PITTSBURGH — Maybe you’ve seen someone on TikTok showing how to make whipped tallow balm at home. Or you’ve heard the brouhaha about fast-food restaurants replacing vegetable oils with tallow in their fryers. Or how the flipped U.S. Food Pyramid now puts beef tallow at the top.

Chefs are flaunting their “beef tallow frites” and “birria quesadilla with beef tallow.”

Beef tallow is having a moment.

Tallow and lard, its porky cousin, were once standard cooking fats used for frying and baking. Those saturated fats have been largely replaced with polyunsaturated plant oils. In the 1980s, federal health officials urged Americans, based on extensive research, to limit saturated fats because they can increase the risks of heart attack and stroke.

Now there’s been a backlash against “seed oils” — such as canola, soybean, corn and sunflower — which are highly processed, and a turn toward “natural” beef tallow.

‘A big seller’

“My kids told me about it,” said Dana O’Connor of the social media-fueled tallow craze.

Co-owner with Mark Smith of Pittsburgher Highland Farm, she handles the business side while Smith oversees farming. The star product of the farm is beef from their grass-fed Scottish Highland cattle.

Before the tallow boom, they didn’t sell much of the fat, though O’Connor personally used it for frying. Now tallow, both for cooking and for skincare, has been flying off their shelves. Particularly the tallow balm.

O’Connor, who has a commercial kitchen in her basement, explained that tallow is rendered suet, the fat around the animal’s kidneys.

“I cut it up into small pieces and put it in a slow cooker,” she said, filtering out the impurities until what’s left is solid fat.

To make the balm, she whips the tallow so it has a softer texture and adds a little essential oil.

“It has been a very big seller lately,” O’Connor said.

So much so that the farm stopped selling tallow for cooking for a while because demand for the balm was so great.

Interest in cooking tallow has also grown recently.

“We've definitely got a lot more interest over the last year or so in tallow … on the skincare and on the cooking side,” she said.

The farm’s sales of tallow have doubled in the last two years, she estimated.

In terms of its culinary properties, it has a high smoke point — the point at which oil begins to burn — which makes it good for frying and deep-frying.

O’Connor also touts the properties of grass-fed beef and tallow, which, compared to conventionally raised beef, has a higher concentration of fat-soluble vitamins and of conjugated linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat that has purported health benefits.

‘Far and away better’

Moe Martin, retail manager for Weiss Meats in Pleasant Hills, has been working at the family-owned wholesale and retail butcher for about 20 years.

As at Pittsburgher Highland Farm, Martin first noticed growing interest in beef fat for its use in skincare products.

“For years, we’ve had people that come in and buy fat to make their own for cosmetics,” he said.

“More and more people started asking, ‘Do you carry it?’ Then we started looking into it.”

About a year ago, Martin became responsible for rendering suet to make tallow at Weiss Meats.

“It’s taken off,” he said. “It really has.”

He estimates he sells about 30 12-ounce containers per week.

Martin was skeptical of tallow at first but has become a convert — for its culinary rather than cosmetic properties. (He said he didn’t use it for skincare but allowed that after making tallow, “my hands feel nice and soft.”)

He touts its 400-degree smoke point, which is ideal for pan-searing meat in a cast-iron skillet. “That’s a big thing these days.”

Compared to butter, which has a smoke point of about 350 degrees, tallow will not set off your fire alarm, he noted.

Clarified butter, however, has a higher smoke point of about 465 degrees. And seed oils generally have higher smoke points than tallow, with safflower oil clocking in at 510 degrees. Refined avocado oil, a “fruit-based” oil, has a smoke point of 520.

Martin also praises “the taste, the texture, the crispiness” of food cooked in beef tallow. Everything is “far and away better,” he said.

He was skeptical at first, thinking it was just a fad.

Now, he said, “I don't know if I'm going to be able to use strictly just vegetable oil or olive oil or anything else ever again.”

Martin uses it to fry anything from burgers to pork chops to chicken.

“It definitely adds a richness that you wouldn’t get otherwise,” he said.

Health claims

Though foodies may rave about tallow’s umami-imbuing properties, health claims for tallow raise eyebrows among nutrition scientists and doctors. In January, beef, whole fat dairy and tallow moved to the top of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ updated pyramid, with whole grains demoted to the bottom rung.

The American Heart Association issued a statement that took issue with certain points of the new guidelines, including recommendations on red meat consumption, whole fat dairy and animal products like butter and lard.

“We encourage consumers to prioritize plant-based proteins, seafood and lean meats and to limit high-fat animal products including red meat, butter, lard and tallow, which are linked to increased cardiovascular risk,” the AHA said in its Jan. 7 statement.

As some point out, the new guidelines advise that saturated fat should make up 10% or less of calories — the same advice as in the old guidelines. But if you’re prioritizing meat and full-fat dairy, limiting saturated fat would be difficult because meat and dairy are so fat-loaded.

O’Connor, a fan of tallow both for cooking and skincare, concedes the point: “I mean, it is a saturated fat. There’s no getting around that.”

Most experts agree that Americans should reduce the amount of fat they consume, regardless of whether the source is seed oil or tallow.

On a subreddit, one user expressed outrage that Popeyes uses beef tallow to fry its products, but didn’t announce it on the menu.

“You’re eating Popeyes, but you’re worried about beef tallow?” another user retorted. “Go have a salad.”

©2026 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.