The Honey Harvest (Part Four)

Honey isn't the only thing we're harvesting.  As it turns out, there's another by-product when you extract honey.  As we showed in previous posts, you use a knife to uncap the honey.  This is done over an uncapping tank and all of the wax falls on a screen which allows most of the honey to flow into a collection tank located below.  The wax stays on top of the screen.  What to do with all this wax?  We keep it and use it for making several things I'll discuss further on.

The wax is taken indoors and in batches, we put it in a crock pot on the high setting.  This melts all of the wax.  The beeswax is a clearish liquid, but you can see impurities floating on the surface of the melted wax.

These impurities must be strained out.  The way we do it is to pour the melted wax through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter.  Can you see how it has caught all the junk that was mixed with the beeswax?

The muslin cloth is draped over a sieve, and the pure beeswax flows into a collection pan below.

We allow the beeswax that's been poured into the pans to cool.

When it cools completely, we pop it out.  Pretty, isn't it?

When we finished rendering the wax, I stacked it up so that you can see how nice it looks.

It's hard to get perspective on how much wax that is, so I weighed it on our kitchen scale.  We rendered just shy of 5 pounds of pure beeswax!

What will we do with all that?  We'll we're going to make candles this year.  We also make lip balm.  The beeswax is used to coat the fabric bread bags that we posted about a couple of weeks ago.  Finally we use the wax to scrape on new foundation.  Waxing the foundation let's the bees know that there is enough to begin drawing out comb.  We'll also be thinking of new uses for beeswax.

Using Everything Except the "Moo"

A couple of years ago when we butchered a steer, we asked the people at the slaughterhouse to save us all the fat.  We believe in using as much of the animal as possible.  We use everything except the "moo."  The steer was fat and we actually had too much fat!  Last year when we brought our Jersey bull calf to the slaughterhouse, we asked them to save the fat again.  Chuck, the Jersey bull, was a leaner animal.  A lot of his fat went into the ground beef, but we still were able to get some and freeze it in big bags.

This week Tricia thawed it out and began processing it.  She placed the fat in big pots on the stove and began heating it up, letting it cook for most of the day.  No, it doesn't look too nice.

Much of the fat liquefies into oil.  The remainder reminds me of cracklins.  This job is probably best done outside, but the mosquitoes are terrible right now and it is terribly hot.

We try to spoon out most of the remaining fat that wasn't converted to oil and then we pour the oil through a muslin cloth stretched over a colander to filter the rendered fat.

What we are left with is clean cooking oil rendered from beef fat.

While this is still hot, we pour into a Pyrex cooking dish and set aside on the counter and allow to cool.

The remaining 'nastiness' that is made up of fat, gristle, meat, cartilage, bone, etc. is gradually fed to Big Boy.  He seems to like it, despite the fact that it doesn't look appetizing.

As the beef tallow cools, it loses its transparent quality and becomes as white as a bar of Ivory Soap.  The work is almost done.  We now cut up the beef tallow into squares.

Using spatulas, we scoop the tallow out and place into zip loc bags where they will be frozen in the deep freeze.

As we need cooking oil, we'll pull a square or two out of the freezer and heat in a cast iron skillet.  With heat added, the beef tallow becomes cooking oil again and can be used the same as any other cooking oil that you might use.

Using beef tallow reminds me of what many people grew up watching their moms and grandmothers do.  I can remember bacon grease being poured in a coffee cup or can to be used as cooking oil later on.  It would turn snow white and then a spoonful could be scooped out and put in a skillet to add wonderful flavor to whatever dish happened to be on the menu.  Fat doesn't have to be a waste product that is thrown away. 

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.