How to Render Beef Tallow
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As I wrote yesterday’s post, I realized that I’d never actually made my own beef tallow from scratch. I’ve collected plenty of bacon grease in my day, and I’ve made schmaltz and used beef drippings from roasts as cooking fats, but never beef tallow. In fact, I almost never hear about it, even in Primal circles. It’s either lard, duck fat, or ghee getting all the attention. Hey, those are all great, delicious fats, and they deserve their prestige, but I like sticking up for the little guy. I like an underdog. In this case, of course, the little guy comes courtesy of a big cloven-hoofed ungulate.
To render beef tallow, you need to get your hands on some raw beef fat.
It’s called suet, and the best stuff for rendering is going to be solid and firm. Most suet comes from the tissue surrounding the kidneys and the loins, but any hard beef fat will do. What I did was buy steak and roast trimmings from a butcher. It wasn’t grass-fed, unfortunately, but it was from clean, organic meat from a guy who really knew his stuff. It was also incredibly inexpensive (I paid two bucks for around three pounds) and just about the only source of raw beef fat I could find on short notice. If you can find a good butcher that deals with grass-fed meat, I’d imagine buying the fat trimmings is still fairly inexpensive and completely worth the extra effort.
I don’t know whether my batch was suet or not (I suspect there was at least a bit, judging from the thick, hard pieces that felt like cold butter when you sliced into them), and it did look a little ragged and hastily thrown together, but it was still fat. I wasn’t going to let a little uncertainty slow me down, for I was armed with the knowledge that fat can always be rendered.
I threw my motley crew of beef fat onto the cutting board, grabbed my chef’s knife, and began to cut the fat into cubes. I’d read tons of contradictory information about particle size, with some recipes calling for larger, 1-inch cubes and others claiming finely diced or shredded fat got the best yield. My experience with rendering pre-shredded buffalo kidney fat was painless and easy, so I went for shredded. I figured the more surface area, the better. As I cut more and more and trimmed more and more, however, I realized that tossing a bunch of room temperature fat cubes into the food processor was asking for a congealed mess. The solution? Freeze the cubes.
So, after trimming the fat completely and removing all attached muscle meat and bloody tissue (see pic of me holding up a speck in my fingers) (this step is crucial, because meat and blood will only burn and ruin the purity of your tallow), I threw the whole lot into the freezer for a couple hours.
You don’t want completely frozen and you don’t want completely… thawed? You want the middle. You want a texture like sorbet (mmmm, beef sorbet anyone?) or cold butter. After two hours, into the processor they went, and twenty seconds of pulsing got me the shredded (yet still intact) fat I needed.
This is where I had to make a huge decision. Was I going to do a dry-render over the stove in a high quality pot, or was I going to do a wet-render and get the potentially purest tallow by boiling and then separating fat from water? I’d read about several different ways to render fat, but I chose two that seemed to make the most sense. The wet-render sounded tempting, if a bit messy and time-consuming, but I eventually passed on it. I settled on doing the traditional dry-render over super low heat on the stove top along with an oven render at 250 degrees. For both, I used reinforced cast-iron pots (from Martha Stewart, no less!) and about a pound of shredded fat in each.
The plan was to cook it long, slow, and low while noting the differences between the two methods and ultimately choosing a “winner.” The stove top fat started rendering almost right away, even with just a tiny flicker of a flame doing the heating. After about 20 minutes, the first sign of “cracklins”began to show: light brown shriveled up pieces of (former) fat bubbling around inside the newly rendered fat. I was initially worried that I was going too fast too soon, but that wasn’t the case. The cracklins were great, and they never burned. The fat remained pure and clear.
In the oven, things were slow going. I had set the timer for two hours, and an hour into it there was a decent layer of rendered fat accruing. There were no cracklins to be seen, only soggy grayish chunks of fat. An hour and a half into it, cracklins were everywhere – almost as many as in the stovetop pot. Neither pot smoked nor burned; neither source of rendering fat gave off a foul odor (although my dog did set up camp right in front of the oven, no doubt hoping for stray splatters). I was a little worried that I’d mess it up somehow, but I didn’t. Both pots of fat fully rendered without burning. The stove top took about an hour and twenty minute to fully render (1 pound, shredded, over ultra low heat), while the oven pot took closer to two hours at 250 degrees F.
I’d also read that I might have to clarify my tallow – to remove random miniscule bits, flecks of meat, crumbled up cracklin that could mar the purity of the fat. Much to my surprise, there really wasn’t a need for clarification. I used a fine mesh strainer and it was completely sufficient. The result was pure, delicious tallow that turned white in the fridge and was easy to scoop. If you look really closely, you can see some specks at the bottom of the jars, but you’d really have to stare.
From my experience, both methods work equally well. If you like stay in the kitchen and tend to your dishes, go with the stove top method. As long as you keep an eye on it and keep the fat from sticking to the bottom, your fat will render much faster this way. If you want to go do other stuff while it renders, use the oven method. Other than keeping the heat low and occasionally popping in for a quick stir and scrape, you can pretty much set the clock and forget about the rendering.
Anyone ever use the wet-render method? Got any tips for my next batch of tallow? Let me know!
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
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Great experiment, Mark! What does it taste like?
I imagine it would be hard to find fat scraps from grass fed beef. If anyone considers using fat scraps from a non organic source, remember that toxins are stored in fat!
This might be a dumb question, but what do you use it for? In place of oils, like for greasing a pan when you cook eggs? I get my meat locally, and it’s grass fed, antibiotic and hormone free. They process it right there and will probably have fat available…
It has a high smoking point so it is good for high heat cooking. Many use it for deep frying and baking.
Fry your eggs in it. Throw it in a beef and veggie stir-fry. Use it in place of butter or coconut oil for a variety of dishes. The list of uses is long.
What about using a crockpot? Would that be low enough for heat or would it be too low?
I use a crockpot to render my beef fat and it works out great–on the low setting that is.
You can even use it as an extra healing and penetrating base for many herbal first aid ointments (really much more effective than most plant based oils for healing the human body).
Mark I’ve used the wet-render method for lard, but with some modifications.
I tried to boil the fat, which I cut in small pieces with a knife, but it was taking for ever.
I got impatient, so decided to throw the pieces of fat into the blender and proceeded to boil the “fat-puree” for 20 mins aprox.
I got a very thick layer of floating liquid fat floating, and then decanted it the best I could to a separate recipient.
The problem I experienced is that, due to the prior blending, it was impossible for me to decant the very last amounts of lard due to it being mixed with skin/meat tiny residues, so I lost some of it. Not much though.
An the end, I was very satisfied with the results:
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Not sure whether you have seen Jennifer McLagan’s book “Fat” (http://www.jennifermclagan.com/book_fat.htm) that won this year’s James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year, but not only does she have some great recipes for a variety of animal fats, but she talks about how to render fats like lard and suet, and goes into the differences between wet and dry rendering, why you might want to do one or the other, and how to do it.
Sounds like you hit upon some of the key components for suet anyway (freeze it a bit and shred it in a food processor rather than cutting it into cubes as you might with pork fat).
This is still a fantastic book and well worth buying for anyone who is a cooking enthusiast, and especially a *primal* cooking enthusiast.
I’ve used wet-rendering but don’t any more. IMHO it’s a pain in the butt and I don’t have any better returns than with the stovetop or oven methods.
I would only recommend it if you know you are too impatient to let the fat melt very slowly, especially at first. The water is there to prevent burning and will do this job. But if you use the oven method, or if you keep an eye on the stovetop, there really is no need.
Also, I mash my bits with a potato masher from time to time. Speeds the process a little bit.
Mark, Thanks for the great post. I am going to do this next weekend when I have some time to watch the pot.
Thanks also to Tommy for the tip for the book. Awesome!
Really surprised you haven’t made this stuff before Mark, it is the MAIN ingredient for making good deer sausage. I use organic grass fed beef tallow for my deer sausage and refuse to use anything else.
Again another awesome post to help those primal eaters!
Mark, if you really want the rendered goodness to last , put about a tsp of fair trade sea salt on the bottom of the container you’re going to store it in. If there is ANY suspended moisture or particulate that settles to the bottom, the salt will do its magic and greatly reduce the possibility of spoilage.
Once upon a time McDonald’s fries were done in tallow, or mostly so. Then the healthies and vegetarians came along and they didn’t want it, so here we are.
Slightly off topic, but where can one get lard w/o the partial hydrogenation? I presume it’s a heck of lot less than hydrogenated vegetable oils, but nevertheless…..
The ubiquitious John Morrell dark blue packaged lard always had a bit of funky smell, at least to me. I recently bought an El Cheapo regional brand at half the price……and no smell!
Guess I answered my own question after I went back and read yesterday’s post!
So I read this article a few days ago and couldn’t help but think “Man I gots to get me some tallow.” This morning I get a call from my cousin who tells me the local grass fed organic cow was ready to be picked up from the butcher this morning. I get 100lbs of the stuff and I am excited. I ask “any chance of getting some of the offal and suet or tallow?” He says the butcher set aside just the kidneys and the suet just for you. Its about 10lbs of fat in a bag.
SCORE!
I have asked for fat at whole foods and farmers markets; both say they use it all (there is not much from young grassfed beef) for sauce, sausages, etc. I did manage to get enough pork belly fat to render a half gallon (slow cooker works well for me) but we used it all within a month. So finally I ordered a 5-gallon of tallow from grasslandbeef.com; they also sell in 2.5 lb for those who want to try it.
I was just trying to order some beef fat and the butcher said you only want to use the beef around the kidneys is this true?
I just made some for the first time today. I cut the fat about 1/4 inch thick and 2 inches long and put it in the pan with about 1/2 cup of warm water and cooked on medium heat for about 45min, stirring occasionally. I think the water kept the fat from sticking to the bottom of the pan, but quickly evaporated so cleanup was super easy and there is no water left in the rendered fat!
Similar to what @Dane said…
A way to speed up the process of dry rendering is to add a little (keyword little) water to the pot. The steam gets the fat melted down much more quickly on the super low heat setting. The little bit of water evaporates out in no time.
I’ll second the prior comment by grok. I’m a butcher and a chef, and have access to a lot of trimmings, so needless to say I do a lot of rendering. I use precisely the process which Grok mentioned and would add a few other points. First, this method really does work much more quickly than the others but because of the higher heat, as mentioned in the article, it is crucial to get all the lean meat off the fat; it will burn and get you some unpleasant smelling tallow. This process also works with every other animal I’ve tried (pork, duck, goose, chicken, mutton).
As far as a source of grass fed beef fat, most Whole Foods meat markets carry either a 100% grass fed steer, or a grass fed/grain finished (grain, the final month at feedlot), and many both. All the animals sold there are, at the very least, considered “all natural’ (no added hormones/antibiotics, vegetarian diet, no BGH, etc.) Give them some lead time and they will collect as much trim as they can.
Great tips.
I still used very low heat. The lowest setting on the stove for oh… 3-4 hours. I first I was worried about sloppiness of leaving some meat on, but mine’s perfect. Almost white as snow.
I love the cracklins. They make a fantastic big-ass salad topping!
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Ask your butcher (of the wonderful folks at Whole foods) for ‘K&L’ fat: kidney and lumbar.
Best flavor to ease of rendering ratio for beef and very very easy to get working. Hint: buy the meat grinder attachment for your kitchenaid mixer if for no other reason than it makes your tallow project an absolute joy.
I did a couple of batches of tallow this week with some grass fed beef fat from a 1/4 cow we purchased.
Tried the oven method and some in a slow cooker set on low. Both worked just fine. One batch, I ground up the fat, and one I just dumped the 1-2″ chunks of fat directly in the slow cooker. No difference in taste or clarity.
I’d say the freezing/grinding step is unnecessary.
I rendered 1.5 lbs this past weekend. I did the dry method – oven at 250F and i left it for 3 hrs. Worked great.
How do you guys store the rendered tallow? I have probably 10 lbs of the stuff that I need to render still, which is a LOT of fat.
Fridge or freezer for what you’re not immediately using is a fail-safe.
What wonderful tips on this subject. Another use that I have for small amount of Tallow is making it into Suet Feeders for Birds. We have a very large area we feed birds in and they love it. Draws many different specied in as well!