Suet/Tallow: Preparing/Rendering, Storing, Using

[glennbech]

I bought a tenderloin cut at my butcher today that was boneless but contained a lot of fat. After trimming, I rendered the fat like I use to do with duck fat.

I did this by putting the the suet in a large pan, covered it and put it in the oven at 120-130 c for an hour or two. I then strained the fat. Im not sure if this is the right process for beef fat. I read up on the subject AFTER doing it (typical!), and most pages I found suggesting boiling the fat with water and salt...

Now... Im not quite sure what I need this fat for. I guess it was the "never waste anything", instinct that kicked in. I know I can use this fat for soap, birdfood and for cadndles...

But, How about cooking ? Maybe a beef confit ? Any Ideas ? Recipies ? It looks and smells awsome .-)

Edited June 5, 2006 by glennbech (log)

[Torrilin]

Fried potatoes. French fries. Yorkshire pudding. Anything you'd use duck fat for. Anything you'd use bacon fat for. You get the idea I'm sure . If it's creamy white you got it rendered right. It's fabulous stuff to have on hand.

Emily

[Kerry Beal]

I recall the early days of McDonalds fries when I'm sure they used tallow to fry them. Great fries.

[HKDave]

Emily beat me to it... Yorkshire pudding, Christmas pudding, frying spuds. It's also great for browning beef for stews and roasts.

[glennbech]

Kerry; You're right. They used ~ 95% Tallow and 5% Cottonseed oil.

Im sure they were great fries.

I know I can use duck fat for as long as many times I like, if it never goes over 160 degrees c, does the same go for tallow?

[Torrilin]

Not sure. I have limited storage space, so I only have tallow on hand if we do slow roasted beef short ribs (rub with salt and mustard powder and perhaps some pepper, roast in the oven at 200F until falling off the bone tender). Have you tried consulting a suitably old edition of The Joy of Cooking? They're very good on food safety and flavor concerns with unusual to us ingredients. Generally fat can be reused, but some ingredients may add an off flavor to the fat, and the temperature where it goes "off" may vary.

Emily

[Dejah]

English friends tell me that the best fish'n'chips is deep fried in beef fat.

I just picked up 5 lbs from Soby's - for free.

Now, how do I render this?

[Peter the eater]

English friends tell me that the best fish'n'chips is deep fried in beef fat.

I just picked up 5 lbs from Soby's - for free.

Now, how do I render this?

←

Mmmm . . . free beef fat . . . we're not talking about shoplifting are we? <smarmy smile emoticon>

Does it look like suet, all pelletized, or is a big sack of big white waxy chunks complete with membranes and other tissues?

I didn't know you had Sobey's in Manitoba, I'm a big fan.

[Marlene]

I render beef fat all the time. It will take quite a while though so be prepared. Over as low a heat as you can get, put the fat in a large pot. If you are using a gas stove, you may need a flame tamer over the burner at some point. Once it melts, it will bubble and spit quite a bit. When the bubbling and spitting stop, you've rendered out all the water. If you've got fat that's got membranes and stuff on it, you'll want to strain it through cheesecloth at the end, and you're good to go.

I store mine in a mason jar in the fridge. You've got 5 pounds so you may get a couple of mason jars out of that, so you can store one in the freezer.

[Dejah]

Thanks, Peter and Marlene.

The fat I got was trimmed from other cuts they prepared. It's mainly long pieces from steaks, etc - solid white waxy fat. There doesn't seem to be any membranes, meat or anything else on them.

From google, some instructions said to dice the fat first. Is that necessary, or can I just stack them into a big heavy pot?

Our former IGA stores were changed to Soby's. I like their meat, and always watch for their Sterling Silver sales. A couple months ago, they had a sale on prime rib. I ordered a 6 rib one, several 2 ribs, and single rib. Enjoyed the 6 rib last Sunday, and the single ribs are perfect for the kids cooking away from home.

Last week was T-bones on for 4.99/lb. Good eats!

[Marlene]

I never bother to dice it first, but like chopping chocolate, a dice will help it melt faster.

I use my beef fat for all kinds of things, not just fries. I'll use it for yorkies when I don't have enough drippings, melt some to roast potatoes in, and I always add a bit to my roasting pan when roasting a prime rib and potatoes together!

[Dejah]

Yorkies is the other reason I wanted the fat.

There never seems to be enough from the roasts.

[Dejah]

It took me 8 hours to render five pounds of beef fat. The crispy bits were very tasty, so I dump them before I was tempted to make myself sick.

Then I used my old restaurant batter recipe and did up some cod, shrimp, zuchinni, carrots, and cauliflower. I wish I had some broccoli florets as they make the best battered vegetable. The flavour from the beef fat took me back to the fish'n'chips we enjoyed at Whitby on the North Sea coast!

The fat was cooled, poured into quart jars and into the fridge. I think I'll have to do up a roast and yorkshire puddings soon!

[Mjx]

How do you get rid of the water, when you render suet in it?

 

I've rendered suet on several occasions, and have always simply tossed it into a pan over very low heat, and let it do its thing.

 

Yesterday, I got a fresh clump from the slaughterhouse. When they asked how much I wanted, I said about 200g would do nicely. The butcher strolled in from the lot with a roughly 5kg/10lb bag (no idea how much, because it was too heavy to weigh). Apart from the thrill of lugging home a gigantic bag of warm, bloody fat on public transit (because of course I did), I kind of wondered what the hell I'd render this in.

 

 

When I got home, I chucked the bag in the freezer, because I just didn't want to handle that much slithering gloop, and a firm clump would be easier to work with.

 

 I hauled the fat out this morning (and attempted to weigh it, but it was too heavy for the scale to register). It had set up kind of pointily, settling into the corners of the plastic bag. I managed to cram it into the largest pot here, but between the size, the shape, and the fact that it was rock hard so I couldn't really trim it, only one pointed bit ended up in contact with the bottom of the pot.

 

 

 

A couple of years back there was a discussion of rendering suet in boiling water, so I boiled some water, and poured that in, to speed things up a little.

 

After six hours of this, the fat has reached this stage:

 

 

Now I'm wondering, how do you dry the fat completely? Do you just boil off the water?

[Okanagancook]

Yup, keep simmering.  It looks like it has a ways to go yet because there are still lumps of fat and the remnants are not brown.  If you can get in there an break some of the larger pieces up the rendering will go a lot faster.

[andiesenji]

regular beef FAT (as opposed to real suet or kidney suet) renders more easily when ground coarsely. 

 

I grind it with a meat grinder and pack it into 2 - 3 pound portions and keep in the freezer.

 

I render it in the oven, in a deep roasting pan or French or Dutch oven starting with enough water to cover the bottom of the roaster by 1/2 to 1 inch  and the roaster goes into the cold oven and I set the temp for 250°F. and the timer for two hours to start with. 

At the end of that time I stir and turn the fat solids and add more water if necessary and put it back for another two hours. 

 

At this point I draw off most of the liquid into a deep bowl and leave it to cool - add some more water to the roasting pan and put it back in the oven for another hour or so -  to get the last of the fat. 

 

After the first batch of fat has cooled, the bowl goes into the fridge so the fat will solidify and it can then be easily separated from any water in the bottom of the bowl. 

 

Kidney suet should also be rendered in water and can be rendered on the stove top over very low heat, but I prefer the oven method and at a lower temp, 200 to 225 at most.  I just break it into chunks and chop till it looks about pea-sized. 

 

You can also use a Crockpot or slow cooker.  There are distinct advantage to this because you don't really have to watch it.

There are a couple of blogs that discuss this in detail.  I will try to find the most recent entry that has some excellent advice.

Edited November 4, 2014 by andiesenji (log)

[JoNorvelleWalker]

I've used the MC method quite successfully for rendering lard, and if I had suet to render I would do it the same way.  Though I confess the thought of ten pounds of it gives me pause.

[Mjx]

Thanks, guys.

 

This is what went down: By midnight last night, the pot was full of a blend of melted fat and small, unmelted lumps, and I was a wreck. With no defined end in sight, it seemed likely that I'd melt down before the rest of the fat did, so I decided to just work with what was there, and with a combination of a retired tea towel, the colander insert to that pasta pot, and a food mill, ran the whole load into various containers.

 

I ended up with 3210g/7lbs of rendered suet, and a lot of mess and waste (clumps of blood vessels and connective tissue; I'd picked out the adrenal glands earlier on):

 

 

(The small portion in baking paper is 200g, the amount I wanted when I marched myself into the slaughterhouse the other day; if I were to use all this suet for the annual plum pudding only, I'd be set for the next 16 years.)

 

I don't have a sous vide cooker, since there are too few things it'd be used for to make it worh while, but in the small hours of this morning, I really felt I could've used one.

 

Freezing this first was a tactical error; I should have just put it in the refrigerator, so I could've carved it up into smaller portions, and perhaps even not rendered it all in one go.

[Deryn]

You could start a mincemeat factory?

 

Glad you got your 200 grams and thank you for the ride along with you as you rendered it.

[Beebs]

Oh dear, Mjx....your photo of that blobby mess of frozen fat rearing up out of your stock pot made me laugh so hard!

 

Looking forward to seeing what you'll do with 3kg of rendered fat!

[Martin Fisher]

If you happen to have a pressure cooker, that's the way to go.

[KiroKiro]

I started experimenting with recipes that require suet.

I need a meat grinder to run the fat through and get rid of the connective tissue; I will use the appliance mostly for this purpouse.

Which features should It have? Kidney fat has a hard consistency: minimum power suggested?

 

Thank you

 

K.

[Shel_B]

Berkeley's Local Butcher is promoting the use of tallow for cooking (and for cosmetic use, too).

 

 

I've cooked a fair amount with animal fat, especially lard, chicken, and duck fat, but I've never cooked with beef fat.  I've even rendered my own lard. I can see roasting or frying potatoes using beef fat, and imagine that a pan-fried steak or other beef dressed with the product would be very nice.  What else can be done with tallow?  

 

Any suggestions for rendering beef fat?  I don't eat much red meat, but a few times a year I'll make some sort of beef stew, and often there's a fair amount of fat that's trimmed from the meat. It might be nice to use it. Is any beef fat OK to be rendered and used for cooking, or are there certain parts that are preferred for rendering?

[liuzhou]

Tallow is the fat of choice in Sichuan hotpots and other dishes. Strictly speaking, tallow is the rendered fat enclosing the kidneys. Unrendered it's suet. Not all beef fat is tallow. Not all tallow is beef. It can come from sheep. too.

Edited May 21 by liuzhou (log)

[KennethT]

Tallow is fantastic for making french fries.  In the old days, back when McDonald's was known for their french fries, they were fried in tallow.  There was a marked quality decrease once they changed it to vegetable oil.