How to Render and Purify Tallow | ODORLESS, WHITE, WET METHOD | Bumblebee Apothecary

everyone its Marissa with bumblebee apothecary welcome back to my channel today I'd like to do a highly requested video on my updated method of rendering and purifying tallow so this will be the ultimate guide to how to render tallow as well as how to purify it so that it is white and odorless and ready for whatever you want to make it into or use it for [Music] my original video on how to render tallow in a crock-pot is one of my most popular videos and that method is still really great for if you just need a quick and easy way to render some tallow for some cooking and things like that so there's nothing wrong with it this just takes everything a little step further and renders using the wet method it helps eliminate any type of beef smell and prevents burning of the tallow when it's rendering so it's like a higher quality way to render tallow I still use a crock pot just because I find that gives me really even heat for rendering which I really like the finished aloe that you get by following this process as you can see is nice and white there is pretty much no beef smell at all it's just white and odorless and you can use it for cooking for candle making for soap making making it to skin care products like tallow balm lip balm SAVs different things like that and it's great sometimes when especially when you're using it for skin care products like tallow balm on your skin you definitely don't want any kind of a beef or meat smell so using this method for rendering for skin care products is definitely the way to go this is the method that I use when I render tallow to make my tallow bones lip balm SAVs and scrubs and all the things that I have in my shop I have other videos where I talk about the amazing health benefits of 100% grass-fed tallow as well as all the many many things that tallow can be used for so I'm not gonna go into that into detail here but on my blog bumble bee apothecary com which I'll link below you can check out a bunch of different blog posts that I have where I talk about lots of different recipes for tallow and all the amazing health benefits and nutrients that are in it let's also talk really quickly about the beef fat that you're going to be using the best beef fat is 100% grass-fed grass-finished beef fat the leaf fat that comes around the internal organs around the kidneys is the highest quality is the purest and it has the highest nutrient content so when you're sourcing beef fat to render into tallow you want to look for 100% grass-fed grass-finished and if possible the leaf fat from around those internal organs and kidneys if you can ask the butcher or wherever you get the beef fat from to grind it for you it will render a lot more quickly and a lot more evenly that way if you're not able to get it ground you can grind it yourself in a food processor as long as the fat is nice and cold or you can chop it up really finely well I personally do since the farms that I get my beef fat from don't always have their butchers grind it as I take it to a local meat processing place and I just ask them to grind my big amounts of it for me and they're happy to do that alright so enough talking about it let's jump in and start rendering some tallow first step after you have your tallow that's nicely ground is to go ahead and put it in your crock pot you can put it in there to fill it up and then we're gonna add a couple ingredients that helps to purify it and makes this be this wet rendering method so the first thing is some salt I don't really measure this to be honest I just put a handful or so in I would say two or three tablespoon for this big of a crock pot and then after that I'm gonna add some water I add quite a bit of water really again I don't measure part of the reason I add some cheese because I'm in a drier climate here and I feel like the water evaporates pretty quickly during this rendering process so I probably add a good eight cups of water or so if you're not in such a dry climate you can probably get away with less but the purpose of it is to keep that tallow from burning so just go ahead and add a good amount I would say at least a quart or so depending on the size of crock pot don't be afraid to add more and then the next step is to set our crock pot on low make sure it's plugged in and the rendering process will start you can see as it's starting to render some of the outside beef fat has already melted into liquid tallow and there's still a lot of raw beef fat yet to go here it is as it's been rendering for a little while longer it's getting close to being done but not quite it's a really good idea a few different times throughout the rendering process to go ahead and stir you can see that there's still plenty of chunks so more raw fat and this stirring just helps it render more evenly so that you don't have the outside rendering more quickly than the inside so as you can see it's been rendering for a while it looks pretty different from when we first put it in and from the early stages of rendering you can see that the chunks have settled to the bottom that those are the grisly bits that are left over and then the tallow that has rendered out has risen to the top so now it's ready for us to strain those grisly bits out so let's get started doing that so I have a metal strainer here lined with some organic fine woven cheesecloth and I'm gonna strain it through that you do want to keep in mind what type of container you strain the tallow into each time because you want it to be something that you can pop the tallow out easily so think about that what it's made out of and what the shape is I really like these metal mixing bowls because you they're a little bit flexible and they're a shape that the tallow can just be popped right out so that's what I like to use I'm just gonna start by labeling it a bit at a time through this cheesecloth and metal strainer and that will take out the grisly bits and then leave behind the nice hot hello as I'm getting towards the bottom of the crockpot here I'm starting to get more of the chunks and the grisly bits that are left over and so my strainer is going to be full those pretty soon so I'll have to stop and get rid of those but I'm also going to kind of press down in the strainer to kind of squeeze all of that nice of goodness out so that none is left behind because after all this is you know a little bit of work and you want to make sure you get the most tallow out of it and then when the strainer is pretty full of those bits I'm going to dump them into a bowl I have over here and then just continue until all of the tallow is drained through this cheesecloth and metal strainer this particular process for rendering includes that wet method like I talked about with the water and then there's also another additional step of purifying the tallow that I'm going to show you - it really makes a difference in helping it to be pure white and odorless and perfect for whatever you want to use it for so once I have all of the tallow strained through the cheesecloth and the metal strainer I'm going to put this entire bowl that contains the strained tallow and then obviously some of the water still in the refrigerator or another cool place to solidify it and then I'll show you the next step alright so after rendering the tallow has chilled and hardened and solidified and so we're going to take it out of this bowl now and go on to the purifying step ok so you can see the bottom of it is got a big discolored area that's the impurities that were pulled out that's what the salt does it actually pulls the impurities out into the water so they've all settled down here on the bottom and you can see that this water is kind of gelatinous it's kind of brownish colored lots of impurities and things have been pulled out all of those things in the other rendering method that just does it straight in the crock pot no purifying steps a dry method leaves all that mixed in to the towels you can see why that would also contribute to kind of a beef smell so what I'm going to do is scrape the bottom of this cake of tallow and you'll start to see that it's much lighter the main chunk of tallow is much lighter in color and that Brown stuff just scrapes right off and then we can set that aside you can feed that to birds and chickens and things like that so we just scrape until we see only the nice pure light color now what we're gonna do is just slice this into about four chunks into quarters and then we're gonna put it right back into the crock pot I cleaned the crock pot in between times so it's all nice and clean and then this is gonna be the purifying step so we'll put these chunks of tallow right into the crock pot and then we're going to repeat kind of a similar process to what we did before we're gonna add salt to again draw those impurities and the things that we don't want out of our nice pure tallow so same amount as before for this large of a crock pot I'm doing probably few tablespoons and then plenty of water for my climate anyway you're doing plenty of water you can again adjust depending on your climate and how much tallow you're actually rendering and then we're just going to put that on low this step takes quite a bit less time than the first rendering step does we're going to bring it to kind of a simmer and let that simmer for about an hour and then once that has gone for about an hour at that simmering type of temperature then we're going to strain it again and then it should be ready to go all right the tallow has been purifying here for about an hour so now it's ready to strain a second time into a bowl so that it can solidify and be separated from the water again so I'm going to go ahead and strain again through my metal strainer lined with the fine mesh organic cotton cheesecloth taking both the melted tallow and the water from the crock pot together this straining step goes a whole lot faster since you don't have the gristle eat chunks to deal with it's just melted tallow and water [Music] okay now that that is all strained through into our Bowl we're going to put that into the refrigerator or somewhere cool to solidify again and then we'll pop it out and I'll show you the final steps so now that the tallow has been purified that second time it's time to pop it out of the bowl again so just kind of take it out and put it on my cutting board and you can see how it looks a lot different this time there's just a little bit of discoloration there that we're gonna get rid of and the water that came out of it it's not bad it's fairly clear so you can tell if there's not a whole lot to be taken out of it so I'm gonna do the same thing as before and just scrape wherever I see that kind of brown color and get rid of that and there is kind of a brownish tinge to everything across this entire surface so I'm just gonna do a light scraping of the entire surface on the bottom side of this cake of tallow and that will get rid of any of those impurities so just scraping down until I see the a white color so for me this is how many times I do it I do the first rendering step and then one purifying step and that usually works really well for me you can do it more times you can chunk it up put it back in the crock pot with more water some more salt and repeat the process again until the tallow is as pure as you like it but I find that to be really really pure just doing it those two times that's usually what I do the type of fat that you use to kind of determines how many times you need to process it if you're just using any beef fat then you might need pure if I it a few more times but if you're using nicely fat then it'll be pretty pure after the first time which is what I do so at this point you can just chunk it up into quarters or whatever amount you after that I like to melt it down using a double boiler like this glass picture inside a pan with a cloth and some hot water on the stovetop that's a nice gentle way of heating it down and then it's ready to go into storage containers now one thing that you will want to be careful of is that there's probably going to be a little bit of water left over from the process of purifying it and you don't want any of that water to go into your finished aloe because it could mold so thankfully the water is pretty easy to see it settles to the bottom there shouldn't be very much of it so just watch for that and try to let it settle and stay down there and don't get any of that water in your finished tallow storage container so we're just gonna fill up these jars here now for storing the tallow if you have a cool place like a basement that can be a good place to keep it for shorter term storage it can even be on your kitchen counter for a while for short term also as long as it's not too warm and if you have if you need to store it for longer I recommend refrigerating it or freezing it and it will last a long long time in the refrigerator or the freezer it's really quite stable as is at room temperature but if you need to keep it for a long long time then go ahead and put it in the refrigerator or even freezer so here I'm pouring some off now I'm going to be watching for that water I can see kind of a layer of it down there so I'm just going to be careful to pour only the top that is the actual tallow and not get any of that water if you're planning on using it for soap making you can also way out of the amounts that you need for your batches of soap that makes it really easy to just pull those out whenever you want to make soaps that's another thing you do otherwise it's ready to go and ready to use you can see how nice and white and pure it is of course depending on what breed of cattle your beef fat came from it might still have a little bit of a yellowish tinge but that's good there's nothing wrong with that there's pretty much no smell to it at all it's really really nice definitely the best way to render tallow I hope you enjoyed seeing that process and I hope that you give it a try if you do let me know what you make with your tallow and how it turns out I'd love to see pictures too so you can find bumblebee apothecary on Instagram I'll put a link below and you can take pictures of what you make and tag me so I can see I'm gonna link some links below to some other resources to some other related videos too some blog posts that have more recipes and what you can make with tallow I'm also going to link some of the equipment that I use and some sources in the description box so you can check those out I'm also going to put a link below to my Etsy shop where I have all the different things that I like to make with tallow available there if you want to check those out I also wanted to mention really quickly that on my blog I have a password-protected subscriber library where it has all of the ebooks that I've made all in one place there's printables also some checklists and printable product labels and all the different free goodies that I've made all in one place so I'm going to put a link below where you can sign up to get exclusive access to that subscriber library if you're interested alright if you liked this video give it a thumbs up share it with any fellow tallow lovers that you know if you're new to my channel please hit that subscribe button I make new videos every week on traditional health wisdom and living a sustainable DIY lifestyle thanks so much for watching see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Bumblebee Apothecary

Views: 615,929

Keywords: how to render and purify tallow, how to render tallow, tallow, beef tallow, rendering fat, how to render beef fat, how to render tallow from beef fat, how to render tallow for soap, how to render tallow for cooking, how to render beef fat for cooking, render beef tallow, rendering tallow, cooking, homesteading, purify tallow, how to purify tallow, soap making, candle making, render tallow, Reformation Acres, Glen & Friends Cooking, Bumblebee Apothecary

Id: M4UiZe4mjmg

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019