I don’t know why anyone would throw away perfectly good fat, and by fat, I mean grease.

I have a mug with a strainer atop it on the stove. Every meal that generates grease, like frying bacon or sausage, ends with me draining leftover grease into this mug. The bits of food stay on the strainer, the grease solidifies in the mug. When the mug fills up we transfer the grease into a quart mason jar. We keep it all at room temperature and the stuff never goes bad.

This kind of recycled grease is very flavorful. It contains some of the flavor of the smoked and cured bacon and some of the spices of the sausage. If you cook with it there will be a hint of smoky flavor in whatever you are making. Try sweating some green beans in fat until they begin to brown. The caramelized bean and the bacon flavor are incredible together.

I have bacon grease that is a year old. Yesterday I used a bunch of it to cook one and a half pound batches of Buffalo wings. I fry my wings in 325 degree fat (just at the smoke point for bacon grease) to half fill a stock pot on the stove top. Put 1.5 pounds of chicken in at a time and watch for foam-over, add the pieces gradually. The oil will cool off, but it will only take ten minutes or so for the oil to get back over 300. When the pieces are floating and browning remove them to drain in a bowl. Repeat this process until they are all cooked. Melt a half cup of REAL salted butter in a pan and add an equal amount of Red Hot sauce. Stir it up and coat the wings with it. No restaurant you have ever eaten at makes better wings than these. These even taste good if all you do is fry them. This will take quite a bit of grease to fill your stock pot half full, so start saving yours now.

To clean my grease between batches I will pour hot fat through a reusable coffee filter, one of those gold metal filter kind. You can also use a fine tea towel or maybe a paper coffee filter…cheese cloth works ok, as well.

When this grease gets old I am going to figure out how to make soap with it.