If you have a surplus of fat leftover from cooking meat, here's another way to use it while cooking.
Here's about 2 tablespoons of bacon fat that sat in the fridge for about a month and may or may not have picked up questionable odors and flavors. Rather than risk ruining whatever I'm cooking, we've been using old fats in place of lighter fluid for starting charcoal briquets when barbecuing.
To use the fat, I first melt it in the microwave.
Then we light the briquets with paper, sticks or bits of cardboard inside the chimney along with the briquets.
The fat is a little slower to catch on fire than the lighter fluid, but it burns longer, allowing the charcoal to fully heat and develop a nice white ash on each briquet. To help the fat-covered charcoal catch fire, we add some paper and sticks to the chimney.
As a bonus to the long burning of the meat fat on the briquets, I feel better about eating food that has been cooked over charcoal covered with meat fat than charcoal covered with a petroleum or alcohol (not the drinking kind) product. Adding fewer chemicals to our food is always a plus.
Anyway, we've been doing this all summer and are not only glad we have a way to use the old fat, but also we appreciate how well this has worked while saving money on not buying the commercial fluid.
