Is Fat Flavour?
Posted by Neil Murray on Get Your Grill On
If you watch enough cooking shows, you would have most certainly heard the term, sort of a television cook’s mantra – fat is flavour, usually when there is some fat appearing in their recipes, possibly to assuage one’s guilt about eating it. But really, do they make you want to nip down to the local supermarket, buy a tub of lard and pop great dripping spoonfuls into your mouth to experience this so called flavour? Probably not. So what are all those cooks really talking about when they say fat is flavour?First, it’s important to understand a little about fats and oils too, which both belong to the same group of chemical compounds, the triglycerides and differ from each other, according to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, only in their melting points – fats are solid at room temperature whilst oils are liquid, so in this article, fat refers to both fat and oil. He then goes on to say that fat’s fundamental purpose is simply to store energy and that it’s twice as efficient at storing it as carbohydrates, the other major source of energy for all living organisms.
Because fat is so efficient at storing energy, it has become the primary means by which all animals store energy for later use. If, for instance, humans were forced to switch to carbohydrate storage there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the average woman would put on extra 13kg in weight, to store exactly the same amount of energy as fat currently does. It should come as no surprise therefore, with something so good at storing energy as animal fat, that its chemical structure bears a strong resemblance to other simpler, concentrated hydrocarbons such as petroleum. One powers our cars, the other, our bodies.
Fat is also essential to our overall health, we couldn’t survive without it as certain fatty acids are part of the building blocks of our very cells and are also necessary for bodily function. Our bodies are unable to synthesize some of these fatty acids, which we must obtain from our diet.
So it would seem obvious as to why humans developed a taste for fat, it is the highest quality and most concentrated fuel available - eating it is the equivalent of siphoning someone else’s petrol tank. But it’s also more than that. Besides that we enjoy its interplay with other foods, because of the extremely high temperatures fats are capable of, it also allows us to cook food in a way that contributes to both taste and texture – think of a golden, crunchy, fried potato chip or a simple pan fried steak with a delectable brown crust.
Think you don’t like foods fried in animal fats? Think again. It was only a couple of years ago that McDonalds stopped frying their world famous fries in beef tallow after a public outcry. But they didn’t change frying fats until after they were able to replicate the taste of fries cooked in tallow, so popular these fries were.
Fat also has another characteristic; it carries flavour compounds which it helps coat the taste buds with. Think of how the taste of bacon tends to linger a while in the mouth, as the fat, which carries both the flavour of cured pork and smoke, helps to hold the flavour on your taste buds, allowing you to savour the bacon long after it has begun its journey to your stomach. Fat also carries the flavours of a salad dressing and holds them in place as it coats all the salad leaves and other ingredients.
But for all that, is fat really flavour in the way television cooks mean it? I’m not so sure. There is no doubt that many common fats and oils have a flavour all their own, such as beef, lamb and duck fat, as well as olive, walnut and hazelnut oils and there is no doubt they contribute to dishes to which they are added, but their taste is far from the primary flavour of a dish, with perhaps the only exception, some seed and nut oils that dominate the taste of milder salad leaves.
If fat were flavour, wouldn’t a chicken raised in a cage, with all its extra fat, taste better than a free-range bird with hardly any fat at all? It’s quite the opposite in fact. Glenloth, a Victorian supplier of free-range chicken, use exactly the same breed of birds as those raised in cages in battery farms, the only real differences between them is the type of feed used and access to open spaces, yet comparing their birds to battery farmed is like chalk and cheese. Glenloth birds have well developed meaty flesh with an almost gamey flavour; those from cages have flaccid flesh which barely contains any real chicken identity, the extra fat contributes nothing at all flavour wise.
That exercise adds flavour is easily demonstrated with beef. Eye fillet is regarded as the premium cut, due to its tenderness, yet compared to other cuts from harder working muscles, it lacks mightily for flavour - this particular muscle does little work. The important difference between muscles that do little and those which work much harder, is the amount of connective tissue present, there is far more in a working muscle, the collagen of which acts similarly to fat, in that it melts into the surrounding tissue when cooked. And perhaps this combination of fat, muscle and connective tissue has far more to with flavour than any one part alone.
So why do television presenters persist with the fat is flavour mantra? It comes down to mouth feel and texture. Fat lubricates meat for example, making it easier to chew as muscle fibres slip apart and also makes it seem juicy at the same time. Have you ever noticed how a lean cut of meat such as veal, seems to become dry after very little chewing and how we place a premium on well marbled steak, waygu being the supreme example? At the same time, fat is also carrying flavours to all parts of your mouth and helping to keep them there. It’s the reason why we like to butter our bread
It is this double whammy effect that fat gives to our food that makes it seem extra tasty. Fat is flavour? Not really, but food just wouldn’t be the same without it.
