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How to Render your own Tallow

Well, Christmas has come early for my fellow tallow lovers - I was going through my Picasa collection looking for some Christmas card pix and I came across some tallow-rendering photos I took last winter - I think I had ambitions of a photo essay but then I got sidetracked. So without further ado, here's how to get yourself the best soap making fat ever, the old-fashioned way.

Photo #1:
Find yourself a good butcher. The problem with the lack of neighborhood butchers these days is that beef fat isn't even around. In the case of supermarkets, most of the meat is packaged far away and shipped, they don't have that many butchers on site anymore. Luckily I was able to find a Halal butcher in Paterson, NJ, a nearby town which has a large Middle Eastern population. They don't speak English too well, but I showed them a photo of tallow and they pretty much understood. One trip to their store gives me enough tallow for the whole year. They didn't even want to take any money for it the first time, but I insisted on giving them something for their efforts. Now I bring them soap I make with their tallow and we kind of have an informal barter going. One essential part is that they're willing to run the tallow through the meat grinder, which makes it MUCH easier to melt (you can see it looks like white hamburger meat with chunks of actual beef). Tallow is the fat that surrounds the kidney, technically. I don't know what they give me but it works great.

Photo #2:
Fill a large stockpot about 2/3 of the way with the ground tallow and add enough water to cover. I also add small amounts of baking soda and white vinegar to help whiten the tallow and get rid of the "beefy" smell. The key is to add these things BEFORE you start heating the water / fat, if you add them later it will volcano on you and you will have a mess. Turn the head on mid-medium high and wait for the magic to happen.

Photo #3:
The fat will completely melt and mix with the water. The little bits of beef that were in the mixture will cook and turn the color of cooked hamburger. Before I did this people described the rendering process as really gross and smelly, but if you like the smell of a roast in the oven, you will like the rendering process as it smells the same. It is messy, however, because of all the grease and fat. But the finished product is well worth it. I always do this in the winter, for reasons that will become clear in the next step.

Photo #4:
Anyone who has made chicken broth from scratch knows exactly what is going on here. When the tallow has completely melted, pour the hot liquid (be very careful) through a strainer to strain out the cooked beef and other impurities. At this point the fat will be mixed with the water and they will need to separate. You can see that I use a really large plastic container for this.

Photo #5:
I live in a condo and I pour the mixture out on my deck, in the winter. The cold weather will help the fat to separate from the water. Leave it in the elements for several hours, or ideally, overnight.

Post #2 has all the rest...can only post 5 photos here...

Jim
 
Photo #6:
You can collect all the meaty bits in a bag. I throw them out but I hear some people save them for bird feeders, etc.

Photo #7:
This is the tallow mixture after it's spent all night in the cold. You can see the beautiful white disk of fat which has formed. This is another point where you want to be careful. You know have the tallow (which you want) on top of a nasty gelatin / water / detritus mixture (which you don't want). You can cut the tallow free, but in a tallow rendering of this size I just find it easier to invert the plastic container over the sink and gently push on the bottom of the container. When the seal breaks, the junk will flow out and you can hang onto the tallow. Be careful though, because the bad stuff can flow out quite forcefully, splashing up and creating a mess.


Photo #8:
The tallow stands alone.

Photo #9:
At this point I re-render my beautiful disks of tallow. Put the fat back in the stockpot and add some more vinegar and baking soda. Do not add water this time, and heat it over low heat. Once it's melted you should have pure fat. Pour it through a strainer again and into containers. From that point on, it's ready to use.

I hope you enjoyed my process...Viva La Tallow and Merry Christmas!

Jim
 
Utterly amazing. Congratulations and thank you for sharing this. O.K.,now what's the next step to the finest shaving soap?? (Please don't plug in a link to D. R. Harris.)
 
Render my OWN tallow...I'm getting images of Tyler Durden in "Fight Club", which got me into soapmaking in the first place...

As for what to do with it after you've rendered it, now you're asking me to reveal the real trade secrets!

Suffice to say that if you want to get into making bar soap with tallow, it's a reasonable process that you can learn about via books or good websites like www.soapdishforum.com

As for shaving soap with tallow (and tallow makes the best shaving soap), it's a bit more complicated b/c in order for the lather not to collapse you have to use copious amounts of stearic acid, and therefore you have to "hot process" the soap over a double boiler. Not impossible certainly, but it takes a bit of practice.

If you search my old posts I posted a shaving soap recipe last year which works pretty well if you want to give it a try. It is a lot of fun, and once people realize you make your own soap you'll have a lot of new friends. It's a great hobby!
 
That was a great post! The more knowledge than can be shared about ingredients in products, the better.
Sue
 
Very cool. Didn't realize it was that easy actually...I had always assumed there was some kind of complicated alchemy and pagan incantations involved. :thumbup1:
 
I have recently been trying to do this. I have had extremely limited success. My local butcher refused to grind it for me so I had large pieces of fat. After 2 hours of heating with water and a little salt the best I got was 2mm of tallow on top of the cold water.
Am I asking for the wrong stuff? or does grinding it make that much of a difference? I shaved it thin as I could (some of it was crumbly like hard cheese) and pulled out a lot of "stuff" at the end.
 
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Great job!! Very well presented!! :thumbup1:
 
I have recently been trying to do this. I have had extremely limited success. My local butcher refused to grind it for me so I had large pieces of fat. After 2 hours of heating with water and a little salt the best I got was 2mm of tallow on top of the cold water.
Am I asking for the wrong stuff? or does grinding it make that much of a difference? I shaved it thin as I could (some of it was crumbly like hard cheese) and pulled out a lot of "stuff" at the end.

Part of it, I think, is the fat used. You don't want the kind of hard fat that you would trim from a steak, I suppose it might work but the softer fat is better. Before I found the Halal butcher I went to a supermarket and they gave me some left over fat and I had the same experience you did. Also I found that the grinder makes a huge difference. I've read in soapmaking books that you can use a Cuisinart or other food processor, but sometimes the fat is so tough that it can snap the blade. The meat grinder attachment on a KitchenAid mixer would probably work. If you can, it's best to keep looking for butchers until you find one who will grind it for you. If you give them a little extra $ for the effort it will be well worth it - good luck!
 
Photo #9:
At this point I re-render my beautiful disks of tallow. Put the fat back in the stockpot and add some more vinegar and baking soda. Do not add water this time, and heat it over low heat. Once it's melted you should have pure fat. Pour it through a strainer again and into containers. From that point on, it's ready to use.
Great photographic tutorial. But I must remark about the above: adding these two together will not do anything worthwhile. The acid in the vinegar just reacts with the base in the baking soda before they can help purify the fat. You don't want to overdo on the soda lest the saponification begins early (although you'd need a pretty large amount of soda). The few other tallow rendering recipes I've been able to find all make use of salt (1 tbsp per pound of fat or thereabouts). Ideally, you'd want a safe chemical or enzyme to hydrolyse any remaining protein. Such products are usually extracted from bacteria and can be bought on-line; I don't think fresh kiwi pulp or fresh pineapple juice—which I'd use in day-to-day cooking—are worthy alternatives. They give the tallow a flavour, of course, and the enzymes these fruits contain are inactivated by heat—which you must supply in order to melt the tallow in the first place. Now most enzymes are destroyed by heat, but those you purchase can be tailored for a specific temperature and are thus perhaps more resillient.
 
Thanks for an excellent tutorial. Much appreciated. I followed it to the letter and achieved extremely gratifying results.
 
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