This Is What Butchers Often Do With All The Beef Fat They Trim

Butcheries are great places — they're where you get some of the best pieces of meat, whether pre-cut and super fresh or cut and prepared to order. Whether you enjoy a good strip of fat on your meat, or you prefer it on the leaner side, your butcher has you covered.

Fat can be a good flavor enhancer, especially when it comes to marbling — the striations of fat that run through a piece of meat. But when you have a thick chunk of fat hanging tenaciously onto the side of your cut, it's not ideal, for your health or for cooking. This is because meat and fat cook differently, so while the marbled fat melts into your meat making it rich and buttery, a thick strip could land you with burned fat on the outside, uncooked fat on the inner layer, and greasy meat that's unevenly cooked.

This is why butchers will most often slice off the excess fat. But what do they do with that fat? While you may think it's just chucked into the garbage bin, it isn't. Butchers are quite vigilant about not wasting any parts of the animals, and the bits and pieces that aren't sold to the public are disposed of in a variety of ways. Some of the fat is often rendered down into useful cooking oils, while other parts of it are used in pet food or commercial animal feed.

Rendered fat is sold by butchers to be used in baking and cooking. It is made by slowly heating the meat with fat still intact, so the fat separates from the meat and connective tissue. Pork fat is rendered into lard, which is one of the most common ingredients used in baking, to make pastry tender and crispy. Rendered beef fat is called tallow, and is great as a cooking oil on high heat, because it has a high smoke point.

Some of the trimmed fat is reintegrated into other meat products, like sausages. Fat is integral in sausages, as it provides extra moisture as well as additional flavor to the meat and seasonings. Or it's added into ground meats, like ground beef, chicken, lamb, pork, veal, and other meats ground up to make mince. You can check the ratio of meat to fat on the label of your package: 80/20 for example, indicates 80% leaner meat and 20% fat.

While talking about mince, some of the fat is sold off to be included in pet mince or other wet pet foods. Fat is an important source of energy for pets, being high in calories as well as having some nutrients that are essential to their health. And the same as its function in human food, these fats add extra flavor to your pet's dinner.