Tallow

I figure that there wasn't a post dedicated to Tallow so I decided to make one!

What is tallow?

Tallow is the rendered fat (usually from cows or sheep but may come from a variety of animals). Tallow has a rough smoke point of 400 degree Fahrenheit to 420 degrees Fahrenheit. Tallow is solid at room temperature. Tallow keeps, in my experience, for about a year in the fridge, two years in the freezer.





How to make tallow?



Rendering tallow is as simple as placing suet in a pot placed over low heat and letting the oil render.

After the fat has fully rendered, I filter the end product with cheesecloth into mason jars.

I choose to store my tallow in the fridge.

This is the approach I follow - chop up fat trimmed off uncooked meat;  render down in the slow cooker (less chance of burnt bits than doing it in the oven)  Every now an then, attack fat pieces with scissors to allow more liquid fat to run off.  Strain and then if there are bits still in the liquid fat, pop it into a saucepan with some water,  heat gently then allow to cool.  Skim fat off the top, or allow to 'solidify' a bit then remove to containers.  Mine is in the fridge.
Edit to add:   some people like to spread the result on toast . . .  or make water-proofing for boots and shoes:  
Mix equal parts tallow and neatsfoot oil  (that's a purified oil rendered from beef shin bones and feet.)

The past few winters, some friends came to my house in December to do a big yak meat drying process so they could store meat for summer at their off-grid house. This yellow fat you see in the photos is just yak tallow, and I guess it's colored by the yaks being wildly free-range and eating high altitude desert plants. I made big loads of broth and tallow as a by-product of drying meat. The tallow I cleaned up well lasted in jars on the shelf for a year without getting any off-smell (we are not there now, so later I'll find out if a second year works). Yak fat is quite mild (unlike, say, mutton tallow that I find to smell sheepy).

We receive the meat as large pieces, like an upper leg, a lower leg, a quarter of a ribcage, and we store them in another friend's deep freezer. Then we take one out and partially thaw in a chilly part of the house for a couple days (the north side stairs in my passive solar-heated house stays at fridge temps and is ideal). When it's still lightly frozen but soft enough to cut, we slice off the meat and string it up to freeze-dry in a screened cage on the roof (in the high desert). Pieces of gristle and chunks of fat go to the broth pot. We cut up the bones with an axe, and I start the broth and fat process.

1) Simmer the bones overnight and ideally 18 to 24 hours. The first round, I use plain water, lightly salted, and no onions or spices. Drain them into a colander OVER A POT!!! and pick out the bits of meat for use. Put the broth in the chilly place in a straight-sided vessel.

2) Put the bones back in the pot with any remaining fat chunks or odd bits, this time with any other alliums or spices desired for broth, and simmer another 24 hours. Again drain over a pot and put the broth to chill in a straight-sided vessel.

3) Optionally simmer the bones a third time for another 24 hours, and this time add just a little acid such as vinegar or lemon juice, to draw more broth out of the bones. At the end of this process, the bones are mostly soft and go right in the compost, where they will disappear.

4) Meanwhile, when a broth pot has cooled, loosen the sides with a knife and lift out the disk of hardened fat. Scrape the bottom off, back into the broth. There will be little specks in the bottom of the fat, so scrape those off. (For storage of the broth, heat it, pour into containers, and freeze).

5) Combine the various batches of fat, melt them in clean water, stirring the fat into the water, and then chill again in a straight-sided container. For good long storage at room temperature, repeat this step again (chill, lift off the disk, wipe or scrape any last bits off).

6) Finally, take the chilled hard disk of fat, turn it upside-down to expose the wet side to the air, and let it dry in the chilly place for a couple of days. Melt it in a dry pot, and as it gets hot make sure there are no no moisture bubbles left inside. In theory there's a risk of it catching fire if it sits on the stove getting too hot, so I like to keep an eye on it and pay attention. You want any moisture to come out as bubbles of steam, but you don't want the fat itself to volatilize and come up as bubbles.

7) Pour into clean, dry, heat-resistant containers and store. I reuse glass jars that commercial food came in. The fat doesn't touch the lids so you can reuse jars with plastic lids, but if your storage will be unattended and risks rat attention, then stick to metal lids.

I store tallow at room temperature in an unheated room.

Something I do to make it store better in these conditions is to strain it and pour it first into a large stainless steel bowl, and then leave it to cool, I then briefly heat the bowl again so that I can flip the slab of tallow over, and then I can scrape impurities off the bottom of it. The tallow then gets reheated and poured into hot jars with hot lids while it is hot, and then I put the jars upside down briefly to exclude more air and seal them, but they could also be water bath canned.

What are we all using the tallow for?

I make some up every so often (generally when we have a big barbecue someone brings some cuts with lots of fat and I'll save it), but I'm not sure what else to use it for besides beef stir fries or something like bolognese.

I cook everything in it, even sweet deep fried pastries like doughnuts are really good cooked in tallow.

It has a high smoke point so it's great for deep frying, shallow frying, and roasting.

When cooking any kind of greens, like kale, collards, chard, spinach, or edible weeds, a nice simple way to cook them is sauté onions or garlic in animal fat till sweet, add the chopped greens and salt, stir and flip a moment to coat with the fat a little, and cover till cooked.

In answer to the question about what to do with tallow, it is not only great for cooking, but is wonderful for making soap.

Apparently many people are using pure tallow for skin care.

I haven’t tried it, but I do use it for soap making.  Years ago when we began hearing about the orangutans’ loss of habitat and the relationship to commercial palm oil production, I replaced the palm oil fraction of my soap formula with tallow.  It contributes the same characteristics to soap as tallow.  But I am buying “deodorized” tallow…. ( I make a lot of soap.)

I've been using tallow recently as a moisturiser and it feels beautiful! A lot of mum's in the crunchy circles around me are using it as a nappy balm too.

A qs - I've seen the rendering process expalined/done a lot with the uncooked fat cut off the beef. But what about the fat left in the pan after cooking a roast or frying? How can I purify (?) And re-use that? I've actually had a realisation while writing this - that's the "drippings" isn't it? I've been struggling with how to look it up online.

I use tallow in cooking, soaps, lotion bars, salves, & ointments. If it goes rancid("oh, look - I found a 3yr old jar of tallow that got lost in the back of the pantry"), I'll use it to make for starters, for both the summer fire pit and the woodstove. The rancid stuff is rare, but the used stuff even gets made into fire starters - soak dehydrated corn cobs in the used/old melted tallow, and you'll have fantastic fire starters.

Straight tallow is excellent for the skin, but I like it even better, with calendula, rose petals, and plantain. Infuse it with rosemary(or just add a few drops of rosemary essential oil), and it works great as a hot oil treatment for hair, too. A little goes alooooong way. Use citrus or peppermint (or a combination that appeals to you) and rub it into your cracked heels, hands, & rough elbows.

Lamb tallow has been an absolute staple for us for the past 5 years as we've navigated food and chemical sensitivities.

We get bags of lamb fat from our local butcher, minced. We make big batches as we need by cooking for 3-4 hours in a big pot, usually about a litre of water added. Pour through sieve into a big bowl and cool overnight. Lift off solid tallow 'disc' and wipe/rinse. Sometimes we remelt and jar it, other times just break that up into chunks and freeze.

We have to be careful of cooking time (shortest cook possible) and storage (keep frozen) to reduce the development of amines which cause a histamine reaction for my girls and I. Also cooling quickly in water baths so it can be refrigerated s soon as possible. We used to keep the jar we were using in the fridge but at times found it was causing reactions if we didn't go through it quickly enough, although that wasn't often a problem! Some people may need to freeze it for this reason, not because it's going to go off, but that it may reduce histamine issues.

We've used it to make skin balms with lavender oil and they were a huge hit at my daughters market stall.

+Danielle Cosgrove I've started trying to use tallow for body lotion but I find it really smelly, is there any way I can reduce or eliminate the odor of the tallow? I've been using beef tallow only here. Thanks!

I have found that if I clean/melt the tallow multiple times, then the resulting product has very little odor.  I’m talking five, six, seven times.  Less than that and the tallow still smells like meat.

I've found tallow does a good job at making potatoes nice and crispy when frying. You'll occasionally see restaurants frying their fries or hashbrowns with duck fat to get a nice crispy exterior, but tallow and even lard (really, any saturated animal fat) can do the job just as well.

I am starting a botanical products business and tallow skincare products are on the list. It is great for conditions like eczema and psoriasis.

For those that are interested in tallow, have you considered the value in suet?



This recent video came out and gave me some ideas. I hope it inspires you as well.

I like using tallow for cooking and for making lotion. Since a lot of people covered the cooking part above, I'll mention my (experimental) process for making a whipped tallow butter.

***It's most important to source high quality suet!! What I mean is suet from animals that lived a healthy life. I prefer suet from biodynamic beef but the suet I just used (that you'll see in the below photos) came from my friend's goat herd (specifically a goat named scroto baggins) and I know how well they treat and care for their goats. Your sourcing options and access will be different from mine but I don't recommend using the suet unless you KNOW how that animal lived. A lot of toxins are stored in fat.

1) I cut up the suet into small pieces, add it to a pot of boiling water and boil the suet until the tallow separates from the rinds. I separate the solids from the liquids and then let the liquids cool down in a bowl with tapered sides. I do this in the morning to allow the liquids to slowly cool throughout the day. Just before bed, I put the bowl in the fridge. If it's cold outside then the hot-cold cycles can be hastened.

2) In the morning, I'll remove the hardened disc of tallow from the bowl and skim the bottom of it. It's now been clarified once and will still have a meaty-smell.

This batch was so large I had to alternate the cycles and use two large, tapered bowls.


3) I then repeat the boiling process of tallow and water, then cool down and scrape. I do this at least 8 times or until there's nothing visible to scrape off.


When I know I've finished clarifying the tallow:



For the whipped tallow butter part:
option 1) whip the tallow until it has stiff peaks and the color is very white. simple and done.


option 2) add essential oils for (mostly) aromatic qualities. Then finish with option 1.
I use an aromatherapy book to provide guidance on blending top, medium, and low aromatic notes (my friend is pictured below doing the blending).


option 3) infuse a carrier oil (like EVOO) with herbs, like calendula, chamomile, plantain, etc that have skin healing qualities. After straining the herbs out of the hot infusion (bake at 180degF for 12hrs). I blend ~25% carrier oil to ~75% tallow by weight. Then finish with option 1.


option 4) do option 3, then option 2, then option 1. My preference to optimize the healing qualities.

I personally like adding rose hip SEED oil to tighten the skin. This anti-aging serum by BioMed Balance made a really fantastic batch without needing to figure out the aromatic profile.



I then store the whipped tallow balm in the fridge until I gift it (there's no way I can use all of this in a year!!). I don't use anything else on my skin (besides my homemade salves) and it's become very popular amongst my friends and family.


My daughter, friend, and I recently made our own batches and these are the numbers we used: