Tallow

Several friends and I are going in together on a side of beef – “cowpooling” - with the meat in question expected to arrive late February. Having only a small freezer, and expecting approximately 30lbs of beef, I’ve started clearing out freezer space.

One of the things taking up space in my freezer has been nearly 4lbs of beef suet, which I’ve been waiting to render into tallow. It’s been waiting for some time – I think I originally planned to do this before Thanksgiving, and then ran into holiday craziness. This weekend seemed like a good time to finally tackle it!

First, it helps to cut the suet up as small as possible. Last time, I used my food processor, but I will NEVER, EVER do that again – it makes a phenomenal mess! This time, I took a serrated knife and hacked it up by hand, taking care to discard stray bits of connective tissue and so forth. Easy enough, and much less cleanup!

When it’s all cut up, 4lbs (well, 3.8lbs) of frozen suet looks about like this:

I then added about 4 cups of water, with several tablespoons of salt already dissolved into it. The water keeps the suet from burning before the tallow renders out, and gives the solids somewhere to settle into. Salt, I’ve been told, helps “purify” the tallow… magic? Actually, it’s a lot more straightforward than that. It raises the boiling temperature of the water, thus helping render out more tallow, faster. More importantly, it makes the water denser, so you don’t have any wishy-washy semi-separating tallow bubbles.

Get the heat going:

A solid boil, and rendering is well underway:

I swear it's boiling, you just can't tell in this pic for some reason.

I found that, having been more careful with the preparation – tossing out connective tissue and less desirable bits – there wasn’t any of the unpleasant smell I’ve encountered with rendering. Honestly, it didn’t smell like much of anything – it was just steamy. You do have to take care that you don’t manage to boil all the water out from under your liquid beef fat, with all that steam.

Straining the gooey bits out of the good stuff:

I did toss the dregs from the strainer back into the pot to render a little further, though I didn’t get all that much more from them.  When they were all tapped out, we mixed them with peanut butter and some bread crumbs to put out for the birds.  We put the mix in hollowed-out apple halves and hung the result in the maple tree:

Letting the fat cool, without disturbing it:

Hardened tallow:

The plates of tallow need a good wipe down and a rinse under cool water. If they look nice – uniform, creamy white, nothing untoward hanging on, not oily or slimy or grainy but like a cross between butter and white chocolate – then they get dried off and packed carefully in the freezer for later baking or soap making. If they smell like cheap burgers or don’t look rights, then they go back into the pot with some fresh water, I re-melt it, and we try again. I’ve had goosefat hold out for a third boil, where it just wouldn’t separate from the solids and it wouldn’t clarify or solidify until then, but beef suet tallow seems to fix itself the second time around.   This tallow needed a re-melt – it was grainy, with some beefy bits still trapped on the underside, and a faint but distinct burger odor. You can see some of the yuck on the upside-down piece in the picture.  I put a brand new pot of salt water on the stove, broke the tallow up into it, brought the whole thing to a vicious boil, took it off the heat, and then put it straight into the fridge when it stopped bubbling.

All told, I got maybe 2.5lbs of tallow. Perhaps I could have chopped the suet up more for a higher yield to my rendering, but I’m pretty happy with it. It takes up a lot less room in the freezer, and soon I’ll be using it for soap making and maybe some cooking (ooh… doughnuts…. )

yum.