Show Us Your Grease Container

TastyReuben

TastyReuben

Nosh 'n' Splosh
Staff member
Joined
15 Jul 2019
Local time
10:26 AM
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30,350
Location
Ohio, US
Yeah, when you thought it couldn't get any worse, now I want to see your grease container.

Where I live, any cook worth their salt saves any bacon grease from the morning (or afternoon...or evening) meal, to use to flavor everything from home-baked bread, to fried potatoes, to a big pot of beans. My mom even spreads it on bread. She used to store hers in a coffee can.

Here's mine:


Bacon Grease Vessel

Bacon Grease Vessel


Do you do the same? If so, let's see it!
 
Mines a pan with a grill on top, I won't put a pic up as its kind of black from years of use. You could scrub for days, you won't change the colour. I grill bacon a lot so fat collects in the bottom.
It's about 15 inches X 10inches.

Russ
 
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It started out as a small mason jar, but my son has been making a lot of bacon lately. I use this instead of just about any other means of pan cooking (grilled sandwiches or burritos, for example), and it works great when making a stir fry.
 
Its not really something that we tend to do in the UK. I think people did this many years ago but mainly from the fat from roasted meat, rather than bacon - it was called 'dripping'. I can remember being given dripping sandwiches for supper as a kid. It may have fallen out of fashion to collect the fat when vegetable oil became easily available and cheap. I think a lot of folk in the UK would also regard this fat as unhealthy saturated fat. We don't use the word grease. To us its 'fat'.

I'd be interested to hear whether other UK members have memories of this or whether anyone here does collect the fat.
 
morning glory said:
It may have fallen out of fashion to collect the fat when vegetable oil became easily available and cheap. I think a lot of folk in the UK would also regard this fat as unhealthy saturated fat. We don't use the word grease. To us its 'fat'.
I'd be interested to hear whether other UK members have memories of this or whether anyone here does collect the fat.
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I agree with you. I rarely cook bacon, perhaps twice a year at most. I also think that modern bacon is loaded with water which takes quite some time to drive off leaving very little in the way of fat.
My mother cooked a joint of meat every week for Sunday's dinner (eaten at mid-day) and the fat and the brown residue from that would be collected and spread on bread and known as 'dripping' the tastiest way of ever eating bread.
 
morning glory said:
I'd be interested to hear whether other UK members have memories of this or whether anyone here does collect the fat.
Click to expand...

My grandmother always had a jar of dripping in the fridge which was fed each week from the sunday joint.

Mum occasionally had dripping. We always had a roast on a sunday but I think we had more chicken, and then the animal fat out of fashion in the 80s so I think it died off then. The last time I remember mum having dripping toast and telling me how it reminded her of her childhood was in the 80s.

(My family was also influenced by my dietary limitations so mum didn't cook with the animal fat).
 
morning glory said:
I think a lot of folk in the UK would also regard this fat as unhealthy saturated fat.
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We would consider it the same; delicious, delicious unhealthy saturated fat. 😋

It could be that fatty streaky belly bacon is more popular here than back bacon, which is much leaner, so we have a lot more fat to deal with. When I make bacon for breakfast, that's six slices of streaky bacon (so three each), and that'll yield close to a 1/4 cup of liquid gold.

One of my favorite ways to use it is to warm a couple of tablespoons up while I'm baking a potato, and once my potato is split open and fluffed, I'll drizzle that bacon grease over it and mix it in.
 
TastyReuben said:
It could be that fatty streaky belly bacon is more popular here than back bacon, which is much leaner, so we have a lot more fat to deal with. When I make bacon for breakfast, that's six slices of streaky bacon (so three each), and that'll yield close to a 1/4 cup of liquid gold.
Click to expand...

Maybe - but I think most people in the UK would only very occasionally eat bacon for breakfast - mainly because of health issues plus (in those days when most people went to work) the time factor. Most people here (I think) eat cereal/fruit for breakfast.

I tend to prefer streaky type bacon and buy the dry cured type. TBH there isn't a lot of fat that renders off. Maybe bacon is just different in the UK.
 
We have bacon probably twice a week - one breakfast and one supper, usually.
 
morning glory said:
Maybe - but I think most people in the UK would only very occasionally eat bacon for breakfast - mainly because of health issues plus (in those days when most people went to work) the time factor. Most people here (I think) eat cereal/fruit for breakfast.

I tend to prefer streaky type bacon and buy the dry cured type. TBH there isn't a lot of fat that renders off. Maybe bacon is just different in the UK.
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In the UK and Ireland we do seem to treat bacon differently to other places, a nice meaty back slice is preferred whereas when I stay (used to stay, nobody goes anywhere now) at overseas hotels who entertain North American guests, all you could get at breakfast was cremated streaky - and don' t get me started on German offerings.
 
The Velvet Curtain said:
I could give up most things in life, but the well rendered fat layer on some quality meat is my weakness. I get it from my dad who used to love beef dripping sandwiches.
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I've probably mentioned this before, but that reminds me of the time I called my mom, to ask about her latest doctor's appointment. That's when she told me he said her cholesterol level was over 500mg, and that he told her she needed to make some changes to her diet.

"Them doctors don't know anything. I don't eat nothing but good, wholesome country cooking."

Almost immediately after that comment, she excused herself so she could yell at my dad to not throw out the bacon grease from that morning's breakfast:

"Don't throw that out! I'm gonna sop that up with a biscuit later!"

:laugh:
 
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