Mitchells Nutrition beef tallow promises "a primal approach to food prep".
Please take care when opening the overhead locker – seven tamarillos and a jar of beef tallow may have moved during flight.
My carry-on bag is a dinner waiting to happen.
I imagined the plane going down somewhere remote: “Is there a Michelin chef on board? Could the nearest food blogger make themselves known to the crew?” Beef tallow contains 3700 kilojoules per 100g. It would be months before we’d need to go full Yellowjackets.
I was en route to Blenheim. Home for a holiday with whānau where I was guaranteed one roast leg of lamb, multiple wild venison sausages and as many condiments as my stomach could take.
My mother is famous for her feijoa chutney, tomato relish and a store cupboard that will survive the apocalypse. I had almost finished a Vita-Weat cracker smeared with crunchy Sanitarium peanut butter before I thought to ask her where she’d found a jar of something that was discontinued in July, 2024.
“I checked the expiry date before you arrived,” she said.
And?
“October. It will be fine.”
I guess she was right, because I am alive to type this tale.
The beef tallow in my bag was for Mum. Growing up, she always kept a jar of dripping in the fridge door. Carefully saved from the roasting dish, the striations of rendered tallow and residual meat juice were testament to the fat-capped shoulders and legs of butchered beasts.
We never ate this dripping on toast, because it was not the 1950s, and we had not spent the previous decade learning how to make the best of a bad world. But the fat from the last roast always crisped the spuds of the next one.
“Did you ever get to the bottom of that jar?” I asked my mum. I already knew the terrifying answer. I suspect, had olive oil not finally trickled south, she’d still be roasting spuds in that never-ending dripping.
And now that dripping has been gentrified.
Last year, purified beef fat began to infiltrate the skincare industry (aficionados swear by its moisturising properties). Meanwhile, in food stores and online, customers can buy “premium wagyu beef tallow” and “100% organic NZ beef fat” and “pure rendered grass fed beef tallow”.
At Woolworth’s, a 450g pottle of “pure dripping” costs $6.50. But at the newly socially acceptable “tallow” end of the market, prices are at least double and, frequently, three or four times higher.
Yes, you read that correctly. In these Ozempic-approved times, when people pay $500 a month to NOT be fat, others are literally buying the stuff in jars.
Obviously, when Mitchells Nutrition asked if I’d like to sample their take on nature’s high heat cooking oil made from 100% grass-fed and finished beef, I did not hesitate – who doesn’t want to join the movement back to ancestral cooking and fry their chips with intention?
Mitchells Nutrition is a local company founded by a former professional snowboarder whose first product was powdered bone broth. The business now sells everything from beef heart capsules to functional mushrooms. Its website claims tallow is high in vitamins A, D, E and K; the label on the back of the jar describes “a primal approach to food prep” utilising the byproducts of the bone broth (seriously, don’t get me started on what the marketing department has done to soup) cooking process.
“It’s very ... yellow?” says my mother.
A tablespoon of tallow the colour of creamed honey is scudding across the cast iron pan on her stove and dissolving into a pool of nostalgia. The kitchen smells vaguely of Sunday night, circa 1979. We are preparing to cook sausages, eggs and chips.
The chips are in the air fryer (because it is not actually 1979) and the sausages are ready to go.
But, first: I lower a slice of bread into the pan. It sucks up the melted fat and sizzles at the edges. Count slowly to 15. Flip the bread and count again. Lay it on a paper towel and sprinkle the surface with salt.
“Your grandma used to keep dripping in a big tin under the sink,” says my mum. “Sometimes she made deep-fried scones for a treat ...”
I cut the single slice into quarters and offer the plate to Mum. The bread is saturated in memory. Crisp and soft at the same time.
Kim Knight is a senior journalist on the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle desk. She has a master’s in gastronomy and was Canvas magazine’s restaurant critic for five years.