Schmaltz

Rendered chicken fat. The Yiddish word for the pale golden substance that riclib collects with the solemnity of a temple ritual every time he makes Chicken Broth.

In a world obsessed with manufacturing complexity, schmaltz is the fat that manufactures itself. You roast a chicken. You make broth from what remains. You put the broth in the fridge. In the morning, a golden layer has risen to the surface and solidified, like a small geological event that happened overnight in your Tupperware. You scrape it off. You put it in a jar. You have schmaltz.

The Squirrel, predictably, wants to collect chicken skins in a freezer bag over several months, then render them slowly in a pan with onions and garlic, straining through cheesecloth into sterilized jars with handwritten labels and dates. This is technically valid. It is also the culinary equivalent of building a hydroelectric dam when it is already raining.

The Lizard says nothing. The Lizard makes broth. The Lizard scrapes off the fat. The Lizard has schmaltz.

The Collection

The ritual is simple, which is what makes it a ritual and not a procedure.

riclib roasts a chicken at 200°C (392°F). The roasted carcass goes into a pot for Chicken Broth. The tray drippings — the fond, the juice, the liquid gold that pooled under the bird during roasting — go into the broth pot too, or into a separate container. Everything gets refrigerated.

Overnight, physics does what physics does. Fat is less dense than water. The schmaltz rises. It solidifies into a layer that ranges from pale cream to deep gold, depending on how aggressively the bird was roasted and how many onions were in the tray.

In the morning, riclib lifts the solid fat cap off the broth. It peels away cleanly, like removing a lid that was always meant to be removed. It goes into The Jar.

The Jar lives in the fridge. It has no label. It does not need a label. Nothing else in the fridge is that color. The Jar grows slowly — each batch of broth contributing a thin geological stratum. Over weeks and months, The Jar fills. When The Jar is full, a second Jar appears. This has been happening since riclib discovered that the layer of fat he’d been discarding was, in fact, the most valuable part of the entire broth-making process.

The collection is not optional. Discarding schmaltz is not something that happens in riclib’s kitchen. It would be like a gold miner throwing away the gold because he was really there for the rocks.

The Flavor

There are two kinds of schmaltz, and the difference matters.

Raw-rendered schmaltz comes from chicken skin and fat rendered slowly in a pan. It is mild, neutral, and vaguely chickeny. It is the schmaltz of commerce, the schmaltz of recipes that say “schmaltz” when they mean “chicken-flavored fat.” It is fine. It is not what riclib has.

Roast-derived schmaltz — riclib’s schmaltz — carries the full Maillard signature of a bird that spent an hour at 200°C (392°F) before it ever saw a stockpot. The proteins in the drippings caramelized. The sugars from the onions in the roasting tray darkened. The fat absorbed all of this and then, when cooled, locked it in.

The result is schmaltz that tastes like roasted chicken concentrate. It is deeper, more complex, slightly darker in color, and carries aromatic compounds that raw-rendered schmaltz never develops. When you fry an egg in it, the egg tastes like it was laid by a chicken that had been thinking very hard about roasting.

The Squirrel argues that raw-rendered schmaltz is “purer” and has a “cleaner fat profile.” The Squirrel is technically correct, which, as noted in several other entries, is the most irrelevant kind of correct.

Uses

Frying eggs. The single greatest use of schmaltz, and arguably the reason chickens were domesticated in the first place. A tablespoon of schmaltz in a pan, heated until it shimmers. Crack the egg in. The white crisps at the edges with a golden lace pattern. The yolk stays soft. The entire egg tastes like a roast chicken dinner compressed into breakfast. It is the best egg fat after Duck Fat, and riclib will fight anyone who says butter is better. Butter is fine. Schmaltz is ancestry.

Roasting potatoes. Cut potatoes into chunks. Toss in melted schmaltz. Roast at 220°C (428°F). The potatoes emerge golden, crispy, and scented with chicken in a way that makes people ask what you did differently. What you did differently is you used the fat of a civilisation instead of the oil of a corporation.

Sautéing onions. For any dish that starts with “sauté the onions in…” — substitute schmaltz. The onions will caramelize faster (the residual sugars in the schmaltz help) and develop a roasted depth that olive oil cannot provide and butter only approximates.

On bread. Schmaltz on rye bread with coarse salt. This was a meal in Eastern Europe. Not a snack, not an appetiser — a meal. Workers ate this. Families ate this. It is dense, rich, and satisfying in the way that only animal fat on good bread can be. In Riga, where rye bread is a foundational element of existence (see: every Latvian bakery), schmaltz on bread is not nostalgia. It is Tuesday.

As a sofrito base. Anywhere you would start with olive oil or butter for a sofrito, mirepoix, or refogado, schmaltz works. It adds a savoury depth that is impossible to replicate with plant fats. riclib uses it in risotto, in bean stews, in anything where a Portuguese refogado meets Eastern European pragmatism.

The Riga Connection

Riga is not a city that most people associate with schmaltz. Most people associate schmaltz with New York delis, or with their grandmother’s kitchen in Brooklyn, or with a vague sense of Ashkenazi nostalgia filtered through Seinfeld reruns.

But Riga was one of the great centres of Yiddish life in Europe. Before the war, a third of Riga’s population was Jewish. The food culture of Latvian Jewish communities was built on the same foundations as Jewish food culture everywhere in the Pale of Settlement: chicken, onions, bread, and the fat that connected them all. Schmaltz was not a speciality ingredient. It was the default cooking fat. It was what you used because you had chickens and you had a kitchen and you were not going to waste what the chicken gave you.

The war took the communities. The food culture fragmented. But the traces remain — in the rye bread, in the onion-heavy cooking, in the way that certain dishes in Latvian cuisine carry echoes of flavours that came from kitchens that no longer exist.

riclib, a Portuguese developer living in Riga, collects schmaltz in a jar in his fridge and uses it to fry eggs. He does not do this because he is performing cultural archaeology. He does this because it is the best way to fry an egg. But the jar in his fridge connects, through the fat of roasted chickens, to a food tradition that was nearly erased from the city where he now lives. The schmaltz does not know this. The schmaltz is just fat. But the hands that scrape it from the broth are continuing something, whether they intend to or not.

Measured Characteristics

See Also

• Chicken Broth — the process that produces schmaltz as a blessed byproduct
• Goose Fat — the aristocratic cousin, excellent but harder to come by
• Duck Fat — the only fat riclib ranks above schmaltz for eggs, and only slightly
• Tallow — beef’s answer to the same question, different accent
• Ghee — clarified butter, the subcontinental parallel evolution
• BBQ — where animal fats meet fire and time, as they were always meant to