[Sca-cooks] Tail fat

[Galefridus Peregrinus]

Urtatim said:


> When recipes call for Fat = sheep tail fat, not necessarily easy to find (i'm sure i can find it where i live, but the recipes should be do-able in other places). Lard is obviously out; butter would be the closest substitute i can think of.

Yeah, that's an interesting problem. A few years ago I did some research to identify the breeds of sheep that store fat in their tails -- there are a bunch of them, most of which I found were being raised by specialty sheep breeders. I visited several halal butchers in my area and discussed the problem with them -- I recall one saying that he used to see such sheep back in the Old Country (Turkey, IIRC), but hadn't seen any since coming to the US. Another very kindly gave me a pile of fat trimmings (which I rendered and use occasionally), but muscle fat is different from tail fat. Sheep store rat in their tails in a manner similar to how camels do in their humps, and this fat is much softer the muscle fat.

The problem, as someone else has alluded to, is that in North America, we dock the tails. One thing I did as part of my research was visit a regional sheep and wool festival, during which I talked to pretty much every breeder who was raising fat tails. I found that the solution is to purchase a lamb on the hoof and tell the breeder not to dock -- a fairly expensive solution, but one that I'll probably end up doing eventually.

One other alternative is that some breeds of sheep store fat in their legs, just above the hooves, but those breeds are a lot harder to find, at least on the East Coast.

-- Galefridus