Affieplaas Beef Tallow Cooking Fat – 900g

What Is It, Exactly?

Beef tallow is rendered beef fat — the fat from around the kidneys of cattle, slowly heated and clarified into a smooth, stable cooking fat. Affieplaas raises their cattle on pasture, not in feedlots. The tallow is jarred without bleaching, deodorising, hydrogenating, or adding anything at all. One ingredient. The same cooking fat South African kitchens used for generations before the shelves filled up with refined seed oils.

If that sounds old-fashioned, it is. That is the point.

What Does It Taste Like?

Affieplaas tallow is clean and neutral in flavour — you will not taste the fat, you will taste better food. Roast potatoes with a crispness that stops people mid-bite and makes them ask what you did differently. Fried eggs with a lacy white and a proper yolk. A steak with a crust that you will want to recreate every time.

It is not a strong or unusual flavour. It is just what food tastes like when it is cooked in something real. And because tallow brings vitamins A, D, E, and K to the pan — naturally present from the pasture diet and stable enough to survive the cooking process — it does something most cooking fats simply do not. It feeds your food, not just cooks it.

What Can You Cook With It?

The full cooking guide covers everything in detail, but here is the short version:

• Frying and deep frying — chips, fritters, vetkoek. Stable at frying temperatures, great flavour, and it does not fill your kitchen with fumes.
• Roasting — parboil your potatoes, rough up the surface, toss them in hot tallow in a preheated tray at 200°C. You will not go back to vegetable oil.
• Braai — brush the grid with melted tallow before the food goes on. Keep a small jar next to the fire. It handles the heat without flaring.
• Pan frying and searing — a tablespoon in a hot cast iron pan, let it shimmer, then cook. Add butter, garlic, and rosemary at the end and baste. Restaurant result at home.
• Baking — replaces butter or lard in savoury pastry and baking. Substitute 1:1 for vegetable oil by volume.
• Seasoning cast iron — one of the best fats for it. Thin layer, 200°C, one hour upside down. Done.

Why Are People Switching Back to Tallow?

Most people who switch do not go back. Once you understand that tallow stays stable at high heat — while many seed oils break down at the same temperatures — the choice starts to make sense. It is not about trends. It is about using a fat that was designed, by nature, to handle real cooking. The full case is worth reading if you want to understand exactly what happens to vegetable oils at high heat and why tallow handles it differently.

The short version: tallow has been doing this job for centuries. It is good at it.

A Few Practical Things

• It is solid at room temperature — scoop with a spoon or melt the jar briefly in warm water. Normal.
• A little goes further than you expect — start with half the amount you would use of oil. You can always add more.
• The white film on stored tallow — crystallisation, not mould. Harmless. Dissolves when you heat it.
• Shelf life — up to nine months at room temperature in a sealed container. No refrigeration needed.
• Soft or liquid in summer — completely normal in a South African kitchen. No quality loss.

Tallow is not just a cooking fat. The same fat that makes your chips crisp has been used in natural skincare and soap-making for centuries — and the Affieplaas Boerseep range is made from exactly this. If you are already thinking about what goes into your food, it might be worth looking at what goes onto your skin too.