Making Tallow

Good morning!  Just wanted to write up a quick post about my recent purchase from A Better Way Beef. I purchased a mixed box of grass fed, grass finished beef and an additional 10 pounds of suet.  The price was great, $5.35 per pound and the mix included 7 pounds of ground beef, two beautiful shoulder round steaks, some beef short ribs, a nice sized rump roast and a couple of nice sized chuck steaks, and $3.00 per pound for the suet.  They keep the prices low by allowing smaller purchases rather than insisting a customer purchase a whole side of beef.  The cost of a whole side would be prohibitive for me, and that would keep me purchasing commercially produced meat at the grocery stores.  That is just not going to happen again, now that I have found "A Better Way!"

I finally found the extra time to render some of the suet into tallow the last Wednesday evening.

 This is the frozen suet after I removed the amount I need to render the bowl of tallow shown below.

The procedure is very simple and I was amazed at how easy it was to break off chunks of the suet with a sharp knife.

I chopped the chunks into smaller pieces and filled a 13x9x2 baking pan about 1/2 full, then placed it in the oven which had been preheated to 225 degrees F.  I checked on it once an hour, stirring the pieces to make sure it melted evenly.  Low heat and slow melting is the best way to do this, so make sure you have plenty of time on your hands if you are going to give this a shot.  I am thinking it took about 4 hours... Strain in a good stainless steel mesh strainer after you are done.

The resulting tallow is pure white.  Beautiful and probably the MOST stable fat for frying.  As a matter of fact, I fried my eggs in this fat yesterday morning, low heat of course, but not ONE splatter.

I can imagine how tasty the sweet potato fries are going to be!

I will make sure to add progress photos from the next batch I render so you all can see what the chunks of suet look like as they are melting in the pan.