Our Own Grass Fed Beef - Rendering Tallow (Part 3)

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our blog posts, we talked about us taking a grass fed steer from the farm to the slaughter house and we showed you our freezer loaded up with meat and organ meats.  We will show you today another product that we got - beef fat.  Well, that sounds disgusting, doesn't it?  Why would you want beef fat?  We'll show you in this post.  We were able to get several bags of fat from the steer.

Now, there are numerous uses for beef fat or tallow, but first you have to process it or render it.  You probably grew up where you can remember your mom or grandma would save the bacon drippings from frying bacon and keep it in a coffee cup or tin can near the stove.  Those drippings would serve as the fat or oil to fry things in similar to Crisco. Tallow is the same thing, except from a beef animal instead of pork.  Here is the first of several bags that we will be working with.

A big bag of fat

You want the fat to be slightly frozen as it is easier to work with.  This is not a job for the squeamish of heart or someone who is a 'clean freak' because it makes a big mess.  Simply take pieces of semi-frozen fat out of the bag and using a sharp knife, cut off any pieces of meat or blood.  You want the fat to be simply fat and nothing else.

The first batch

After trimming the meat and blood off of it, I cut the fat into pieces about an inch square.  I then threw it into the food processor.  I learned, though, that it wasn't frozen enough and it made a big 'gloppy' mess.  I learned that the food processor step is really unnecessary as long as you chop up the fat into small enough pieces.  I probably won't do that step again.  It's one more item to clean.  Plus, it has to be hard on the food processor.

Chopping into mush

I simply took the cut up fat and put in into a large pot and turned the heat on medium.  After a while the fat will liquefy.  Be sure to stir every once in a while so that it doesn't burn.  

Heating things up

It's best to keep the lid on the pot and the vent hood running.  The smell isn't bad, but it is not pleasant.  After it is bubbling pretty good, I turned the heat down to low and just let it cook and cook, while stirring occasionally.

Cooking it down

When crispy pieces float to the top and the bottom of the pot contains clear liquid, your work is done. I pulled it off of the stove top and got a metal colander.  I cut up a t-shirt and laid it on the bottom to serve as a filter and then carefully poured the very hot contents of the pot into the colander.  The liquid filtered through the shirt and into the measuring container.

Filtering the oil

The filter/colander caught all the crispy pieces of fat.  This is similar to what you get with pork: Cracklins.  In French, they're called gratons or in Spanish, chicharones.

Beef  'cracklins'

What remained was 8 cups of rendered beef tallow in the liquid state.  It was still quite hot.  It was clear as the filter caught every little bit of sediment.

Hot Rendered Tallow

I lined a pyrex baking pan with wax paper and carefully poured the hot contents into it.

I let it cool on the counter for the better part of a day.  It came to room temperature, but wasn't really hardening, so I put it into the refrigerator overnight and it hardened just fine.

Yellow Beef Tallow

We used a knife to cut it into squares like you might do with brownies and then we used a spatula to scoop up the beef tallow squares.

We labeled a gallon sized ziploc bag and began placing the squares of beef tallow into the bag. They'll be frozen and then we can pop them out as we need them.

Tallow from grass-fed beef has fats like conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and that is very good for you according to the Weston A. Price Foundation.

So what will we use beef tallow for?  Well, it has many uses.  First, we'll use it to fry things in.  I understand that french fries fried in beef tallow is excellent.  Then, we're going to try to make soap. You can make candles with it and you can even make skin care products (balms) with it.  We'll freeze a bunch of beef tallow and try to make several different products with it.