Tallow Cornbread

I've posted my recipe before (adapted from another one online) that I use for cornbread.  I've adapted it for use with rye flour, too.  As the recipe notes, some sort of fat is called for.  I use 3 tablespoons, plus whatever I use to grease the dish (which is maybe a half teaspoon more).

I usually use sunflower oil as the fat, plus lard to grease the dish.  I used to use Crisco--I got a huge vat of it that sat in my refrigerator for a couple of years before I went through it all.  However, I've grown more skeptical of the product, figuring that at a minimum it offers no advantages over animal fats. I switched to lard for greasing duty. I was initially using hydrogenated lard from the store, which is pretty tasteless.  I recently got some from leaf lard from Fatworks that has more of a flavor to it, and I will try adding it to my next batch.  In the meantime, it's doing duty greasing pie pans (including the one I baked my recent pumpkin pie in) and other baking dishes.

Before I got the leaf lard, I bought some tallow.  I had always wondered about tallow and wanted to see how it would behave and taste.  I was inspired by Jill Winger at theprairiehomestead.com, who renders tallow from her cattle and uses it for a few things--culinary and otherwise.

My initial plan was just to use it for greasing instead of vegetable shortening, and it is not really the best for that, although it will work at some level.  The texture is not as smooth as lard; it's clumpy (which can be ameliorated by heating it a bit). It also has a beefy smell and taste that's noticeable (at least I noticed it; when I baked pies I could usually detect the tallow flavor, though others who ate slices never commented).

Then I used it on some cornbread.  After a pause of a few months I'm making that again; I have some Blue Clarage to grind up but in the meantime I trekked to the only store I know of (Whole Foods) that sells organic cornmeal.  In most cases I'm not too concerned with non-organic foods, but in the case of grain, I don't really want to eat Roundup-ready varieties to the extent that I can avoid them...they're obviously in commercial corn products like grits, but avoiding when possible is relatively painless so I do so--as another example, before the Crisco I used to use Canola oil but have now ditched that, too.

At any rate...I made a batch of cornbread and could taste the tallow (otherwise, sunflower oil went into the mix).  In this instance it was pretty good, more so than when traces of tallow essence showed up in a blueberry pie.  Cornbread picks up the flavor of whatever fat is used, assuming there is one; in many cases, bacon grease is used which definitely impacts the taste of the finished product.  So I decided to give tallow as the fat in the dough a try.

It worked reasonably well.  Tallow cornbread might sound unappetizing but it isn't.  The tallow is definitely there and definitely flavors the bread much more so than the sunflower oil, which has a very subtle flavor that gets lost in the finished product.  I'm looking forward to trying lard with it and may get some that's not as neutral as the leaf lard for special applications in the future.