to remove or not ??

Remove fat from a cooled down stew? What an odd thing to do. It would never occur to me. I just heat it up again and scoff.

The indoctrination about animal fats being bad for us really has worked, hasn't it?

I recommend Four Seasons North by Billie Wright. She had been a vegetarian in her city life but discovered that to live in the frozen north of Alaska you need to have a high fat diet just to keep warm. Like the Eskimos always knew. Well... they didn't have much in the way of low fat foods.

Bears know it too. This is why grizzlies in salmon glut season will just eat the brains and other high fat organs and chuck the rest.

Human beings are weird.

I'm sure you're right, thatbags, and that rremoving the layer of fat is weird and doesn't make sense.

But I've always done it, long before any 'indoctrination' had time to set in and was replying to the OP.

Never did abandon butter - those 'healthy' spreads didn't appeal!

I get my meat from a farm shop and it is organic, before that I bought it online. It has very little fat, I think it is described as minced steak. I find the extra cost is balanced by being able to get more servings from it because so little is lost to fat or water.
evaporation.

I love toast and dripping , but haven't had any for years. The dripping has to be straight from the roast with the jelly and scrapings in it, not the clarified dripping supermarkets and farm shops sell.

Did you see the programmes about the Arctic this week?
The polar bears just ate the seal blubber not the meat

Just a reminder – do not reheat food in a slow cooker, even it was originally cooked in a slow cooker.

Absent thinks we are all daft

I can't remember when I last had a piece of beef that I got any dripping out of, but I used to love it as a child. I always keep pork dripping, but was surprised yesterday, after I had cooked a piece of belly pork, how little fat it produced - about enough for a slice of toast! With regard to the original post, I always skim fat off a stew, especially if it is lamb.

No, Absent just happens to know what she's talking about Shanma.
Lots of people don't know the dangers associated with re-heating food.

Thank you Absent for your info I for one am not daft Shanna and did NOT know the full dangers of reheating in a slow cooker
Just googled info and now will always reheat on stove or microwave ....... we learn something everyday

Mary59nana As to rubbing on chests...that brought back memories of being a very young child and seeing mothers rubbing chicken schmaltz on their kids at the beach where we lived on Long Island nr NYC. My mother was moritified (she was from Boston), and used baby oil. I wonder which burned us kids faster!

Lol Lewlew no factor 50 in those days ?

I love the dripping from a roast chicken on a slice of toast. If there were giblets, I lightly fry the liver and have that on toast, too, when no one's looking.

Mary I would not remove the fat unless it was truly excessive.
If you refrain from adding fat (other than coconut oil perhaps) when you brown the meat and then use what comes off the meat to soften the onions, garlic and vegetables there is rarely an excess of fat.

So much of the flavour of our food is in the fat so our family always enjoy it all. Balance is the key and because everything is geared to low fat nowadays we seem to have lost that. We do need the fats to enable many of the much needed minerals and vitamins to be absorbed by our bodies. We use butter and prefer our milk and yoghurt to be 'whole'.

DH loves bread and dripping and as for coconut oil I can eat that from a spoon very happily!

What's about this coconut oil business? I was always told that if it is liquid at room temperature it is an oil, solid and it's a FAT!!!
I would gently warm the stew and use kitchen paper to soak up the fat. I always do it with whatever I cook, to remove the maximum fat. We get plenty of oils in nuts and stuff, without solid fats in our diets.
And, yes, make sure the stew has boiled for at least 4 minutes before consuming. It kills any random bacteria hanging around...

I brought sachets of cocoanut oil to use in India.

In UK they were solid, in India liquid.

We keep some 'using' butter on the worktop, in summer it is 'easy ' spread, now its hard.

Cocoanut oil has a good taste but burns easily IHMO

Meat with a higher fat content often has more flavour especially cheaper cuts. I cook the day before and skim off the fat before reheating.

GandMattie Coconut oil is a funny thing but I think that the best thing about it is that is completely natural.
I use organic coconut oil and love it for the lower temperature things like baking for which it is best suited and it makes great cakes, pastry and biscuits. I do use it for searing meat but you have to really watch it because it is unrefined so has a lower smoke point. As far as I am concerned the less my food is 'mucked about with' the better!
The more highly refined the oil then the higher the smoke point. The smoke point indicates the point at which that particular oil can be used so there really isn't an oil you can use for absolutely every purpose. I rarely fry anything, except maybe an egg, so coconut oil is my 'go to' oil and when softening vegetables for soups or stews you don't do that 'fast and furious' anyway.
You can also use coconut oil on your skin but that is another story. Not all fats are created equal.

5% beef mince when dry fried has hardly any fat. I buy the leanest mince I can get, pork 5% is also available. I buy cheaper cuts of meat to slow cook, but drain the saturated fat off. Worth it for the arteries.

We used to get bread and dripping from my Grandmother in Middlesbrough. It didn't do us any harm but tasted great. Don't get it now because a. not enough fat to produce it in meat, and b. my family don't fancy it.

When we have left over stew, which is not very often, we just heat up on a stove. Seems to taste even better 2nd time around.

Thank you all.... really enjoyed reading all the replies and iv just finished eating the last of my casserole done really well got 3 meals out of it and it got yummier each day