Ah fat.  That horrible word that causes people to cringe.  Fat is pretty important in life, despite the bad reputation it has gotten.  Not only do you need fat to cook with, but you can use fat and oil to burn for light (either as a candle or an oil lamp), and you also need fat and oils to make soap.  In a pinch, even animal/plant based oil can be used to silence squeaks and help things slide and move easier.  Since we need fat for various reasons and we have been getting away from things like “diet butter”, having a more natural, renewable source of fat interested me.  Even though we aren’t at the point where we can keep large animals like cattle for a natural source of fat, and I have no idea what it would take to start pressing oil from plant-based sources, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make our own fat from the raw ingredients.  After all, I’ve been making our own butter for a couple of years now and it is great – so why not try something new?

Rendering beef tallow is easy once you have obtained the fat. Luckily I found a local butcher that didn’t think I was crazy when I walked into his shop and asked if he had any fat to sell.  We don’t have many fat scraps to save, so it would have taken forever to try to save up scraps to make tallow with.

There seems to be different thoughts on what is considered beef “tallow”.  Some people think of tallow as only being the fat around the cow’s kidneys.  This kidney fat is usually called suet.  Other people make the separate distinction between beef suet and beef tallow – the tallow being made from all the other bits of fat from the cow except from the kidney fat.  The kidney suet is supposed to be the purest, whitest fat in the cow and therefore a little more expensive than just regular fat trimmings.

So far, I’m going with the idea of suet and tallow being different, since the antique cookbooks that I read generally make a distinction in using suet for certain things where you might want a more purer, whiter fat if you are using it for an ingredient,  and mentioning tallow for use as a frying agent, an ingredient where the “whiteness” is not a factor, and in the instructions for making non-food items where it wouldn’t seem to matter as much just how white or “pure” the fat is.

Quick version of how to make your beef tallow shortening for food and non-food items:

1. Cut off as much meat from the fat as possible.
2. Cut the fat into small chunks, or if you have a meat grinder you can grind the fat up like hamburger meat.
3. Put the fat into the pot and cook it down slowly, stirring as needed.  This will probably take at least a couple of hours depending on how much fat you are doing at one time.
4. When it looks like a bunch of crispy stuff floating in a sea of oil, and isn’t changing its appearance/consistency any more, it’s done.
5. Skim off the floaties.  Keep or throw away the floaties – your choice.
6. Strain the hot fat through a fine mesh sieve or at least some cheesecloth.
7. Pour into a heat-resistant storage container with a lid.
8. Cool.  Store. Use.

Longer version of rendering beef tallow:

1.  Trim the meat off your fat as much as possible.

Sometimes you can’t get it off unless you are willing to lose some fingers, so don’t worry about getting every bit off.  The meat will cook off the fat.

2.  Cut the fat into manageable chunks to help them melt better.

3.  Put the fat into your pot.

I used my cast iron dutch oven since it’s the deepest iron pot I have.  I chose to use the cast iron for specific reasons.  One – if I were to be without my gas stove or an even an electric stove, I probably wouldn’t be using my good stainless steel stock pots over an open fire.  So I wanted to know what to expect from cooking the fat in a cast iron pot like my ancestors would have done.  Two – a cast iron pot is thick and can take heat well for long periods.  Since it’s difficult to find copper clad Revere Ware these days, I didn’t want to accidentally kill my good stock pots that I’ve had for twenty-plus years – just in case things went wrong with my rendering process.

Approximately 10 lbs of beef fat in the cast iron pot.

 

I cooked the fat on a medium-low flame for pretty much an entire afternoon, stirring it occasionally to get the fat chunks down to the bottom to melt faster.  Since I used a lower flame with a thick iron pot, I didn’t have any problem with the fat burning.  I could probably have sped up the process to just a couple of hours or so if I had used a higher flame and watched the pot more closely.

Some people say that rendering tallow is really horrible smelling.  There was a smell, but it wasn’t that “horrible” to me – not like if your hair gets burnt.  I did try to get a good deal of meat off the fat so there wasn’t a lot of meat to cook off, and I turned the vent hood on to help vent off heat and moisture from the kitchen.

4.  The fat finally gets to a point where it has a bunch of stuff floating on top of a sea of oil.  Here in the South, these floaty things are called “cracklins” when they come from rendering lard.  Laura Ingalls Wilder mentioned lard cracklings as a treat in her Little House books.  Ma Ingalls used the cracklins to flavor Johnny Cake.  Hubby tasted our beef cracklins and said they would be fine to eat with a little salt on them, otherwise they did not have a lot of flavor on their own.  I tried to save our cracklins.  In a big plastic bag.  Apparently the cats thought the cracklins were wonderful.  They got on the counter after we went to bed and ripped open the bag of cracklins.  Next time I’ll put the cracklins in something the cats can’t open.

5.  After taking out the cracklins with a slotted spoon, you’ll need to strain the hot fat.  I lined a fine mesh sieve with cheesecloth to do this.  This gets the smallest cracklins out, however I discovered that it does not get out the tiny specks of black that comes from cooking this in the cast iron pot.  For using the tallow for food, I really don’t care if there are tiny black specks in the tallow since we eat them anyway whenever we cook with cast iron.  But in the case of using tallow for pretty candles or for soap, I’m thinking that I’d want the black specks out of the tallow.

To get the tiny black specks out of the tallow, I think using a finer woven cheesecloth or cotton cloth would work.  I just used the cheap cheesecloth available at Wally World, which is NOT a super-fine mesh fabric.  I could also just wait for the tallow to harden and then not use the tallow at the bottom of the jar since that is where the black specks sink to the bottom.  Or I could use a metal stockpot instead of an iron pot.  Some people pour water into their fat during the rendering process and then refrigerate the tallow to be able to separate the fat on the top from the water and any impurities at the bottom.

6.  Once you have the fat strained, you can put it into containers for storage.  Plastic is not recommended since this stuff is literally boiling hot.

There isn’t any specific shelf life for beef tallow.  I found people saying they kept it refrigerated for over a year and it was still good.  Others said that they kept theirs on the kitchen counter for a year with good results.  And of course if you follow what government entities say is max shelf life for food storage…well you get a whole ‘nother story there.

I decided that I wanted to get maximum storage time from this stuff – at room temperature – so I actually went ahead and pressure canned the tallow.  I boiled the jars in a water bath to get them hot to avoid cracking the glass when the tallow was poured in.  Then I “canned” the tallow like I would can any other low-acid food.  I used my pressure canner with the 10 lb weight for about 30 minutes for these small jars.

Some folks say they water bath can their tallow with good results for shelf life.  Others just pour the hot tallow into clean containers.  It’s a personal preference.  Even if I had not pressure canned my tallow, I would still have boiled my jars before filling them to help get rid of any germs that might cause spoilage sooner.

One jar did get sterilized and filled, but I did not bother to pressure can it – that way I could see how it did without the extra step of pressure canning.  I just put a plastic lid on the jar and left it on the counter.  I’ve used this jar of tallow to cook with, after several months of sitting on the counter.  There is no indication of any spoilage at all.  No flavor change, nothing.  So while the pressure canning of tallow might be overkill, I’ll do it, just to try to get the most storage time for this stuff.  But it isn’t absolutely necessary.

7.  Let the jars cool.  It took about 24 hours for the tallow to completely solidify and the jars to be cool.

8.  Use your tallow.  So far I’ve used the tallow to make home-made flour tortillas and refried beans.  Both turned out terrific.  Definitely thinking I’d like to try my hand at making dipped candles with tallow.  And home-made soap.  In addition to using the tallow for more cooking recipes.  There is a bit of a flavor to the food from the tallow, so I’m not sure how it would work in something like cookies.  Guess that is another project – see if there is a way to get rid of more of the meaty taste to be able to use the fat in more delicate food items…