Rendering Fat: How to Make Tallow, Lard, Schmaltz, and Ghee

1. Introduction: everyone. I'm allies with ancestor evolution, and today we're gonna talk about how to render fat. My husband. I run a small farm and we're passionate about teaching traditional skills for the modern world. Lard and tallow, where some of the most common fats you in the American homestead back in the day today, we're gonna teach you a little bit about how to render your thes fats are useful for so many things both in and outside the kitchen. So we're gonna be going over that as well. First, we're gonna talk about a little bit of terminology. What is tallow? How is tallow different from large? And what is the correct term for rendered bear fat? Next, we're gonna be taking a little bit of a dive into the chemistry That what makes a fat fat? What are the differences between fats? Why does it matter? How does that affect how these fats act in different situations? Next, witness stepping into the kitchen and actually rendering a batch of our own effect were also didn t talking about clarified butter and last but not least, be talking about how to use your fat both in and outside the kitchen and the best way to store your fat hope. You join us and take this class to be really interesting and a lot of fun. 2. Project and Materials: your project for this class is to render some of your own fat, pick an animal of your choice and get some fat, and we're gonna render it together. You could also choose to make clear five butter or ghee before we get started. There are a couple of things we're gonna need, first of all, its impact. This is, in fact, that I asked the butcher to say for me when we got half of a cow earlier this year. This comes from a local local farmer and a local cow. When the cow is being processed, I ask, just ask them to set aside the fact. So we've got quite a bit fat here. I think about six or £7 probably. You don't need this much, but if you have it, great. So pick some fat from an animal of your choice. Could be beef, lamb, pork, some kind of poultry were even better. Next, we're gonna need a cutting board and a sharp knife. You're gonna need a slow cooker now, once you get more comfortable with this whole process, you can do this on the stove or in the oven. But I think especially for beginners. The slow cooker is the easiest and most foolproof way to do it. So that's what we're gonna be mostly looking at today. You're also gonna want, like a slotted spoon or a wire basket spoon something like that that you can fish things out of your fat with and get your crack. Lin's out. Last but not least, you're gonna want a metal funnel and either a clean, thin woven cloth or some cheesecloth that you could put on top of it to help straighten it out. All right, I think that's it. Let's get started. 3. Terminology: So before we get into the nitty gritty of how to render fat, let's talk about some terminology what we mean when we say to render or something. So the verb to render, according to Miriam Webster, in the sense that we mean it means to extract by melting. This definition implies the application of heat. So we're applying heat to a fat, and we're extracting the fat by melting it. Their two main ways to render fat one is called wet rendering, and this is done in a base of water. The other is dry rendering. This is done without water, with only the fat. They're a couple of differences to these methods. The wet rendering generally results in a fat, which is more pure. It's a lighter in color. It has a little bit of a milder flavor, and it has a higher smoke point because it is more pure. The dry rendering method results in a fat that's a little bit less pure, a little bit darker in color. It's gonna have a little bit of a stronger flavor, a little bit meatier, a little bit more like the meat that it was rendered from, and it's gonna have, Ah, a slightly lower smoke point just because again, it does have some impurities in there. Tallow is the rendered fat from typically a cow or a sheep, and this will be designated beef tallow or mutton or lamb tallow. The term tallow is also used to designate the rendered fat from any angle. It and ungulates is a hoofed mammal, so this would be the rendered fat from, say, deer, moose, caribou, bison. Anything like that. The rendered fat would be tallow. What's lard most commonly referred to as the rendered fat from a pig. But it is also the correct term for the rendered fat from a rabbit or from a bear. The reason for that is the rendered fat from all these animals have similar qualities to them. Schmalz is the term for the rendered fat from poultry, so most commonly this is used in reference to chickens, ducks and geese. And what is G So G is a type of clarified butter. It's notably used in Indian cuisine, although it's use is becoming more and more popular. So G and clarified butter are the rendered milk fat from butter. We're gonna be talking about this more A little bit later in this class were mainly gonna focus on four of these fats, beef tallow, pork, lard, chicken schmaltz and clarified butter and ghee. Here's some photo credits. Hang onto your hat and we are about to head into a little bit of chemistry. 4. The Chemistry of Fat: to hold on to your hat. We're about to take a dive into the chemistry of fat. All right, here we dio. So what is it? Fat? Actually, what makes a fat effect at its core, fats are made up of building blocks called fatty acids. Now, fatty acid is basically a chain of carbons with a carb oxalic acid group on the end. Don't worry about that. For now, we're mostly looking at this chain and carbons. Now there are many dozens of different types of fatty acids ranging from really short ones took meeting one's long ones. And in addition, some fatty acids have double bonds. Some have single bonds, etcetera. So basically, what you need to know is that there are lots and lots of different types of fatty acids, all with different types of carbon chains. On this end. Now, in nature, most fats are found in the form of Trygg Lyssarides. So basically, this is three different fatty acid molecules that are attached to glycerol backbone here, and these valley Athens can be different fatty acids, or they can do the same fatty acid. It just depends on the fact that you're looking at what is the difference between a saturated fat on an unsaturated fat, So a saturated fat has a carbon chain here that has no double bonds. All of the spaces on the's carbons are taken up by hydrogen. These thoughts tend to be very stable, and they also tend to be solid at room temperatures. Because of the geometry of the this carbon chain, thes can stack on each other more easily than the unsaturated fatty essence. So this fatty acid is called starik acid, and this is one of the fatty acids that's found in tallow predominantly. So, as you can see, there's no double bonds down this chain of carpets. This is Oleic acid, and this fatty acid has one double bond here. As you can see, this double bond caused a kink in the molecule, And so because of that, most unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature. Now, because we have a double bond here also, this is a place where this molecule can react. It makes the molecule generally less stable. Then the saturated counterpart. What is the difference between a mono unsaturated fat and a poly unsaturated fat so mono and saturated fat has one double bond in its carbon chain. A poly unsaturated fat has multiple devil bonds in its carbon chain. So this is an example of linoleic acid. This is an example of a poly unsaturated fact. So the more double bonds a carbon chain has, the less stable this molecule is going to be. This is important tiered. You hear the terms omega three and omega six fatty acids thrown around all the time? What does that actually mean? If we take our carbon chain here and we start with the end, we're going to count our carbons. So 123456 And this fatty acid, the first double bond is found at the six carbon position. This means that this is an omega six fatty acid, this fatty acid I post a pension OIC acid, which is also found in fish oil. You may be most familiar with it. Abbreviated as e. P. A. This one has its first double bond in the third position. If we count from the end 123 This is where our first double bond is, and that makes this an omega three fatty accid. If we go back, Teoh are a lake acid here if we can't from the end. 123456789 This study acid has a double bond at the ninth position, meaning this is an omega nine fatty acid. So when we talk about fat, we're really talking about mixtures of different fatty acids. So the truth of the matter is that all fats are mixtures of these fatty acids. No fat in nature exists on its own. In addition, in an animal, the composition of these fats varies based on the location of where the fats deposited. For instance, on a cow. The fat around the kidneys has a much higher percentage of saturated fat than the fat underneath the skin. It also is very dependent on the diet of the animal. For instance, chickens that live on pasture and eat bugs and various greens as part of their diet have a much higher percentage of omega three fatty acids than those chickens that do not. The same goes for pastured pigs and the lard from those pigs. So let's talk about beef tallow to start out with beef. Tallow is about 50 to 55% saturated, so on average beef tallow is more than half made up of saturated fat. About 40% is mono and saturated, and about less than 5% is poly unsaturated, and the smoke point of beef tallow is about 404 100 to 4 20 depending on what sources you look at. Pork lard is about 40% saturated, about 48% mono unsaturated and about 12% poly unsaturated. So we see that pork lard has a much higher percentage of poly unsaturated fats than beef tallow does, and you can see that reflected in the smoke point. This smoke point of pork lard is lower than tallow. It is about 3 74 3 75 What about chicken Schmaltz? Said Chicken schmaltz is about 31% saturated, about 49% mono and saturated and about 20% poly unsaturated so of our three fat. So far, Chicken Schmaltz has thehyperfix ist level of poly unsaturated fats, and its smoke point is about the same as the pork Lauren. It's about 3 75 Finally, let's talk about clarified butter, and I should have put a slash here and put G also because thes percentages also reflect the fat composition of G. But clarified butter is about 68% saturated, about 28% mono and saturated and about 4% poly unsaturated. And look at this smoke point woo. It has a smoke point of 482 degrees said. That is the highest so far. So if we look at a table of our fats and we look at the percentage of saturated fat and they're smoke point, we see a little bit of a relationship here as the percentage of saturated fat goes up, the smoke point also goes up. This is because of the inherent stability of saturated fats, especially when heat is added to them. 5. How to Dry Render: All right. So let's talk about the needy, gritty of how to render fat. First, we're gonna talk about dry rendering. As the name suggests, this is rendering fat without the use of water. So I've got here about £2 of beef fat. Any butcher worth their salt should be able to supply you with some fat, if you ask them. You can even save scraps of fat off of cuts of meat over time, just stick him in your freezer, and then once you have a good bit of them, then you can use them to render the fat. Like I said, this is the fat. You could also use pork. You could use lamb. You could use any kind of poultry. Fat is the basic methods we're gonna talk about in terms of dry and wet rendering are the same for all of these fats. So if you decide to do, say, chicken schmaltz instead of beef tallow, then you would be going through basically the same steps here. You're also gonna want to make sure that your knife is nice and sharp for this because you're gonna be coming through some connective tissue. So you're just gonna take your fat and cut it approximately one inch chunks. It does not have to be exact. Basically, the small, earthy pieces, the faster they're gonna melt and render if you want to. You could also freeze your fat and then use like a cheese grater, a box trader or a greater on, for instance, food processor. But I like to have bite size chunks for my craft winds later, and I'll show you how to make them. And so for that reason, I like my pieces to be about one inch. Now, as you can see, there is a little bit meat in here, a little bit of connective tissue, and that is perfectly fine. We're going, Teoh, melt the fat out of this. So we end up with a pure fat and that's that's the whole process that we're going through here is that we're purifying that essentially, just gonna keep chopping until all of this is chopped up. All right, so there we go. We are fat is chopped. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna transfer this to you are slow cooker For the dry rendering method, I recommend using either a slow cooker or your oven. I think the slow cooker is the most foolproof and easiest way to get started, though, So that's what I'm gonna be covering today. The dry rendering method is also a little bit simpler and a little bit more straightforward than the wet rendering method. So we're gonna do this first and then we're gonna talk about what rendered All right, So I got my slow cooker over here. Yes. Did plain old Crock Pot take the top off and just transfer the fat into while using a slow cooker is a pretty foolproof way to do this. I do so recommend that you be at home while this is happening so you can start periodically and just check on it and make sure it's it's doing OK. It's not sticking her brain. Um, this is a process that's gonna take about 5 to 6 hours, so make sure that you're around for that time. This might be more of a weekend project than a week night project, so keep that in mind When you're planning to do this, I'm just gonna plug in the slow cooker and turn it on high. And then we're just gonna let it go, and we're gonna check it in about an hour to give it a stir. All right, so we've had a beef fat, dry rendering inner crockpot now for about five hours, and it's about done, and the way I can tell that is when I look at it, it's mostly stopped. It's bubbling. It's not doing any ferociously boiling bubbling its calm down most of the way, and the the remains of the be fat in there are starting to get a little bit crispy. So when you take it out, it is very hot. Be careful. This is where you're gonna want your metal funnel. And I like to store my callow in canning jars of some kind. Um, pick your poison there, but you're gonna put your funnel in your jar and then cover it either with some cheesecloth or I like using an old dish towel that's clean, and I basically just a ladle some of this into the if you can see this, but we have. It's a nice liquid fat there, and then we have what's gonna be our cracklings on the top. We're just gonna keep doing this, and when you run out of room in terms of crack wins in your phone, you can just take you're slotted spoon or something here, and we're just gonna transfer them to a baking sheet. All right, so we got one pint jar filled up. You see that? Beautiful, clear callow there looking really nice. So I'm just gonna set it back here, and I'm gonna put a lid on it. And usually what I do is I just let things cool down to room temperature, and then I label them and store them in the freezer. You wanna label them with the date that you rendered the tallow? You also want to label them with what it is, especially if you're rendering multiple different fats. So you know. Okay, this is my tallow. This is my Lord, etcetera. I like to keep them in the freezer. We're gonna be talking a little bit more about how to store your fats coming up. So I'm just gonna finish with the rest of this here. Right? So from our dry rendered fat, we ended up with about three cups worth of really nice beef tallow. So I'm just gonna let these cool down and set them aside, and they will be ready for storage as soon as they are cool down. So these air done. That's all there is to the dry rendering. As you'll see in the next section. The wet rendering process is a little bit more involved, so let's get to that. 6. How to Wet Render: All right, So now let's talk about wet rendering went. Rendering fat is a little bit more of a complex process just because it has multiple steps to it. As the name suggests, went rendering uses water as the medium in which we're rendering are fat. There are two advantages to this one. Is that the water act as a buffer for the temperature, so it's going to prevent your fat from getting too too hot. This means that doing wet rendering, it's much easier to do on the stovetop, then dry rendering. So it's almost like a little bit of a double boiler effect, if you will, by rendering in the water all the water soluble particles in the fat itself. Pieces of little pieces of meat, connective tissue, other things that are not that are going to be drawn out into the water, and that's going to give us a more pure fat at the end of the day. So we're going to start out the same way we did with dry rendering. We're just gonna take our fat, and we're gonna cut it up into one inch chunks. This is another £2 of beef fat here Like I said, sharp knife is essential. All right, so we've got our fat cut up into one inch chunks. Now we're gonna move over to our stove, so I'm going to show you how to do a wet rendering on a stovetop. Next got basically just a Dutch oven here. What I'm gonna do here is to feel it about 1/3 of the way with some water. Then I'm gonna add the fat to the pop with water. Like I said, this is about £2 worth of fat. Here, you can do more or less, depending gun. How about you have I've rendered up to about £6 at one time before? More than that, it gets hard to fit in your pot and just a lot to do with. So I recommend I recommend trying this with between one and maybe £5 of fat to start with . But so I'm gonna turn on my stoop on high, and I'm gonna get the water boiling in a pot, and then we're gonna turn it down to a simmer and cover it. But that so we've had our £2 of beef fat rendering in our water This is our wet rendering, and I'm just gonna take the top off here. This has been going now for about five hours, and it's just been kind of a moderate Zimmer during that time. This pot has tallow. It has the remains of the beef fat bits that has water in it. Now, our talent that we dry rendered doesn't have any water in it. So with this, we have to figure out how to get rid of the water. So that's next. So I'm just gonna put my cloth into your a sieve here, since someone used 40 right rendering. Basically, I'm just been a ladle all of this through the strainer. You can kind of give it a little push down as Ugo kind of pushed some of the liquid and the fat through. I'm just gonna pour the rest of this. This is also very hot, so be careful gonna give this a squeeze. So what we're left with is a mixture of water and fat, and the way we're going to get the water out of here is we're going Teoh, cover this and we're going to stick it in the fridge overnight and then we're gonna pop the fat out, so I'm just gonna cover it and stick it in the fridge, and I'll see you back here tomorrow. This is the pot with the tallow in it that we just let set in the fridge overnight. And as you can see, this is pretty hard. So I'm just gonna come. It can split this up here some pieces, and you can just pop out the tallow here and just kind of scrape off the bottom a little bit. It's gonna same thing, these other sections, and just last bit here. And so you see what we have left in this size kind of gela wish. This is the college and from some that connective tissue as we cooked our talent yesterday . So I'm actually just going to get rid of this and clean out this pot a little bit. And then I'm gonna put our Tello back in the pot with some fresh water, and we're getting heated up again. All right? So I'm just gonna put our callow pieces back in here, and I'm just gonna fill it with some clean tap water here, which limits. I'm going to stick this on the stove and just bring to a simmer, and we're just gonna simmer it for maybe about 10 minutes or so. Here's or Talos simmering with water. So I'm just gonna turn off the heat now and let it come down to room temperature and then I'm gonna stick it back in the fridge. All right, so here we have our tallow and it solidified. Begin. As you can see, I'm just gonna take it out of this pots. So I'm just gonna scrape off the bottom a little bit here, and I'm gonna set it on a paper towel because the bottom is still a little bit wet. And if you have moisture in with your tallow, that increases your chances that you're talent will go rancid faster. So we want as much moisture out of here as we can get. Yeah, here is our wet rendered tallow. Just going to get a much of the water off of years. I can, and then I'm gonna transfer it Teoh a Ziploc bag and we're gonna put it in the freezer. I recommend you always store your wet rendered tallow in the freezer because of the chance that it has some moisture in it. See, like always remember to label your bag what it is and the date and stick it in our freezer . So should you wet render or dryer into your fat? The answer to that question is, it depends I choose to dry. Render most of the fact that I render just because it's simpler, it's easier, and it's done in one chunk of time. It doesn't take multiple days worth of hardening in the fridge. Taking it out. Harding in the fridge, Taking it out. Um, the other advantage to dry rendering is that you have less of a chance of your fat going rancid because there's no water in your fat If you went render. There is a chance that there is some water so left in the fat, and this water can promote rancid ITI. In fact, over time now, one of the situations in which you would want to wet render fat. I typically went render fat when I'm gonna be using that fat, for instance, for toiletries or body butter or something like that, where I don't want any kind of an odor in it or are beefy or meaty smell to it. And for that the wet rendering is excellent. Also, if you do a lot of deep frying at a really high temperature, you may want to use wet rendered fat because that fat is going to be more pure and have a higher smoke point. But you should try them both out and just decide what works best for you. 7. Making Cracklins: So after you dry rendered your tallow, you've got these crunchy bits that are left over. You want to save these because we're going to make some crack wins with them. So I've just spread them out into baking sheet here and they cooled off. And now I'm gonna add some salt and pepper. You can put pretty much whatever seasonings you want on these guys. I'm also gonna add a little bit of garlic powder and a little bit of smoked paprika. I've got my oven proceeding to about 3 50 I'm gonna pop these guys in there, and we're gonna put them their anus 3 50 on the nose. We're gonna pop these guys in there and Bergen cooked up for about 20 to 30 minutes or until they're nice and crispy. You want to stir them, have maybe halfway through to make sure that they're not getting burned on the bottom. But, uh, we'll do that, then we'll pop him out. You can also make cracklings out of the remaining pieces of fat from the wet rendering of the tallow. But that will take a little bit longer to get dried out and crunchy. So I find the dry rendering a little bit quicker. And that's what I do most of in my kitchen to counter Craftsman's in the oven now for 30 minutes, and I'm about to take them out and take a look. These things smell amazing, by the way, so they're nice and crispy. Damn. Just gonna put some bombs Hotel here. Now, these are delicious just on their own. Or you can put them on top of, for instance, like salad or some eggs. Something like that. Just make sure you let them cool off before you eat them. I definitely made that mistake before. If you want to save your craftsman's, but you don't want to eat them now, these things freeze really well to just make sure you cool them down to room temperature and then put them in a Tupperware. Label them and stick them in the freezer. And when you're ready to eat them, just get them out. Take them on a baking sheet and stick him in the oven for a little while until they're warm , crispy. Enjoy 8. Ghee and Clarified Butter: So let's talk a little bit about clarified butter and ghee. So, like the beef at that we were working with earlier. Butter is actually a mixture. Butter contains about 80 to 82% milk fat, and then there's about 16 to 17% water and about 1 to 2%. What's called milk solids, which is mostly protein while covering butter, seems like a little bit of a departure from our last segments. It actually is a very similar process. We're going to purify the milk fat in the butter by melting it, hence rendering fat. Do people often ask what is difference between clarified butter and ghee? So G is basically clarified butter where it's been cooked a little bit longer and milk solids have been browned. Now you may have heard of the term brown butter that is basically deal with milk solids remain even with the butter. So today I'm gonna show you how to make G. So I've got half a pound of butter here you can use salted or unsalted. It doesn't really matter. I'm just gonna wrap them and stick them in my pots. So we're just going to stick this on the stove on medium low heat and just completely melt the butter. All right, so our butter is completely melted and as you can see it bubbling and the bubbling is actually the water evaporating from the butter and the phone. You see, there is some of the milk solids which is starting to separate from the fat. So we're just gonna let it continue to bubble here until the bubbling It's almost completely stopped. We're gonna take a look. It should take about 5 to 10 minutes. So keep a close eye on your butter. You do not want it to burn. It's going to give it a couple more minutes so you can see her bubbling has slowed way down here, and our milk solids are actually starting to caramelize. So if you had wanted to do clarified butter, take your butter off the heat a little bit before it starts getting light brown like you see here. Now, if you want brown butter, just use it with the milk solids in it. All right, are bubbling has pretty much stopped. And as you can see, we have some nice caramelized milk solids. So we're going to pull this off the heat and we're going to strain it. So we pulled our butter off the stove. And as you can see, we've got some nice milk solids caramelized down the bottom of the pan. You can see the light brown color. So now we're going to take our metal funnel again and our cloth, or you can use Chief cough for this. Just drape it over the funnel and you're just gonna pour it through so we filter out our milk solids here. The other nice thing about G is that people who are sensitive to you casing and milk proteins can oftentimes eat G. While we have not eliminated 100% of the protein, we've eliminated a greater majority of it. You can see some of that caramelized protein still in the pan said there is RG. I'm just gonna stake a top on this and again label it with what it is and the date let it come down to room temperature 9. How to Use and Store Rendered Fat: So now that you've rendered some fat, let's talk about how to use it and how to store it first. Some general principles about how to store fat you want to store it in a tightly sealed container. For instance, a glass mason jar or canning jar works really well for this purpose. You also want to store it away from direct sunlight or heat a cabinet or at pantry works really well. Also as long as it's out of the sun. Wet rendered fat should also always be kept in the freezer if you're not gonna use it within about a week or so. Now there is a way around this. If you have wet rendered sand fat and you don't wanna have to store in the freezer, what you can do is you can heat it up in a pan until all the excess water in the fat boils off and then store it in a canning jar as you would some dry rendered fat. This is called clarifying the Fat. So what can you do with tallow? To tallow is great for cooking, especially anything that requires high temperature, such as frying or roasting. It's great for making soap. Tallow makes a really nice hard bar of soap. You can use it for making candles, either by itself, or you can mix it with bees, wax or another kind of wax. You can make body bowmore butter, but I would recommend that if you do this, you use wet rendered tallow, not dry rendered tallow, just because of the odor that you can have in driver under Tello. And you can also make suitt cakes for birds as faras storage. You can store tallow at room temperature for about a year or in the fridge or freezer pretty much indefinitely. There have been anecdotal accounts of people storing tallow in a cool cellar for over 50 years, so this stuff can last a really long time. The amounts of time I'm using for storage are on the conservative side in terms of what I am presenting here, Um, so take that with a grain of salt. What about Lord? So lard is great for cooking. Also great for pastry, baking, frying, roasting. Now the smoke point of lard is a little bit lower than of tallow, so not as good for the really high temperature roasting. But It is really good for, for instance, making pie crust or biscuits something like that, where you want a really flaky crust. You can also use large for making soap or again for making body Balmer butter, and you can also use it for reconditioning wood or leather as faras storing your lard. You can store it at room temperature for about 4 to 6 months or in the fridge up to a year or in the freezer pretty much indefinitely. Amount. Schmaltz. Schmalz is predominantly used in cooking. This could be for sauteing for roasting vegetables or potatoes and omelets. Um, it's really good in pate or in gravy. Um, and it gives a really nice kind of savory flavor to you. Things as far a storage. It should be stored in the fridge, not at room temperature, but it can be stored up to six months in the fridge or in the freezer for about 1 to 2 years. As faras G. G. Is great for cooking. Now remember, G has the highest smoke point of all the fats. We talked about 4 82 F. So this is the oil or the fact that you want to go to you when you're roasting things at a really high temperature, for instance, for 25 in the oven or something like that, G is the oil that you want to reach for can also be used for frying, sauteing, baking, cooking eggs, stews, Curries, etcetera. Now G lard in schmaltz can all be substituted in baking four butter. But if you do that, you want to use 20% less of your rendered fat than the rest because for of butter. And that is because butter is made up of about 80% fat. So if you're substituting another fat for that, that is the correct ratio to use. If you remember, the rest of butter is made up of water and milk solids, which, of course, we do not have in these other rendered fats as faras storing your G, You can store it at room temperature for about 4 to 6 months in the fridge for about a year or in the freezer pretty much indefinitely 10. Final Thoughts: congratulations. You made it through. You even survived a little chemistry lesson. I think that's pretty much all we have for today. Whether you choose to render some tallow, lard, some schmaltz or to make some G, be sure to take a picture of it and post it in the project section. Also tell me what you plan to do with your rendered. I hope you had fun and learned a little something. If you want more, check out our YouTube can under the name ancestral evolution as well have fun renderings and fat.