Recently I’ve been defaulting to dripping.
Using it to fry an egg. To soften the onions for a stew. Spreading it on toast.
Where I might previously have used olive oil or butter without a second thought, I now stop to wonder whether you can use dripping instead.
And it turns out you can. A lot more often than you think.
There’s nothing new about this, of course. Our grandparents would rightly have laughed their heads off had we brought them this ‘discovery’.
They might not have had the science, but there was a well-established and millenia-old understanding that saturated fat from well-raised animals was inherently jolly good news.
But a lot of us grew up in the bad old days when – for all sorts of weird reasons – the blame for poor health got pinned on those fats, and not on sugar and Ultra Processed Foods. Indeed, beef dripping was probably the ultimate villain.
Thankfully, the tide seems to be turning.
Because when you consider that the dripping you can buy on Wylde is from Rachael and Jonny's organic, regeneratively farmed cattle that only ever eat grass, it compares very, very favourably with the vast majority of butters.
Then there’s the whole ‘zero waste’ aspect. Beef dripping is the excess fat from the animal that would otherwise be thrown away. By rendering it down and filtering it before pressing into blocks, every inch of the animal is being used.
But most importantly of all, a good beef dripping makes almost everything taste better.
Nick
PS – the brilliant Yotam Ottolenghi made our Wylde Card gift vouchers his ‘pick’ in The Guardian’s 2023 Gift Guide. If you know someone who might appreciate one, it’s not too late to buy here.
