How to Make Tallow: The Easy Way

Use this simple guide to render fat into tallow and master this important homestead survival skill. Tallow can be used for soaps, in skin products, for bird feeding, fire starter, and more. Depending on the fat source, this same technique can be used to render lard.

Knowing how to render fat into tallow is an important homestead survival skill.  Rendered fats can be used for soap making, cooking, baking, conditioning leather, candle making, and as fire starter. Rendered fats are stable, safe for storage, and won’t go bad if kept in cool or cold storage. They can also be used for cooking in your slow cooker, for deep frying, they have a high smoke point, and are delicious for making french fries.

Use this accessible, and easily prepared fat, for your own skin-care products. You can make your own easy moisturizers, lip balms, and more. A great starting recipe is this whipped moisturizing body butter, made with tallow, olive oil, and beeswax with a few essential oils.

Different Animal Fats

Animal fat is a valuable substance.  In commercial meat processing, animal fat is sent to a rendering plant to be rendered into animal feed. On the homestead, you can render fat on your kitchen stove or better yet on the wood-stove (free heat source).  Beware that rendering fat will fill the house with the  smell of roasting meat,  some find the smell nauseating.  So if you are sensitive to smells you may want to do this in an outdoor kitchen, or if it’s summer.

Fat from goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas, deer, moose, elk, caribou and other ungulates is hard and when rendered is called tallow.  Fat from pigs, bear, and rabbit is soft fat, and when rendered is called lard.  Fat from poultry such as duck, geese, and chickens is called “schmaltz” and is soft, almost liquid, at room temperature.  The fat is rendered the same way regardless of the animal that it comes from.  Softer fats render faster, and fats from different animals should be rendered separately. For safety, some people prefer to store rendered tallow in the fridge. I store tallow in the fridge once the jar is unsealed, otherwise I seal the jars and store it in the cold storage room.

The harder fats make a very good soap for laundry and other household cleaning products.  It can be used as a bathing soap, as well, and is a good grease cutter.  However, most bathing soap these days includes coconut oil and olive oil which provide  luxurious lather, as well as skin moisturizing qualities.  Hard fats can also be used as suet for winter bird feeding, suet isn’t needed to feed summer birds, like hummingbirds. Softer fats are good for pastry and baking purposes.

 

Making Beef Tallow

Equipment:

To render fat into tallow you will need:

• 2 Large stock pots with lids
• A long handled spoon to stir the pot
• Beef fat pieces, from around the kidneys specifically (Suet fat), or general dense beef fat pieces. Trimmed from all meat.
• Heat source

1 lb of suet fat will render down to about 12 ounces of finished tallow, and can be rendered in about 2 hours. The cleaner the fat, the easier the rendering process is. If you don’t have a lot of time, use a small amount first to learn the process and follow the recipe tutorial. Fat scraps can be stored in the freezer before rendering with no decrease in quality.

Procedure to render fat into tallow or lard

Fill your large stock pot 1/2 full of fat scraps. Make sure the fat is as clean as possible and that there are no organ meats attached to any internal fat.

Put the pot on over low heat, and heat slowly so that the fat will gradually melt without burning. As the pot fills with melted fat, you can increase the heat a little.

Put the pot over medium heat and heat thoroughly.  Stir the fat once or twice until it becomes translucent, to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning.  As it continues to heat the fat will become liquid and the chunks will shrink.  The liquid in the pot will begin to bubble with small bubbles.  Continue stirring occasionally to transfer the heat to all parts of the rendering fat.  Once all the fat appears liquid you can remove any bones that made it into the pot, with your long handled spoon, and put them aside for another purpose.

As the fat begins to render, you can add more pieces of fat to the pot.  However, don’t fill the pot more than 3/4s full.  As it heats the fat will expand and you don’t want the hot fat to boil over onto your stove, or other heat source.

 Caution:

Fat is flammable and boiling fat can smoke and catch fire.  At this point, in rendering, watch it for smoking.  You don’t want to let the pot get to the smoking point or you can have a flash fire.  If you see any smoke, remove it from the heat source immediately, and cool it down before proceeding.

Never use water on an oil fire. Keep your pot lid handy, and if a fire starts, slip the lid over the pot from the edge to deprive the fire of oxygen slowly. If you slam the lid onto a flaming pot, it may not starve the fire of oxygen and it can continue burning under the lid. Turn off heat source without moving the pot, if possible, and let cool. Fat that has flared is still safe to use, just make sure the pot has cooled down enough to not re-flare before you remove the lid, or turn back on the heat source.

The pot will need to bubble gently (simmer) for several hours until all the fat has become liquid and the water in the meat has evaporated.  The meat will be hard and crunchy – usually referred to as cracklings. This can take all day or even several days, depending on how big your stock pot is.

Remember, don’t leave the pot unattended on the heat source.  I will remove the pot overnight and resume heating it on the stove top in the morning if necessary.

 Clarifying the fat for clean tallow

Once the fat is completely liquid and the cracklings have sunk to the bottom, cool the pot to body temperature.

Strain the warm fat through a cheesecloth or fine mesh strainer, into clean wide-mouth mason jars. The fat should harden clean and white.

Leave the cracklings and any sludge in the bottom of the pan. This is great for pouring into a mold to fill your suet feeder for woodpeckers and wild birds, or as a treat for chickens. Cover jars with the 2 piece lids and store without processing.  These do not need to be sealed.  All water is removed during the boiling process and the tallow is clean of impurities.

The clean white fat is your finished tallow.  I like to melt it one more time and then pour it into wide mouth canning jars, or other storage containers.

Your finished tallow can be used as you would lard, although it will be a bit harder than lard for pastry baking.  It can also be used to make soap, substitute tallow for vegetable shortening in lye soap recipes like this one.    Candles can be made with hard tallow or a combination of tallow and bees wax.

Tallow is also valuable for cooking, it gives great flavor and a crisp finish to potatoes. In fact, it can be tastier than butter for fried potatoes. It’s also decent for frying veggies in, or steak, but I prefer butter on my steak.

Pine cones dipped in tallow and then allowed to harden, make easy fire starters.

Rendered tallow can be used for bird food to feed insect eating birds like woodpeckers and flickers. Large blocks can be melted in the oven, or chipped up and melted into smaller molds.

 

At our house the chick-a-dees will perch on the kitchen window to get our attention when the suet feeder is empty.  Once we fill it they come back one more time to say, “Thank you”.

Your Turn:

You now have your own beef tallow. What do you plan to use it for?

What animal fat(s) have you rendered? How have you used tallow, suet, or lard? Leave a comment.