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Wonder how to make tallow or how to make lard? Do you know how to render fat? Do you want a healthy frying oil?
I’ll tell you how I finally made some beautiful beef tallow the other day (yeah, I said it, it’s beautiful, especially after my last attempt which was quite the fiasco), but I’d love to find out if there’s an easier way.
JUST WANT TO BUY IT?
Now and then I may still just buy it. If you don’t want to make it yourself, visit my resources page for healthy sources. UPDATE: see this post about which is more cost effective, rendering it yourself or buying it in larger quantities – you may be surprised! (Also be sure to read more at that link about reusing tallow and how to store large amounts.)
Why use tallow or lard?
Tallow and lard are traditional fats that won’t leave a nasty film in your mouth, or give you a stomach ache after your favorite fried food, with a few trips to the bathroom thrown in, too. It is also a healthy fat, contrary to what you’ve probably heard. Read more about healthy fats. (Be sure to get your fat from a farmer that knows how to properly raise their animals.) You can fry foods without the worry of killing your heart, like you have to worry about when eating McDonald’s French fries – the oil they cook in is disgusting, although it wasn’t so until 1990:
Before switching to pure vegetable oil in 1990, the McDonald’s corporation cooked its french fries in a mixture of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil. From Wikipedia
What is Tallow? What is Lard?
Tallow is made from rendering beef fat, lard is made from rendering pork fat.
OK, but what the heck is “rendering”?
I didn’t used to know that, either. The other night when I was standing over a pile of disgusting, sticky fat for an hour cutting it into pieces, I wasn’t sure if I was glad that I know now. The first time trying this I didn’t know I needed to cut it into pieces and I burnt the heck out of it, even though it was on super LOW heat for days. (The sick smell coming from our house and off our clothes was just plain embarrassing.) Rendering fat is the following process: turning clumps of fat into tallow or lard that you can fry in.
- First you buy fat from a local farmer who has his animals out on pasture, and raises them without antibiotics, hormones, or other junk, and feeds them what they were meant to eat.
- Next you’ll need to get your big girl/big boy britches on and start cutting the fat into small-ish hunks. (I did about 1-2” pieces.) This takes a while, depending on how much fat you have. I did a lot at once so I didn’t have to mess with it again for a while. It took me over an hour – there were icky pieces that I didn’t want in there, including a layer of thin skin throughout. That was partly what was so time-consuming – do you guys get the gunk off, or do you just chop it up and throw it all in there? This job wasn’t easy for a city girl, but I got through it. (My beautiful tallow makes it worthwhile!)
- Put the fat in a big stock pot and cover with water. Simmer on very low heat until it’s all melted. It took mine about 4 days! I’d turn it off at night and get it going again in the morning. Does anyone know if this is a normal amount of time? Obviously, after the last time I was afraid to turn it up any higher. Part way through I used my potato masher to smoosh the pieces so they’d finally finish melting.
- When it looked like it was done at last, I used a fine strainer to strain it into a glass bowl. This is how it looked – just a tiny amount of gunk leftover and a little over half of this big bowl full of beautiful tallow that I can now use to make real French fries, the best fried fish you’ve ever had, or the other night we had batter-fried shrimp and onion rings!
You’ll want to store it in something you can easily scoop some out of. A narrow top container doesn’t work well, trust me.
Oh great, at that same Wikipedia page as above, it says that it should be stored in an airtight container to prevent oxidation…mine’s been on the counter with a loose top for a week. Think I should toss it? UPDATE: guess we can’t believe everything on Wikipedia either. Read the comment below from Zeke, and I’ll be touching on this in tomorrow’s post, too.
I’d appreciate any pointers on the cutting-it-up stage!
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{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
So I haven’t tried it yet but I was going to cut up the fat by running it through the meat grinder option on my kitchen aid mixer. I figured if it was ground up it should render fairly fast. I’ll probably brave it in a week when my mother’s helper is over.
I would love some good, wholesome tallow, but I’m not ready for this step yet. Nor do I know where to get the fat—-although I’ll ask my milk-man today!
Since your tallow is from beef fed a decent feed, and grain and bones and other nasty stuff, oxidation is less of an issue as your tallow has a higher saturated fat content. Its the unsaturated fats that oxidize. Its the reason coconut oil is so darn shelf stable, and inversely why rags soaked with linseed oil can burst into flame.
Do you strain your tallow for re-use? Or is it not a good idea?
There’s a local meat market/deli down the road from us. They sell the best boudin (cajun rice/meat sausage). Anyway, I was browsing the aisles, and I noticed they sell a gallon jar of lard, not hydrogenated or anything. They get this lard when they fry the cracklings (fried pieces of pork skin with lots of fat attached). They also sell this lard for the amazing price of 4.99/gallon. I haven’t bought any yet, since I fry so little food at home these days, but I’m considering it, especially for Thanksgiving when we fry a turkey. I wonder if it would work for that??
Motherhen68’s last blog post..
Rose, I wish I had a meat grinder.
Sara, go to eatlocal.org and find a good local farmer!
Zeke, ooooooooh, OK, thanks! I feel better now.
Naomi, I do, but don’t know if I should…does anyone else know??
Mother Hen-yes! What a great price!
Kelly, I wouldn’t worry too much about it being on the counter covered loosely. Think about traditional people. How many airtight containers did they have? Also, I’d just leave the skin intact and strain it out at the end. Anyone have a good reason not to do it that way?
Rose, While the meat grinder sounds like a great tool for getting the fat into small pieces, in my experience, it doesn’t work. Granted, I wasn’t grinding pure fat for rendering, but when large pieces of fat go into my grinder, they gum up/wrap around the auger and just sit there groaning. I have to be careful to trim away as much of the fat as possible before the meat goes into the grinder.
Michelle’s last blog post..
This is wonderful to know since we will be butchering pigs and a beef in the near future. I am just wondering what kind of weird looks I am going to get from the butcher when I ask them to save the fat for me! (never done that before.)
Do you know approx. how many lbs of fat you started with and how much you ended up with? And one more question- did the water just boil off and you were left with melted fat?
Thanks so much for sharing what you know and I love your blog!
Michelle, good point. Next time I’m not fiddling so much before it goes in.
Elisa, good questions. Yep, the water just boiled off. I started with almost 5# of fat from the farm and got about 2 1/2-3 qts. of tallow. (My 4 qt. bowl was about 2/3 full.)
I have to say that the more I learn about natural eating the more confused I get…lard is bad…grapeseed oil good…but then someone else says otherwise. Same with raw milk and bacon vs. skim milk and turkey bacon…help!
I have been taking omega 3 fish oil like crazy trying to get my level of omega 3 to omega 9 fats in better balance. The stuff we typically fry in is loaded with omega 6 and that can through us out of balance. Thanks for the article.
We’ve finally found a good source of pastured leaf lard – though the rancher can’t imagine why I want it since no one else he sells to wants it. I can’t wait to get a hold of it, render it and make some fabulous sprouted grain pie crusts.
Jenny @ Nourished Kitchen’s last blog post..Win a Pickle, Sauerkraut, and Kimchi Maker from the Raw Diet Store!
Jenny -
It can be confusing – there’s no doubt about that. I really try to rely on tradition: would my great, great, great grandmother have skimmed her milk, eaten grapeseed or even recognized turkey bacon? Research studies can be, and often are, faulty and that’s where these recommendations for skim milk and other low-fat oddities come from. Relying on the foods that nourished our ancestors seems much more solid to me. LONG LIVE BUTTER!
Jenny @ Nourished Kitchen’s last blog post..Win a Pickle, Sauerkraut, and Kimchi Maker from the Raw Diet Store!
Jenny, I totally agree with the NK Jenny, as far as how to make sense of it all.
In response to Jenny @ Nourished Kitchen: would your great-great-great-grandmother have skimmed the milk? Yes, she would have. Chances are, she had so much milk she didn’t know what to do with it all, so she regularly skimmed the cream for butter, cheese, etc., and gave the left over skimmed milk to the pigs and chickens. Nothing wasted.
Just wanted to throw in my experience with rendering. I just did what my dad told me to do.
I got some beef kidney fat. I admit, it was strait out of the grocery store, but I didn’t want to buy the “good stuff” if this little experiment didn’t work. Now that it did, I can buy the good stuff next time.
I took my beef kidney fat and put it in a cast iron pan on low-med/low heat until the fat started to seep out of the tissues. Once I got a small layer of it in the bottom of the pan, I poured it into my crock. I also placed the crock in a small cast iron pan and warmed it to low heat so that my tallow would stay liquid during the process. I’d let the fat cook for a while, then pour it off, cook then pour. Eventually my crock was full. I let it cool, sealed it, and put it in the fridge. I should have strained out the tiny bits that got in, but they settled to the bottom. I’ll do it next time.
It really is “beautiful.” I couldn’t stop looking at this pretty thing I’d made, all white and creamy looking.
I made tallow the other night from the fat of an older sheep who had been on pasture for a long time. I had great results with some new tricks I tried. Whether you are butchering yourself or buying the fat try to get the good external fat or fat by the kidneys. The good stuff is hard and waxy, I had some soft fat in there too but probably not more than 20%. I tried running it all through my meat grinder but it just didn’t grind good and it was time consuming. Then I decided to throw it in the freezer for about a half hour to harden it up and run it through the food processor. It went much faster this way. If its too warm it tends to want to lump up and jam the blade but if you have it at just the right temp it flakes up into little tiny pieces.
When I had about 15lbs of fat all cut up into little bits from the food processor I put it into our big slow cooker. I did not add any water or baking soda like some of the books say. I just put it on keep warm and in the morning it was all liquefied. It had a strong odor for sure but it wasn’t burnt at all. Kelly I would imagine your chunks were too big if it took that long to cook down. We then ran it through a cheese cloth lined strainer and put it into extra glass jars we had laying around. This is a good time to use re-use glass jars that you can’t use for canning. We wiped all the jars down really well and then put them in the fridge to harden.
I was worried with grinding it the way I did that the finished product would be cloudy and have bits of gunk in it. The cheesecloth caught everything (we fed the scraps to the dogs) and the finished product was amazing. It came out snow white and perfect. Now we scrape out a few spoonfuls anytime when we are frying anything. The hardened product doesn’t have any odor once it’s cold and you can’t really smell anything when your re-heating it either. For the best product though my experiences say get an animal right after the spring lush of grasses. This high nutrient diet will make almost any meat taste good and mild, even older animals.
I am planning on getting some hogs this summer to do the process again. I hope my new method works well with lard too.
You can make lard/tallow very easily using your crock pot. There is no need to cut it into tiny chunks or add water this way. See my blog post for directions for lard. Very, very simple…http://polyfaceyum.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-make-lard.html
Sheri’s last blog post..Polyface Bulk Beef & Pork Boxes
Thank you everyone! I am trying to navigate thru this world of good food vs. ewwwhhh food (as my daughter would say). I think in my 30 years of growing up I have never thought about food that much and just listened to this commercial or that and followed in my family’s tradition of canned and boxed everything, as food. The I bought all canned and boxed organic items and this year is the first year I am making food with the ingredients…instead of pouring in this box or that and adding water. I just want to say thank you again to everyone for helping me to feel less discouraged and more eager to learn and invest in my family’s health and food choices (which was a bit hard a first because I come from an avid line of coupon addicts). Thanks!
Randall, that’s true, but what I wish everyone understood was that if they DID skim the milk, it was never to avoid the dairy fat, but to do other yummy things with the dairy fat.
Diane, I don’t think my farmer has just “beef kidney fat” – where do you get yours??
Chris, thanks for all that great scoop!
Sherri, I’ll have to try that.
Jenny, it is wild when you begin this journey for sure. I was one of the worst of the worst (I bought a LOT of crap)…I still have a ways to go!
I had some great heritage pastured pork fat from our local farmer at Nature’s Harmony that I rendered yesterday. We got some nice, creamy lard sitting on top of a clearish gel. What the heck is the gel? I’m sure it will make a great pet food supplement, but wonder if I did not render long enough or added too much water. Any ideas?
To Jenny, I suggest checking out the Weston A. Price Foundation for good nutritional information. Also keep checking out good blogs like these or listen to Podcasts like ours.
Lee, you may be interested in our new show on Cod Liver Oil if you’re trying to balance Omega 3s with 6. Chis Masterjohn has some great information!
Cathy Payne’s last blog post..ONL044 Chris Masterjohn on the Science of Cod Liver Oil
Cathy, if it’s like gel, it sounds like it is a little stock sitting on top…? Maybe someone else has seen this???
This may be a stupid question, but do you put the lid on the crockpot during this process?
Cathy,
I haven’t done it this way yet, but I’d say yes, to keep the heat in.
Hi – I just found this post by googling rendering fat. I make my own stock and I skimmed some of the fat off of it – not all, don’t worry! But now I have this fat in a few containers in my fridge. Is that rendered already? Do I need to do something else to it? And can I just use it where I normally use lard? I use lard in bicuits, pie crusts, etc. I have beef fat, turkey fat, and chicken fat. Thanks!
I would also like to know what to do with all of the drippings when I cook meats. When I roasted a turkey recently, the fat rose to the top and there was a lot! I don’t want to just throw it away – is it already rendered – what can I use it for?
Thanks!
Hi Margo & Jennifer,
YES! You can use this already-rendered fat for frying anything or however you would use lard! Isn’t that easy?
Kelly
I am looking for information on vitamins. I am trying to compare Nutrilite and Shaklee? I want to be sure that my family is getting the best value for our money…it is not cheap to be healthy.
Thanks in advance.
Jaytee,
Can you repost your question at this post: http://kellythekitchenkop.com/2009/08/do-you-take-supplements-as-an-insurance-policy-part-4-on-our-ca-trip.html
or this post: http://kellythekitchenkop.com/2008/01/supplements-are-they-necessary-for-good.html
And then I can reply to you there (as soon as I can), it fits the topic there better.
Thanks, Jaytee!!
Kelly
My daughter made some lard last weekend and gave me some-problem-it never set up and had an oil raise to the top-I’ve been skimming the top(the oil) for the past few days-is there anyway to get the lard to “set”? What did she do wrong so we can avoid future problems? Thanks for your help!
Pam, what do you mean it didn’t set? When you cook the fat at a low heat for a while and then it’s all melted, put it in the fridge. The next day, the fat on top is the lard. Does that help or did I misunderstand your question?
Kelly
Oops, forgot – don’t forget to strain it, though.
Hi…this is so interesting to me. I rendered tallow yesterday; it turned out beautifully. Can anyone tell me how long it will keep? I want specifics, like 1 year, 6 months, 20 years, etc. A few websites that I found said “1 month in a cool place”, but I don’t believe the storage time is so short. Mostly, I find general info on shelf life, like “a long time”. Can anyone help?? Thanks.
Hi Debra,
I keep some in my fryers to re-use 3-4 times then toss, and it’s covered tight so air can’t get in. The rest I keep in the freezer sealed tight and I don’t know the “official” word on this, but I’d keep it there up to a year if mine would ever last so long, which it doesn’t.
Kelly