowd wants you to replace all fats with tallow. Do not do that.
  • Not getting the fat hot enough first. The number one error I see when people try tallow-roasted potatoes is putting cold potatoes into warm fat. The fat must be pre-heated in the tin until it shimmers before the food goes in. This is not optional. This is the entire technique. A fat that is not hot enough creates steaming, not searing, and you end up with soft potatoes that took forty-five minutes and a whole lot of hope.
  • Buying into the supplement narrative. Beef tallow is a cooking fat with useful properties for specific applications. It is not a health intervention. Do not put it in your coffee. Do not take it by the spoonful. Do not apply it to your face (yes, this is a thing the internet has decided is reasonable). Use it in your oven and your frying pan. That is its job. It is very good at that job.

The Closer

I have been roasting potatoes in beef tallow for years. Long before it was a TikTok trend, long before the carnivore diet made it fashionable, back when you could only get suet from the butcher because nobody else was selling it. The result has always been the same: a potato with a crust so shattering and an interior so fluffy that people at my table go quiet for a few seconds before they start talking again.

That is what beef tallow does when you use it correctly. It produces a result that vegetable oil genuinely cannot fully replicate for this specific application. That is the honest case for it and it is a good one.

It is not medicine. It is not ancestral magic. It is a cooking fat with a high smoke point and a flavour that makes roast potatoes exceptional. Treat it like that. Render your own from butcher’s suet. Put it in a hot tin in a 220C oven. Roast something in it this weekend and taste the difference yourself.

That is all the justification you need. And it costs about fifty cents.

Let’s get saucy.