Gordon Ramsay's Hack For Skimming Fat Is A Real Time Saver

Sometimes, when you're cooking a hearty meal, like a braised stew or roasted meat, a layer of grease floats to the surface of your dish. This can give your food an oily texture and can make your feast even more calorific. You may leave the fat in the pan because it seems like too much work to carefully scrape it all off with a spoon. However, a neat trick from celebrity chef, Gordon Ramsay, will make removing fat seem like a breeze.

In a video on his YouTube channel, Ramsay removes the surface fat from a slow-roasted pork belly dish so that he can re-use the drippings. What came next shocked me. Using a piece of white bread, Ramsay runs the slice slowly back and forth over the top layer of sauce, soaking up the fat as he goes. The best part is that afterward, he suggests frying the bread in a skillet. Can you imagine how tasty that would be alongside pork belly?

This fat-skimming trick can be used on any dish — from turkey gravy to a rich beef stock. Although many people argue that fat is flavor, lifting off excess oil will allow the other ingredients to shine, rather than giving you a mouthful of grease.

If you don't have bread to waste, there are a couple of other tricks you can use to skim off fat. One way is to use a spoon or ladle to scoop the grease off, but this can be time-consuming depending on how much there is. However, if all you have is a spoon, there is a way to speed up the process.

You may have noticed that when fat cools it becomes hard and forms a solid layer that's easy to pick off — it looks a bit like candle wax when it dries. With this in mind, try using a cold metal ladle or spoon (just pop it in the freezer for a few hours) to skim your dish. The chilled spoon will solidify the fat, meaning you can lift off more in one go compared to trying to collect hot, runny oil. If you haven't got time to chill a spoon, you can also put ice cubes inside a ladle and then run the base of it over the top of your dish. This congeals that fat and helps it to cling to the ladle. You can just wipe the grease off with a paper towel as you go. While these are great options in a pinch, the bread-skimming hack seems a lot easier (and potentially tastier) to me.