Press or Render a Quart of Oil or Fat - food.straw.oilfat PEP BB

I rendered some pig belly pieces into lard!  It took a couple batches to get a quart since I did the method where you add the hot lard to a mason jar with a bit of water, store it upside down and then pour off the water once the junk settles.

I made tallow and this time I knew what I was doing!

I followed the instructions in this video by a Youtuber that I follow: https://youtu.be/qFn14auHaaI?si=xmROFTf9mta5N0LZ

The end result was almost 1 quart (4 cups) but I also submitted tallow in another badge bit submission below where I made 2 cups, so the total is a little under 6 cups (quart and a half) permies.com/p/2174597

What I did:
I cut the tallow into small pieces, put it in the Instapot and filled with 2 quarts water. I used the "slow cooker" option and cooked it on low for 6 hours. Poured it into a bowl and put in the fridge overnight. The next day I scraped off the bottom and repeated the process (to have a more purified tallow). The third day, I heated up the tallow in a pot on low/medium to boil out the water. Once the bubbles stopped, I poured it into silicone mini muffin trays - to pull out of the freezer and use as needed!

Dave Burton wrote:For this badge bit, you will press or render a quart of oil or fat!

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must provide proof of the following as pictures or video (<2 mins):
   - source of oil or fat before processing
   - pressing or rendering the oil or fat
   - finished oil or fat after processing (meeting the above stated requirements)

I rendered just under 2 qts of tallow from beef suet I purchased from a local butcher. I clarified it 5 times to use for lotion.

I got a large amount of fat from my half cow share that I finally pulled out of the freezer to render into tallow. It ended up being almost 5 quarts.

Here is all the fat in my 16 quart stock pot. I added 1.5 gallons of water and 9 Tbs of salt and put it on the stove to heat up. This may have been a little too much but it was hard to tell at this point.



After it heated up, I used the immersion blender to blend it all up. Mm. Fat soup.



After blending, I distributed the fat into three large bowls to cool down.



Pretty quickly, the fat and the water started to separate.



After it cooled enough for me to pull the fat off the top of each bowl, I grabbed it all and put it back in the pot, leaving the liquid to be frozen in ice cube trays for dog treats.



After putting it back in the pot, it melted pretty quickly.



This time it only filled up two bowls and the stuff on top was way more pure as the stuff on the bottom, hence the two different colors.



The more pure stuff made a beautiful cake of fat. Sorry the picture is blurry. I scraped off anything that seemed impure off of it. I then melted it down to be put into jars.





The less pure bowl made a big mess. I decided to melt it down again and strain it out with a cheesecloth.







The stuff that resulted was much more pure and so I melted it down again to get another cake.



After melting it down, I cooled it in a bowl and flipped it over to scrape off the impurities on the bottom. I then melted it down one last time to put in a jar.



Sealing the jars.



My five jars of beef tallow. The last jar wasn't quite full but this is still a lot!