Alaska Cabin Life - Rendering Beef Tallow - SHELF STABLE and STINK-FREE

hey there welcome back to Flat Tire Farm we're an African Alaskan Homestead and today I'm going to teach you how to render down beef fat into Pure White Tallow that doesn't smell like a dead cow now I will warn you this video is a little longer than usual and that's because I really wanted to give you lots of detailed instructions on how to do this process completely if you get bored out of your mind listening to me I did put chapters in the video so that you can just forward ahead and Skip ahead to whatever chapter you're interested in next if you can hear the tractor in the background I apologize Mr riva's out there moving the snow today but on with the show today we're going to start the process of rendering down this 40 pound case of beef fat into Tallow now we get fat for free we find people that are butchering cows or butchering pigs um and don't want the fat usually if they're butchering more than one or two animals they have more than they could ever use and so they're happy to give it to us and we're happy to take it and use it now I'll render down this beef Tallow and use it um sometimes I use it for cooking but this case specifically I'm going to use for making soap but just so you know there's multiple uses for a beef Tallow you can grease your leather belt with it if you really want to I guess but I've made beef Tallow and rendered down pork lard lots of times and I've used lots of different methods but I want to show you the one that I found to be the easiest that makes sense and creates the most clean product because for me I don't want it to smell like the animal that started out being all right the first thing we have to do is tackle this fat you can see some of these pieces are really meaty um and I am very fortunate and then I have a lot of resources for fat so I don't have to clean all this meat off here I can just say you know that's probably a piece that I'm going to feed to the pigs or give to our musher friends to grind up and feed to their dogs I get to be kind of picky if I didn't have places for that for the fat to go or I didn't have lots of resources to get fat I could cut all those little tiny meat pieces off um and then throw only the white fat into my pan that I'm going to render it down in so this is some nice fat it has tiny little bits of shards of meat in it I'm going to take that and throw this as my pig bucket if you were wondering um it's just where I'm going to put all the extra meat pieces that I'm not going to render down because you don't want those meat pieces in your rendered down product if you don't want it to taste like cooked beef and it will taste and smell like cooked beef okay and then I just chop these pieces up now we live off grid um and we could use a meat grinder if we wanted to but number one that's a lot of dishes when I have to haul water and don't have a water heater and two I don't want to use the power that it takes to run a grinder so I just chop it up and throw it in the pan there's like a big old weird chunk I don't want that that can go to mushing dogs or to pigs there's some membrane stuff I don't want that I'll just chop it up maybe into no bigger than one inch cubes now I'm kind of the quick fast and get it done kind of lady and you could surely spend a lot of time picking through all this and cutting it into little teeny tiny pieces um but we're not going to do that for this video we're just gonna get it done so let me get all this chippy chopped up and put in my pan and then I'll meet you back in a little bit I'll show you the next step [Music] okay we got one big stock pot full and we've made it through about a third of this box there's a couple hints that I have for you um they're helpful when you're processing either beef fat or pork fat is to keep it frozen so this case sits outside in our conics it's winter time in Alaska so everything stays Frozen so I've made it through a third of this box the top hit that a little bit because I brought it in earlier today and the rest of it now is still Rock Solid Frozen and so I'll have to wait for this to thaw a little bit more before I can keep processing it um you wanted about 50 50 thawed and Frozen it's easier to handle it cuts nice and it doesn't get slippery okay aside from that I usually cover my cutting surface with newspaper and then put my cutting board down because the Frozen fat will flake off and make a big mess that I forgot to put newspaper down so I'll have to clean that up before we keep going and also you'll see I had gloves on earlier and an apron I don't always wear an apron when I cook but what I do when I do I'm fat because it gets everywhere but when I'm using when I'm cutting the fat I have one hand one gloved hand that I'm using to grab the fat and the other one holds my knife if I used both hands to grab the fat and the fat sticks all over the gloves it would get all over the handle of my knife and then as my hand warms up the fat the handle of my knife would become very slippery and very dangerous and so I do my very best to keep one really clean hand and then one hand that's for fat moving but let me get this cleaned up and then I'll show you the next step okay we're all cleaned up now now this is the part where people usually differ in terms of how to process the fat there's always to add water or not to add water and I really used to be a don't add water kind of a lady because the goal is that your end product doesn't have water in it otherwise it makes the facto rancid and it spoils over time and it's much more self-stable if doesn't have any liquid in it so it made sense to me don't add the water however I don't know what you learned in like fourth grade physical science class but oil and water don't mix and so I can add this water in now this is I don't know maybe three quarters of a gallon of water and when it is when the fat becomes liquid then it will float to the top and the water stays to the bottom and you can pour the oil or the fat off fairly easily without getting any water into it and so once I thought about that that made this so much of an easier process for me because I don't like the long cooking time that it took to make sure all the liquid came out if I did Add Water so we add a bunch of water it doesn't matter how much just it has to be a lot like this is a big stock pot and I added three three quarters of a gallon of water and I'm gonna add I don't know five or six tablespoons of salt and that'll help purify it this is just some Redmond's livestock salt that we grind up and use as people salt I'll link the video at the end for that if you're interested in why in the world would we do that okay we have our salt and water in there and that is going to help capture all the impurities all the impurities are going to get stuck in that salt water and then the liquid Fat's gonna float to the top so now we just have to have a heating Source now we live off-grid and wood stove is our main source of heat and we're going to use that for heating this this fat up I could use our propane stove if I wanted but why would I pay for protein propane when the wood stove's already cooking away and I can use the heat for free if you didn't have a wood stove and you didn't live off grid you could use your regular stove doesn't really have to be on a super low heat like you do if you don't add water because nothing's going to score to the bottom because you have all the water as your buffer in this and that's the other thing I really like about this is I don't have to monitor the temperature because all that water creates the safety buffer for my fat not burning you can also put it in a crock pot if you wanted whatever heat Source you have will work just fine but we're going to use the wood stove because that's what we got okay now the easy part we've got our pot on a heat source that water is going to warm up it's going to heat up that fat that Fat's gonna liquefy and all the connective tissue or little bits of meat that I might have left in there are going to stay connected and over time it's going to float to the top and periodically we'll check in I'll show you what it looks like and I'll tell you how long it's been but this whole entire rendering down Tallow process is going to take us a couple of days okay it's only been an hour but you can see the liquid level is coming up over the fat now be a couple more hours and then we'll check in again okay we're at four hours but it's getting pretty late for us so we're gonna put this trivet underneath this pan and that way it'll slow down for a while and then it'll stay warm until we get going in the morning again well good morning everybody let me show you where we're at okay you can see there's lots of liquid in there these little fat chunks are flippity floppity and trying to break down a little bit now I was comfortable leaving this on the wood stove overnight because I have this trivet underneath it which keeps it up off the wood stove and it can't boil it can't even simmer it just stays warm if you weren't comfortable leaving it on your heat Source like I probably wouldn't leave it on my stove top overnight I probably would leave it in a crock pot overnight but if you weren't comfortable doing that you could just take it off let it cool put it in the fridge or we live in Alaska so you can put it outside um and then start it again in the morning now for me this whole process is going to take about 24 hours of rendering it down um but the the time is going to differ depending on your heating source and how high you have it or how low you have it if you stop in the middle and cool it down like we talked about and start again but when we get to the point that I'm ready to pull all these chunks out that's the point that really matters however long it takes to get to that point that's how long it takes to render down fat so this evening we'll uh stop and take a look at it and if it's ready we'll pull all those chunks out and I'll show you the next step okay it's been exactly 25 and a half hours since we started this project so let me show you where we're at okay you can see that the little fat cubes have gotten much smaller okay and they're starting to sink down a little bit now some people will render this down until all these little pieces get hard I don't like to do that because I feel like it imparts way too much beef flavor and in all reality I don't have enough patience for that so at this stage we're going to start pulling these fat gloves out and so I'll see you in the kitchen in just a second okay now for the least fun and potentially very messy part of the day we're going to take all of these little fat globules all these little flippity floppity chunks that are left and start straining them out now I just use this little fry spoon thing first at the beginning to get all of the big chunks out and get the majority of it out so when I get most of this cleaned out I'll see you back okay now that I got most of those little fat particles out I'm gonna use this mesh strainer to get out the last little bit this is why I use that fry spatula thing first because it lets the liquid fall through where when I use the mesh strainer I have to wait a little bit for all that liquid to come out and I often have to swirl it around to get all the liquid to contact the mesh edges okay we have one last step of straining all the bits out and you got to be really careful because this is really hot I have a stainless steel bowl and I put my little mesh strainer in there and I'm going to pour what's left of this through the strainer and all the liquid will go into the bowl and hopefully all of what's left will go into the strainer and not fall in we'll see wish me luck there we go okay we didn't die so that's good okay so now we'll take our little um mesh strainer and jiggle it around and get the rest of that liquid through the strainer and into the bowl because all that fat sits on the edge of the mesh and it kind of blocks the liquid from going through so just like we did when we strained it out of the pan we'll jiggle it around and let all that liquid come out okay now we have all of our liquid fat and remember that salt and water is in this bowl too and all the parts we don't want are in our bucket and now all we're going to do is cool this down and as it cools the Fat's gonna come to the top and solidify and the water the salt in lots of little gooey Gunk is going to be in the bottom of our Bowl so I'm going to just stick this outside to let it cool but you might stick it in the fridge and then I'll bring you back and we'll show you what it looks like and that is my favorite part foreign well it was about 12 degrees when we put this bowl outside last night and it's about negative two right now so we actually had to bring this bowl in and thaw it out but I want to bring you up close so you can see what it looks like okay here's our Tallow you can see it's all white and hard and the reason I put it in this bowl is because you can kind of flex the edges and that lets this Tallow separate very easily away from the bowl but that's the underside of it look you can see all that schmoo in the bottom that's all the impurities it's brown and goopy it's a little bit actually like bone broth it has some gelatin in it from breaking those tendons down all right back to the table now I like putting the liquid in a bowl like this in order to cool it because this Tallow gets really hard and I did once try to cool it in a stock pot but then it's like stuck solid in there and if I use the bowl I can kind of push the edges a little bit and let it flex and that'll give me the room to pop that thing out if you do it in a stock pot and you let it cool in a stockpot you're gonna have to Chisel it out with a knife and then you get the goo everywhere and it's not that fun so there you go but here's our beautiful hard tallow that's so cool okay you might be able to see little dark spots and impurities that are still in this um Tallow but that's because we're not done getting all the gunk out of it yet so the next step is you can see I got smart put my newspaper down this time is to just scrape this goopy stuff off foreign that this isn't smooth and they're still brown stuff embedded in this so we got to scrape it all off now you can use a flat knife for this and just kind of chisel it off if you want but I like to use this serrated knife so I can kind of saw it down we're just going to cut all of that um textured stuff off until we get down to nice smooth Tallow all right now we'll just take some paper towels and you can kind of wipe all that schmoo off the edges this had a little well of schmoo in the middle so I kind of dug that out but it doesn't have to be perfect just yet because we're not done okay but we did a pretty good job get most of that stuff off of here I'll bring you up close and show you all right you can see we got most of it off there's a little bit left right there but I'm not going to worry about it because we're still going to process it again okay now you just have to chop it up in pieces that'll fit in a pan this pan is pretty big that I have so I think if I just break it in half maybe don't Karate Chop on television huh well you can crunch up if it works don't cut each other it doesn't work now all we have to do is hack it up in pieces that'll fit in this stock pot I think we just need a couple pieces for this stockpot because it's pretty big foreign there we go give me just a sec to clean this up and I'll show you the next step okay remember I had the rest of that box to still process so this is the rest that I've already I'm rendered down the first time just like this one so we'll just get them done at the same time now and we kind of just do the same process you're essentially rinsing the fat so I'm just gonna put maybe half a gallon of water in each one of these now because as soon as this melts down all that water needs to do is just pull the impurities out pull everything out that's not pure fat we're going to put salt in it again same amount five to six tablespoons we'll put it back on the heat source and this time we don't have to let it render down forever and ever and 25 and a half hours we just have to let it get hot so maybe an hour on the wood stove so let me get that going and then I'm gonna meet you back when all this is liquefied again okay okay these are completely liquefied now this one has a little bit of chunky stuff on the top just some tiny bits and pieces so I'm gonna help it out just get that stuff off of there so he's just a little bit but rather get it off now than deal with it later okay we got those skimmed off the top and now we just dump them back in the bowl and get them to cool down again I want to clarify what I was talking about when I was talking about it doesn't matter how much water you put in it in reality it does matter but only a little bit the amount of water that you put in there you just have to put enough in there so that it's not gonna boil off as you're cooking so that when you're done cooking it down or you're done rendering it down or warming it back up that there's still water in the bottom so you wouldn't want to put so little water in there than when you're rendering it down it all Burns off because then you're defeating the purpose and your Fat's gonna burn so it does matter how much water you put in there just put enough in that it isn't going to boil out okay and we're gonna chance it here and see if we can get both of these pans of fat in this one bowl we'll see oh my gosh I can't believe that worked okay so then we let it cool again and then what we'll do is we'll pop that fat out of the bowl again and we'll check and see how clear the water is and basically we just keep doing this process until the water in the bottom is clear and there's no more Schmutz to scrape out I always do this at least twice but often three or four times depending on what I'm using the fat for if I'm using the Tallow for soap or skin products I'm going to clarify it lots of times but if I'm just using it for cooking like cooking eggs or biscuits or whatever then I'm just maybe gonna do it two times so I'll meet you back when this cools and we'll check and look at the clarity of the water and see if we need to render it again okay so now we're back we've rendered down fat we have clarified it once and this is the second clarification so let's see how dirty the water is this time look at that and die see that this water is definitely better than the first clarification it's not gelatinous anymore which means we've pulled out all of that gelatin from rendering down those tendons and tissue and you can see it's a little bit clearer but still pretty murky now if you are going to use this Tallow for cooking um you could probably skip ahead in the video to the final process chapter but because I'm going to use this for soap I'm going to clarify it at least one and probably two more times so if you can see here I'll lift this going he's pretty heavy there's just one little spot now of brown goo bits and parts left so we're getting it clarified more and more and we'll do just like we did on the last one we just scrape that stuff out of there until the Tallow is nice and clean again we'll wipe off the edges we're gonna be a little bit more picky when we clean it up this time I scraped off a lot more of the bottom I got all the little chunks off I'm gonna make sure I get everything wiped off the edge make sure I don't see any impurities left on this Tallow block and then we're going to put it back in the stock pot and do exactly what we did before [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] well the water's getting clear looks like I need to clarify it one more time okay I think we're finally gonna get to the last step now we've rendered down raw fat we've clarified it four times and so let's see what it looks like after the fourth clarification okay this water is pretty clean now look at that yay and we just have a tiny little spot on there okay the time has finally come we have finally made it to the last step okay I scraped that little bit of Schmutz that was on there that little tiny size of a quarter that was on there and I scraped off the entire bottom just a very fine layer of it to get all the last little tiny bits of fine pieces of yuck that still may have been in this tallow okay so we're just gonna split it open our last step here is to just get the water out of it now now we could put this in the pot and cook it down forever and a day and have Tallow that tastes like burnt old beef or we could use our fourth grade science that we talked about earlier and know that when this fat becomes a liquid it won't mix with the water and they'll separate we're just going to put a little bit of water in there stick it back on the stove and all we have to do is heat it up so it liquefies and then I'll bring you back okay we have our talawal liquefied now nice and warmed up any water that was trapped in that solid Tallow has now been able to separate from the liquid fat and go to the bottom as well as a little bit of water that we added so now we're going to pour this into a clear measuring cup or any clear container you can use so that we can see what is oil and what is water and that will help us make sure we don't get any water in the vessels that we want to store what we do now is we just let it sit for a moment give it a minute or so and the water and the oil should separate if there's any water in this so I'll show you that up close okay we've let it sit for just a minute now and you can see that the oils on the top and the water's at the bottom now this water line is really helpful for us it shows us where the oil is and where the water is and remember we don't want to get any water in our long-term storage vessels for this tallow so all we have to do is pour and watch the water line and make sure that the water doesn't go in there now you can see that as we're pouring the water kind of settles into the bottom of the measuring cup so as long as you're really watching you won't have any problems then when it gets really close to the spout I'm going to stop and I can pour this off into another vessel see there's just a little bit left in there and if I wanted to be brave I could get a little bit more out but I don't want to get any water in this towel that I'm going to make for soap because I wanted to store long term downstairs when I get to the tiny little bit of oil and water that I'm not sure how to separate out I'll pour it into another vessel and I'll deal with that in a little bit and then we just go again we'll let it sit for a minute wait till it separates pour off the oil dump the water in tiny bit of oil into that other vessel and then I'll meet you back when all of this gets separated okay looks like we're getting close to the end here I have just this last little bit left in my I'm not brave enough vessel here I'll stick this in the fridge when the top solidifies I'll just take that little that little puck of fat out and Tallow and I'll use that for cooking in the next week or so foreign into hard beautiful white Tallow okay here it is all beautiful and hard and ready to store you can see there's no water in the bottom we did good a couple of tidbits here at the end that you might have been concerned about you might have been concerned that the salt gets stuck in the fat and if you're gonna make soap or cook or use it for face products that you're going to end up with salt in it and that's not the case the salt actually stays suspended in the water and as long as you don't get any water in your final vessel that you're pouring into no salt will be in your Tallow and also remember on that last round we just added plain water and we didn't add any salt in terms of yield as in how much did we get we started with a 36 pound box of raw beef fat remember in the beginning we cut out all the funky chunky bits of beef and weird membranes and stuff and we got rid of all that at the beginning and that probably was about 10 pounds of stuff that we filtered out right away and then as we rendered it down there was still connective tissue and all those ooey gooey bits that we got out and so in the end the final product the amount of solid pure Tallow that we ended up with which was about 12 pounds so that's not too bad for free and free in terms of storage as long as you make sure you didn't get any water in here this towel is going to last you a really long time if you are concerned that maybe you did get water in there or you're not really comfortable with leaving something like this on the Shelf um without Refrigeration you can put it in your fridge it'll last you like forever and a day but I keep this Tallow and lard that I've rendered downstairs in our pantry that stays about 50 degrees most of the time and I don't have any problems with it I have some lard that's at least two years old that is still perfectly beautiful is the day we processed it if you have any comments or questions because I missed something in this very very long video that I tried to cover everything imaginable leave it in the comments below and I will make sure to get back with you on that thanks for toughing it out with me till the end we appreciate all your support here at flat tire Farms stay tuned for the next video guys

Channel: Flat Tire Farm - Homesteading Alaska

Views: 17,156

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Id: Ifbtr0hXqy0

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023