How To Properly Store Bacon Grease in Your Home
If you’ve ever experienced the pain of having to dump perfectly good bacon grease because you didn’t have anything on hand to cook it with, you’re not alone. Many people unnecessarily dispose of this culinary “liquid gold” because they don’t know how to store it for future use. Fortunately, learning how to properly store bacon grease is easy, and the whole process is only a few simple steps!
Make Cleanup Easy
If you’ve already made your bacon and are looking for a way to store your grease, you can skip this step. If you haven’t, consider lining a baking sheet with aluminum foil and cooking your bacon that way. You may feel most comfortable frying it in a pan, but using aluminum foil instead makes it much easier to clean up and pour your bacon grease into a container. Of course, you can still use the bacon grease at the bottom of the pan, but holding it sideways and pouring all the grease out is a little trickier.
Strain and Pour
Before you pour your bacon grease into a container, you have to strain as much of the bacon out of it as possible. The more meat you leave in, the faster it will spoil. It’s also worth mentioning that you shouldn’t pour hot grease into a container. Glass will likely crack from the temperature shock, and plastic will warp, so you want to wait until it’s warm instead of hot. Still, we recommend storing the grease in glass because you can see if the grease changes color and spoils or if any bacon slipped through the filter.
Once your bacon grease cools, grab your strainer and a clean container of choice that is easy to seal. You can use a glass, ceramic, or metal container and a cheesecloth, coffee filter, or regular strainer to get the bacon bits out. If you use a cheesecloth or coffee filter, secure it to the container with a rubber band if you can. Fortunately, you can save those bacon bits to use as a nice salad topper.
Pop It in the Fridge or Freezer
You may have to repeat the strain and pour process a few times to get the meat out, but once you finish, you can pop it in the freezer. Before you set it and forget it, be sure to put the date on the container so that you can monitor how long it’s been in storage. Generally, you can leave bacon grease in the fridge for about three months. Just be sure to smell it occasionally and make sure it hasn’t gone sour. You can store it in the freezer for about a year, but you will need to defrost it before using it.
Properly storing your bacon grease is incredibly easy, and once you store it, you can use it for stir-frying vegetables, making biscuits, popping some popcorn, or whatever else you can imagine. If you’re looking for high-quality bacon that’s guaranteed to give you a crispy treat and delicious bacon grease, shop Vincent’s Meat Market and order meat online! We can ship Italian bacon, beef bacon, or slabs of pork bacon right to your door.
