Tallow: what is it and how to render it using a slow cooker?

Tallow: what is it and how to render it

What is Tallow?

Tallow is the purified, rendered fat that comes from cows and sheep, it is often called suet which is the name for the nutrient-rich, hard fat that is found surrounding the animal's organs and major joints.  It is NOT the liquid fat you pour off the pan after browning your meat - that is muscle fat, and not the same thing.

I source my suet from local, pasture raised sheep and cows.  My reason for using pasture raised animals is that the suet is 'clean', by this I mean it does not contain antibiotics or growth hormones, something that can be found in factory-farmed or feedlot animals.  The drugs administered to these animals, in this high intensity farming gets stored in the animal's fat, which it not something I want to have in my products, which I will be applying to my skin.  So clean suet is the way to go.

How to render suet to make tallow

Suet needs to be rendered to remove all the impurities, connective tissues and any muscle, so that you have a pure finished product.  There are various ways to do this, I use the slow cooker method, as it means I do not have to stand over the pan stirring whilst I melt the fat.

I usually freeze the suet until I have enough to do a reasonable amount of tallow rendering, as the straining process can be a little messy.

I have a couple of slow cookers with metal inserts, rather than ceramic. I prefer these as I have had a couple of the ceramic inserts crack when rendering frozen suet, so metal is the way to go for this job.

I chop up the suet (still frozen) into smaller pieces and pack it into the slow cookers until they are full to the top, the suet will render down, so make sure you pack it in there. I then put the slow cookers on low for 6 hours and head off to do other jobs, like gardening 🪴or reading a good book 🕮😊.

I check the progress of my suet about every hour and push it down to make sure it is starting to melt.  The idea here is to melt the fat, not cook, so low and slow is the way to go, we do not want to burn the fat.  About four to five hours into the rendering process, I will start to see some liquid fat in the bottom of the slow cooker and the remaining solid fat will have gone from a solid white to a translucent white and will be soft and gelatinous.  I this point I use a stick blender to breakdown the remaining suet, so that I end up with a liquid.  I continue to render out for the last hour. You will notice that the solid protein matter will drop to the bottom and the liquid fat will be on top.  Once you reach this point, you are now ready to strain the soilds from your liquid fat.  I use a double layer of cloth in a metal sieve (do not use a plastic one, it will melt....yep, done that). You will end up with a lovely clear fat. 

    

From here I will weigh out the liquid fat into containers.  I use 500g, as my measurement as this is the amount of tallow I use in my soaps.  I allow the fat to solidify into tallow at room temperature.  Once solid I store in my refrigerator, as my climate here in SW Qld is hot.

  

The remaining solids is made up of protein from the connective tissue and muscle. I break this up and freeze.  I feed small portions of this to my chooks, especially when they are molting.

I hope this post helps?  

I learnt this process from Liz at Eight Acres Natural Living, and have found that this process gives me a lovely clean tallow, which makes great soap and other body products.

There are other methods out there which include adding salt and water in the rendering process.  I have tried this but did not like the end result and so I will stick with Liz's simple but perfect approach to rendering tallow.