What Is Chicken Fat? Schmaltz, Gribenes & Uses

I came to chicken fat late. For most of my life my only run-in with it was schmaltz, and even then I was only ever eating it, never cooking with it. So when I bought my first jar a few years ago on a recommendation, I honestly wasn't sure what to do with rendered chicken fat. It turned up a little melted, I took a quick curious peek, and then stuck it in the fridge for later.

The first time I pulled it back out and dug a spoon in, it clicked. Cold from the fridge it has a wonderful, easy-to-scoop texture. The first thing I did was toss some brussels sprouts in it and roast them, and the flavor came out rich and deep, a world away from the same sprouts in plain canola oil.

Roasted vegetables are still how I reach for it most. But I've since fallen for it in stir-fries and fried rice, and spread on a good piece of bread with a little flake salt.

So what is chicken fat, exactly? It's rendered poultry fat: the fat of the bird, slowly melted down, strained clean, and set into a soft, spreadable cooking fat. Mild, savory, and one of the most useful fats a cook can keep on the shelf. It also goes by more than one name, and the names carry real differences worth clearing up.

What Chicken Fat Actually Is

Raw chicken fat comes off the bird as pale, soft trim: the pad near the tail, the fat under the skin, the bits around the cavity. On its own it is greasy and hard to cook with. Rendering fixes that. Slow, low heat melts the fat away from the connective tissue and water, and what strains out is clean liquid fat that firms up as it cools.

The finished product is a savory cooking fat that tastes gently of roast chicken. It sits firm and pale in the jar when cold and turns pourable when warm. Our chicken fat is one ingredient: 100% rendered chicken fat, nothing added.

Chicken fat has been a kitchen staple far longer than it has been trendy. Jewish and Eastern European cooks have rendered it for centuries. American home kitchens leaned on it, along with lard and tallow, until vegetable oils pushed the animal fats aside in the mid-20th century. It is back now, and cooks are rediscovering what those older kitchens already knew: rendered chicken fat makes food taste better.

Chicken Fat, Schmaltz, and Gribenes: The Naming Question

If you have searched for what chicken fat is called, you have probably run into three answers. The three overlap, but they are not the same.

Rendered chicken fat is the broad, plain term. It is the fat, melted and strained, with nothing else in the pot.

Schmaltz is the Yiddish word for rendered chicken (or goose) fat, and traditionally it is rendered with onions. The onions caramelize in the warm fat and leave behind a sweeter, deeper, oniony flavor. So all schmaltz is rendered chicken fat, but not all rendered chicken fat is schmaltz. The onions are the dividing line.

Gribenes are the prize at the bottom of the pot: the crispy bits of chicken skin and onion left after rendering schmaltz. Salt them while they're hot and they disappear before dinner does.

Schmaltz became central to Jewish cooking for a practical reason. Ashkenazi kitchens couldn't cook meat in butter, since dairy and meat don't mix under kosher law, and pork lard was out too. Olive oil didn't grow that far north, and grazing land for beef was often off-limits. Chickens and geese needed none of that, so rendered poultry fat became the everyday fat. It held that place until Crisco and mid-century fat fears pushed it aside, and cooks brought it back in the 2000s.

One more term worth clearing up: chicken tallow. People search it constantly, so it's a fair question. Strictly, "tallow" means rendered fat from ruminants like cattle or sheep, so "chicken tallow" isn't the technically correct name. If someone says it, they mean rendered chicken fat. Same thing, looser label.

What Chicken Fat Tastes Like

Chicken fat tastes like the best part of a roast chicken, concentrated. Clean, savory, gently poultry-forward, with none of the sweetness that onions bring to schmaltz. It reads as background depth rather than a loud flavor of its own, so it slips into most dishes without taking them over.

Where beef tallow brings a deep, savory richness and duck fat leans rich and faintly sweet, chicken fat sits in the middle: mild and flexible. It is the fat that gets along with everything. It helps to know what it's made of, too: about half of chicken fat is monounsaturated, built mostly on oleic acid, the same fat that dominates olive oil. That's more monounsaturated fat than butter carries, and less saturated fat than either butter or beef tallow.

Chicken Fat vs. Tallow vs. Duck Fat

Three rendered animal fats, three jobs. Here is when to reach for each.

Chicken fat isn't the budget version of any of these. It's the workhorse most kitchens already reach for first, milder than duck and cleaner than tallow, the fat that fits when the others would be too assertive. Chicken and duck are the two monounsaturated-rich animal fats, which is why chicken fat crisps a roast potato just like duck fat does, only with a milder, more flexible flavor. Matzo ball soup is built on chicken fat. A quiet weeknight sauté wants it where the full weight of tallow would take over. Pick by the flavor the dish is asking for, not by price. For the full breakdown across every cooking fat, see our guide to smoke points and cooking fats.

How to Cook with Chicken Fat

Use it anywhere you'd reach for butter or oil and want a savory lift. Two uses earn it a permanent spot on our shelf.

Roasting is where we reach for it most. Toss potatoes, carrots, or Brussels sprouts in melted chicken fat, get the pan ripping hot before the vegetables land, and you get the same crackly, golden crust that makes duck fat famous, with a milder flavor. That crust isn't luck. In a controlled fry test, cook and writer J. Kenji López-Alt found that the more saturated the fat, the crispier the result, which is exactly why cooks group chicken, duck, and goose fat together as the roast-potato fats. The hot fat shocks the surface like a quick fry, browning sets in, and the shell crisps. The same jar bastes a whole bird from the inside: work a little under the skin before roasting and it melts back into the breast while the skin renders and crisps.

It's also our not-so-secret weapon for stir-fries and fried rice. Cooking rice in chicken fat is centuries old. It's the backbone of Hainanese chicken rice, where the raw grains are toasted in the fat until every one glistens, then simmered in chicken broth instead of water. Cooks call the result "oily rice," and the saying goes that the most important part of the dish isn't the chicken, it's the rice. Swap chicken fat in for neutral oil in a weeknight fried rice and the eggs and grains pick up a roasted-chicken-skin richness a flavorless oil can't give you. Cookbook author Andrea Nguyen puts it plainly: "Pork fat is nice, but chicken fat has an incomparable round richness." At a medium-high home flame, it flavors the food as much as it cooks it. We put it to work in our chicken fat fried rice, which is the fastest way to taste the difference.

A couple more places it earns its keep:

• Soups and stocks. Sauté the aromatics in chicken fat before they hit the pot. Or do what Cantonese cooks do with wonton-noodle soup and leave a little floating on top, where it gives the broth a silky, almost buttery body.
• Sautéing vegetables. Mushrooms, greens, onions, green beans. They brown deeper and taste more complex than they do in olive oil.

For the full technique breakdown, temperatures, and per-dish detail, read cooking with chicken fat, and when you want to put it to work tonight, our chicken fat recipes take it from there.

How Chicken Fat Is Made and How to Buy It

Rendering is the whole game. Raw chicken fat goes into a pot over low heat and melts slowly. Water cooks off, the fat separates from the solids, and the clean liquid gets strained and cooled. Rush it with high heat and the fat scorches and tastes off. Take it slow and it comes out clean and pale.

When buying a jar, two things matter. First, plain versus onion-rendered: plain rendered chicken fat gives the cook full control, while schmaltz brings that built-in onion sweetness. Neither is better; they're built for different jobs. Second, read the label. A jar of good chicken fat should list one ingredient. If you see seasoning, preservatives, or oils blended in, keep looking.

The best fat is the one that lets the cook lead. That's why we render ours plain.

Our chicken fat is slow-rendered in small batches from pasture-raised birds on New York family farms, the same birds behind our chicken demi-glace. One ingredient, nothing added. Chicken fat carries a little more polyunsaturated fat than tallow, which makes it happiest kept cold once opened: it keeps two years unopened in the pantry, and about six months in the fridge after you break the seal.

Want the whole render lineup? Our Render Trio pairs chicken fat with tallow and duck fat, one ingredient each, so the right fat is always within reach.

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Chicken Fat

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Render Trio

$49.99

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