Beef tallow is nutrient-dense, delicious, and cheap! Follow these simple steps to make the most of your budget and your health. Once you’ve begun cooking with tallow you won’t want to go back! 

We purchased ¼ beef from a local ranch in September 2022, and it has been amazing! One of the easiest ways to begin a homesteading lifestyle is to source local foods, and I highly recommend starting with proteins. When you purchase ¼ or ½ a beef, you pay for the bones, fat, and organs, whether you choose to pick them up or not. The beef fat can easily be turned into tallow, a stable, flavor-neutral cooking fat with a high smoke point. Bones can be turned into a rich broth like this and organs can be used as nutritious proteins for meals. Today, we will focus on tallow-making. 

When we told the butcher what cuts we wanted for our beef, we specifically asked for all of the fat. Two weeks later, we picked up our beef and had a large bag full of beef fat. I would estimate that we had about 5-7 pounds of fat from ¼ beef. Everything was frozen, including the fat. This actually makes trimming the fat a bit easier, as long as you have a good-quality kitchen knife. 

Tallow Preparation

Step one of processing beef tallow is to trim the fat. Remove any bits of meat still attached to the fat, along with any veins or other red bits. Any meat or red bits left will flavor the finished tallow, so I highly recommend being particularly mindful during this process. This step is where you should also remove the casing of the fat. There is a very thin, membrane-like casing around some of the large fat deposits (you will be able to tell if it is there). Peel as much of this away as possible, leaving the fat exposed. You will likely not be able to remove all of the casing, which is totally fine. Do what you can and don’t overthink it! 

Step two is to process the beef fat into small pieces. The smaller the pieces, the more quickly the tallow will render. I also find that with smaller pieces the tallow is less likely to burn. You can do this by hand with a knife – which is fairly time-consuming- or, you can use a food processor. Unfortunately, we do not have a food processor, so my husband and I take turns chopping up the fat into small ½-¼ inch pieces.

Step three is to render the fat. Place the finely processed fat into a room-temperature heavy-bottomed pot on the stove. Turn the stove to low. The fat will begin to melt and render tallow as the pot heats through. Take special care not to allow the fat to boil or crisp. This process can take up to a few hours, depending on how much fat you have started out with. Also, be forewarned, tallow making can be a funky-smelling process! I highly recommend not processing tallow if you are nauseous or pregnant. The finished tallow should be odorless, but the process is more interesting. My husband coined the term “funky fat” when I rendered tallow the first time. He isn’t wrong! Go ahead and open up those windows and get a breeze going through your house. 

All of the tallow has rendered down when the pieces of fat are significantly smaller and no longer plump and shiny. The next and final step is to strain and set the tallow. This is so simple and requires a cheesecloth, strainer, and a container to store the tallow. I prefer to cool my tallow into bars, so I use a large 9×13 casserole dish and then cut the tallow into squares. Some people prefer to store the tallow in mason jars, but it can be difficult to scoop out if you store it in the fridge or freezer as I do. Either way, you will need a clean container to store the tallow.

Drape cheesecloth over the strainer. Place this over a large bowl or preferably a pourable measuring cup. Once the tallow is no longer scalding hot, pour it through the cheesecloth and strainer. The combination catches the fat but also the small bits that would pass through the strainer. 

Final Steps

Pour the filtered tallow into the desired container and allow to set until completely cool at room temperature. At this point, you can slice the tallow into bars if you used a casserole pan and flash freeze them in the pan, then transfer them to a storage bag. Alternatively, you can store the it in the fridge or freezer in mason jars. I’m sure you could store it at room temperature for brief periods of time, similar to butter. I feel more comfortable storing it in a refrigerator or cold room, so it is really up to your personal comfort level and discernment. Tallow can store in the freezer for many months, so I like to store any backstock in the chest freezer.

That’s it! Just a few simple steps and before you know it you’ll have high-quality home-rendered tallow. Use it for frying, roasting, or any other number of things! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and I will do my best to get back to you.

Happy tallow’ing!