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By Beretta Farms
Published: Sunday, July 19, 2026
For most of culinary history, there was no debate. Rendered animal fat, tallow, lard, and butter, was the cooking fat in every kitchen, in every culture, for generations. Then, in the mid-20th century, cheap industrial vegetable and seed oils, canola, soybean, sunflower, corn, and generic "vegetable oil" blends, flooded the market, and tallow quietly disappeared from cupboards. Most of us already know these oils by sight; they're the ones lining an entire supermarket aisle. What's less well known is what got pushed out to make room for them, and why it's worth bringing back.
What Is Beef Tallow?
The broad definition of Tallow is rendered beef fat. But not all beef fat is created equal. The highest quality Tallow comes from suet. A firm, dense fat surrounding the kidneys and other organs, rather than the soft intermuscular fat found around and between the muscles (the marbling you see in a steak). Suet is fundamentally different from that muscle fat: it has a higher melting point, a cleaner and more neutral flavour, a longer shelf life at room temperature, and a different fatty acid composition altogether. That distinction is why "Tallow" traditionally referred to rendered suet.
To render it properly, the raw suet is slowly boiled, then spun in a centrifuge to separate out any remaining liquid or connective tissue. What's left is pure, single ingredient Tallow that turns solid and pale at room temperature and melts quickly with heat, no additives, no processing aids, no seed oil hiding in the ingredient list.
Beretta Farms' Grass Fed Beef Tallow is rendered exactly this way, using 100% kidney suet from Canadian RWA cattle, raised without antibiotics, hormones, or steroids. We also render Bison suet the same way; since bison is naturally leaner than cattle, the resulting tallow is bolder and more nutrient dense, though it behaves the same in a pan.
Where Tallow Actually Shines in the Kitchen (and Beyond)
Searing steak is the natural place to start. A cast iron pan and tallow can hit true searing heat without smoking, adding a clean, beefy depth to the crust. Roasted vegetables benefit the same way; potatoes, root vegetables, and squash develop a richness at high heat that olive oil can't match. Tallow was also historically the standard for deep frying, including, famously, the original McDonald's fries before 1990, and it still produces a cleaner, crisper result than most oils. In baking, it's a nearly one-to-one swap for butter in pastry and pie crusts, with a richer flavour. And for everyday cooking, it works anywhere a seed oil normally would: eggs, sauteed greens, pan sauces.
Beyond the stove, tallow's fat composition makes it well suited for skin care. People have been using Tallow to moisturize their skin for centuries! Since its proportions of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids is similar to our skins natural oils, tallow-based products absorb easily into the skin. Its anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties make it safe for sensitive, acne prone skin, eczema, and aids in healing scars. Making it a pure grass fed tallow a popular single ingredient moisturizer and skin barrier balm. Beretta Farms carries this side of tallow too, with Cynthia's Tallow Skin Care, a line created by Cynthia Beretta.
Why Smoke Point Actually Matters
Every cooking fat has a smoke point, the temperature at which it starts to break down, burn, and release compounds you don't want in your food. Tallow's smoke point sits approximately 420°F (215°C), well above butter and most seed oils. That headroom matters for searing, roasting, and frying, where the pan is often hotter than home cooks realize.
The bigger issue with seed oils isn't just where they start smoking, it's what they're made of in the first place. Canola, sunflower, and vegetable oils are high in polyunsaturated fat, which is chemically less stable and more prone to oxidizing under heat. Tallow, by contrast, is mostly saturated and monounsaturated fat, the same stable fat structures found in butter and olive oil, which is exactly why it holds up so well at high heat without breaking down.
The issue isn't just simply the seed oil it's the scale and processing. Most seed oils go through a heavy industrial process, cleaning, pressing, bleaching, deodorizing, and often chemical solvent extraction, before they reach a bottle. And in practice, most people aren't consuming seed oils on their own: they're consuming them baked into ultra-processed food, where they show up alongside excess sugar and sodium.
The bigger nutritional concern is balance. The ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids is somewhere close to 1:1 or 2:1. The typical North American diet, heavy on seed oils, runs closer to 10:1 or 20:1, a skew that's been linked to chronic, low grade inflammation over time.
Tallow doesn't carry the same imbalance, and it comes with fat-soluble nutrition that seed oils do not offer.
Because grass fed cattle store nutrients in their fat, kidney suet tallow isn't just a neutral cooking medium, it's nutrient dense:
None of that is present in a bottle of canola oil.
Seed oils won out on price and shelf life, not on nutrition or performance. Tallow, especially clean, single-ingredient kidney suet tallow, offers a more stable fat for high-heat cooking, a nutrient profile seed oils don't have, and a return to the kind of cooking fat that fed generations before industrial processing took over.
If you're ready to see the difference for yourself, Beretta Farms' Grass-Fed Beef Tallow is rendered from 100% Canadian RWA kidney suet, one ingredient, nothing else. We also render the same suet process into our Bison Tallow, for those looking for a nutrient dense and bolder flavour.
At Beretta Farms, we believe in offering you the flexibility to choose! We offer both grass finished and grain finished beef. All of our cattle programs are raised without the use of antibiotics, added hormones or steroids, and we partner with Canadian ranchers that meet our animal welfare and quality standards.
Learn more at berettafarms.com
