A Note on Schmaltz

A few weeks ago, I was describing something that I made to someone and mentioned schmaltz. "Come on," he said, "now you're just making stuff up."

Schmaltz is rendered chicken fat, and it's a fundamental ingredient in Jewish cooking, as goose fat is in Polish cooking and lard is in (very non-Jewish) food from the American south. (Lard, incidentally, is called khazer schmaltz in Yiddish and is used in unflattering expressions about ideas that are foreign in origin but are presented as Jewish, like a drummer at shabbes services.)

Anyways: schmaltz is easy to come by if you ever make broth. The fat on a chicken is not a single, uniform substance, but is made out of many different molecules with different properties. Schmaltz, like ghee ("clarified" butter) consists of the fat that turns into a liquid at the lowest temperatures.

By far the easiest way to get schmaltz, at least in my life, is to carefully skim it from chicken broth after it's prepared. It will rise to the top naturally, and will be all the more easy to remove if you let the broth cool in the refrigerator first. Schmaltz keeps very well in the freezer and can be warmed easily in the microwave.

If you don't make much broth, there are other strategies to extract it available, and you can also buy it pre-packaged at kosher delicatessens.

Schmaltz is what gives Jewish foods like matzo balls and knishes their signature flavor.