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Rendering Beef Fat into Tallow

Rendering Beef Fat into Tallow

INGREDIENTS:
1 Pack FFF Beef Fat or Suet Fat

Equipment:
A sharp knife
Cutting Board
Fine Metal Strainer
Glass Bowls or Oven Safe trays
Clean Jars

DIRECTIONS:
1. Defrost the packages of Beef Fat and prepare a clean open surface to work on. Using a sharp knife, take your time to cut and pull off any meat or anything with an odd color. Remove all veins and as much of the membrane as possible. After picking through the fat, you will be left with about 2/3 of the original weight. 



2. Chop the Fat pieces into small chunks with a knife or put it in the food processor and pulse it fine. Heap it into a metal strainer and place the strainer on top of a glass bowl or oven safe tray.



3. Turn your oven on to about 160-170 Degrees F. If your oven does not go that low, prop the oven door open about an inch or so with a wine cork or something similar, and turn the oven on as low as it goes. In a gas oven, turn the dial until it "clicks", or the oven barely turns on. Rendering the fat at a lower temperature preserves more of the vitamins in the tallow, and in combination with cutting out all the veins and meat, helps keep it from tasting or smelling beefy.

4. Leave the fat in the oven for about 3-4 hours and stir every hour or so. You will be left with the rendered tallow in the bowl/tray and little crispy bits of leftover fat in the strainer. If you are planning to use the Tallow for a lotion or body cream, remove the rendered tallow from the bowl after about 2 hours and let the rest keep rendering. Use the fat that renders longer for cooking tallow.



5. After the Fat is rendered, strain it through a linen nut bag into a jar. Save however much you want to use as cooking tallow, and use the rest to make into body creams or lotions. Make sure to save any of the crispy fat bits left over and use them in any recipe that calls for bacon bits!

                        
 
6. Now you are left with some beautifully rendered Beef Fat to use for cooking, or to further process into Body Creams and Lotions!



7. To use the Tallow for body creams and/or Lotions: Let the rendered Fat cool slightly and add some pure lanolin (approximately 30% the amount of Tallow by weight), a little jojoba oil and a few drops of whatever essential oils sound good to you! 



8. Then whip it with an immersion blender until it turns opaque and starts to thicken. Once it reaches this point, quickly pour it into small clean jars or containers. It usually takes once or twice to figure out how much lanolin oil and essential oils to add to make the finished product have the consistency you like, however this ratio works for most uses.

                      

9. And there you have it! How to render Beef Fat and Beef Suet Fat into rendered Beef Tallow for use in Cooking or Body Creams and Lotions!

                     

Credit to Nancy Figueroa of Pinch ’n Rub Spice and Tea Hub for generously sharing her process for rendering Beef Fat, crafted with love through trial and error!

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