What is an animal fat?

Animal fats are isolated from animal tissues and animal sources. Primarily, animal fats include lard, tallow and butter fat. The lipid isolated from animal fat depots, mainly triacylglycerols.

Both animal fats and fish oil are highly digestible energy sources for animals, and fish are also an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins A and D.

Some fats are also produced from inedible tissues by rendering plants. Overall, animal fats are saturated. That is, carbon atoms of fatty acids joined to the glycerol molecules in their triglyceride contain all possible hydrogen atoms.

The most common long-chain saturated fatty acids of animal tissues are palmitic acid and stearic acid. Since animal fat are high in saturated fatty acids they are usually solid, and have fairly high melting temperatures.

Feed-grade animal fats consist of rendered fats from beef or pork by-products which are mainly slaughterhouse offal or supermarket trimmings from the packaging of meats, and poultry fat includes fats from 100% poultry offal.

Fat rendered commercially from beef and sheep carcasses is commonly called tallow. Beef tallow is hard and typically contains as a percentage of total fatty acid, 26% palmitic, 17% stearic, 43% oleic and 4% linoleic acids.
What is an animal fat?

Animal fats processing

For centuries animal fat was the principle edible source. Handing and processing animal fats have evolved from the primitive to state-of-the-art processing equipment and technology. Processing of animal fat for edible use may ranges from simple to complex.

If fat is selectively removed from the animal carcass and carefully rendered, the result product can be simply filtered to remove particulate.

For more complex products with more rigorous quality specifications, the complete processing train of caustic refining, bleaching, hydrogenation, blending and deodorization is used.

Animal fats recovered from fatty tissues by cooking processes known as rendering. The two predominant rendering processes are wet and dry rendering.

In wet rendering, the fatty tissue is heated under steam pressure, thus rupturing the cells and liberating the fat.  The lard produced by this method of rendering is known as ‘prime steam lard’. In addition to lard, tallow and whale oil also usually steam rendered. The wet process is preferred for edible animal fats.

In dry rendering, the fatty tissue is heated in jacketed drums with agitation until the fats is released. Presently, centrifuges are used to separates the fat from water and protein. The dry rendering process is preferred for inedible products.
Animal fats processing