How To Render Beef Tallow {a long-lost fat}

I’m calling the butcher today and ordering some fresh fat. I’ve had the idea but your post really inspired me. I have an outdoor kitchen so hopefully the neighbors won’t mind the drift. Thank you again for the information, I always try to find ways to connect with the lives of my ancestors. I have spent many years off the grid, living sustainably, and following my Viking wanderlust.

Bee well and best wishes,

Tim

Awesome information. Not sure how soon I’ll make it, but good to have in my brain for reference

okay, if you do not like the scents of roast beef, or french fries cooked the way they were always cooked until the early 2000s, and the smell of food makes you ill, I suppose it smells ‘bad’. But for 99.999% of the people reading this, the smell of a roast beef dinner cooking or fresh cut french fries will be pleasing. If you have dogs, they will spend those hours drooling.
This process as described will yield yummy cracklings for sure. Anyone who likes bacon, or rinds will also enjoy these. However, for those of you who do not like the smell of meat or home cooked food, the tallow you get from doing it like this WILL absorb and maintain the beefy scent. if you light candles made from this tallow, it will smell like mcdonalds (mcdonald’s fries were always the best because of 1, half cooking, cooling, and then second cooking. and 2, because they used tallow -which everyone did until the mid to late 90s, when they wanted to sell inedible cotton oils and junk veggie oils, which is why all fast food chains had to find a way to reinvent their fries and onion rings to be crispy the way tallow makes them, and veggie oils simply cannot- McDonalds fries are still one of the best fast food fries available, but that is because they re-add beef flavor to their shortening).
If you want clean, scentless tallow, you can do one or two things: first, if you proceed this way and dry render it, and you get the cracklings, then you do not have to figure out what to do with the left overs. to clean it up, you need to clean your pot thoroughly, then add about 6 cups of water and a tablespoon of salt. Set on low heat, and remelt your tallow, let it simmer for an hour, then cool it in the fridge, outside or on the counter. Pop the tallow layer out of your pot or cooling stainless bowl once it hardens. Flip it upside down, and scrap the think layer of impurities stuck to the bottom of it off until it is uniformly white. The left over water will be full of impurities and colour. Discard this. you can collect the scraped impurities and keep it separate for coating and marinating your steaks, roast beefs, potatoes etc. you may opt to run it through a cheesecloth filter again too once remelted. If you dry render as described above, you will need to do this at least 3 times before you are satisfied. But the more times you purify like this, the harder, whiter your tallow will become (at the expense of losing some mass/volume of the finished product), and eventually, it will be completely scentless. This is how you get tallow suitable for cosmetics, such as balms, soap, clear soaps and scentless candles.
Second option: WET render it instead of dry rendering. Instead of throwing it in the ninja and cooking it dry, simply cut it into reasonably small chunks, add the same 6 -8 cups of water to a crock pot / slow cooker, and let it heat up for a bit. Then, just stick blend it. This will reduce the amount of time needed for cooking. it will form a mush or slurry. leave it to simmer in the pot until everything visible sinks to the bottom. Because the water is preventing heat above 100C, and drawing out impurities, you end up with a much paler yellow layer of oil at the top. At this point, pour it through a cheese cloth filter into a large stainless bowl, and then do how ever many purifying runs you want. It is much easier to ‘clean’ the pale yellow tallow, and it will retain much less of the scent / flavour wet rendered, then if dry rendered. Usually a single purifying run will be sufficient. If you remelt, filter and simmer with water and salt two or three times, you will wind up with nearly pure white, hard tallow, that has no scent at all.
The down side of this, is at the end, you do not have cracklings. You have a gross, boiled sludge at the bottom you need to figure out what to do with. I use it as an ingredient for homemade dog food, or in the spring, will place it at the bottom of the troughs when I plant my garden. Lots of people say not to add meat to your compost, but lost of people do anyways. Personally I keep meat waste for gardening separately. Just be sure to rinse the salt off of it if you do this.
two more tips for those of you with sensitive noses: If you goto a butcher shop, ask for only suet aka leaf aka kidney fat only. Before beginning, go through it and cut away any visible meat, blood, or skin. These are the things that leach scent and flavor most heavily into your tallow. Like deep frying fish or fries with oil. The oil absorbs the flavor and smell.
tip 2 for everyone: The butcher will charge you for this fat. Most grocery store chains with a meat section butcher will happily GIVE you any, and all the fat they trim off their cuts. Simply because unlike a butcher shop that uses and sells all of this fat (for sausage, tallow, searing, flavoring, and tend to deal with people who know meat, cuts, quality and candle maker, soap makers etc) very little is wasted. , grocery stores on the other hand, offer limited range of cuts and are not set up to sell anything else. Most grocery store patrons could not tell the difference between a T-bone vs a porter house, or even are there looking for low quality lean cuts, or the highest quality marbled tenderloins only. Their sausages come boxed and premade, hot dogs, kilbassas all come from different factories, lard, suet tallow are sold separately and so forth. As a result, all this valuable fat is just another chore for them to get rid of it. They get a large quater or roast, and trim away any excess fats to discard. Just about every major grocery store butcher will give you 5 gallon buckets free of charge if you show up. Then it is up to you to choose what quality and purity tallow you want, and to trim away anything that may flavor your scent your final tallow.
— wet rendering will reduce your bad smell problem to a fraction of the dry rendering. And plain, unscented candles or lip balm made from purified wet rendered tallow should have zero smell.