A friend of ours brought me some beef fat a couple months ago, so I could make tallow. I’ve been reading up on how to render it down to a liquid form, and then it’s usable for soaps and balms and things like that. I’d made a tallow balm before, with some pre-rendered tallow another friend got for me, and that turned out really nice.
This is how the fat looked when he brought it over. Kind of gross, huh?
So I chopped it down into smaller chunks. Next time, I will run it through my food processor. I didn’t want to deal with the clean-up this time so I skipped that step, but I think the tallow will turn out better if it’s ground first.
This is how it looked after it was all rendered down. I had a good quantity of fat so I went about 18 hours all together. I did some on a low heat on the stove top, and then after my husband got home and I needed the stove to make dinner, I moved my pot to the oven and finished the rendering process there.
Once it cooled, it looked like this. Pretty, yes? So far I’ve made a dozen bars of soap with the tallow from one jar, and six smaller jars of balm with a 2nd jar. With the 3rd, I will make more soap. It turned out wonderful, and I love how my face feels after I wash with it. I’ll do a separate post about that.
And that, my friends, is how I rendered tallow all by myself for the first time ever.
Have you ever rendered fat before?
Filed under: Tallow Tagged: Rendering, Tallow
