Beef tallow is one of those things I thought about for maybe a half an hour as a little kid and then promptly forgot about—I learned from the Laura Ingalls books that tallow was used to make soap and candles. My mom explained that it was pretty good for straight-up cooking, too, and then all I could think about was how hungry I’d be if my entire candle-lit life smelled like beef fat. (I didn’t know then that tallow had no smell. Not gonna lie, I was a little disappointed to learn that.)

I didn’t really think about tallow much after that until McDonald’s made a big fuss about getting rid of it in the 1990s. I don’t know for a fact whether that is also when everyone on earth started undercooking French fries, but it makes sense to me: I can easily see some corporate bozo concluding that making fries in hotter oil with shorter cooking time was a brilliant strategy, so I’m willing to spread this theory even if it’s a big lie. My mom and husband sang the praises of tallow, but I didn’t remember the taste being all that different.

Earlier this year, Steak ‘n’ Shake brought back beef tallow fries. We bought some. They tasted good, but unfortunately our local S&S has jumped on the same bandwagon of leaving fries just a shade underdone, so apparently tallow doesn’t cure all ills. So we bought some for ourselves.

I’d never cooked with it before. I didn’t this time, either—the hubs did. He melted some down, threw in a handful of fries, and let ‘er rip for about 5 minutes.

The result? Probably confirmation bias, but I did notice a slight difference. Not in the taste, like I would have expected—the fries don’t come out tasting like steak or anything. But the grease residue is slightly different from that of canola oil; there’s less of it. You don’t feel a need to wipe your mouth with every bite and your fingers don’t feel quite as gross. I’d have to make 2 batches of fries side by side to see if the taste is different AT ALL, and maybe someday we’ll get around to that. But for now, I will say it was worth the purchase and we’ll keep playing with it.

Who knows, maybe we’ll try duck fat fries next time!