fat rendering breakthrough (for me anyway)

[tanyalynn]

So, when I've rendered fat, near the end I've had a mix of pieces of fat that have pretty much given their all, and other floaters that still seem fairly fatty. It's been hard to figure out when to stop, don't want to cook forever but don't want to have a poor yield either.

Solution? A potato masher. The old fashioned kind, nothing fancy, it worked great to squish the fatty floating pieces and within a few minutes, they looked deflated and fairly done. I tried squishing a couple pieces of fat at a time against the side of the pan with the spoon, but that was slower and I couldn't apply as much force.

[Carolyn R]

I wondered if you would mind sharing where you learned to render your fat?

We raise several pasture beef a year and I would love to learn the traditional art of rendering the fat.

Thanks, and glad you found a trick that works!

[snguyen]

When an animal goes in for butchering, ask the place to grind all the trimmed fat like ground beef and bag it for you, it makes it super easy to cook down faster. Then I personally just throw it in the crock pot on high heat for a few hours until I've just got liquid fat with cracklings on the bottom. Don't worry if some of the cracklings end up in your jars with the lard, they just sink to the bottom and are pretty yummy. Bottle it while it is still hot, it should help to create a little vacuum to seal your mason jar lids. If not, you can always put them in a hot water bath like you were canning produce to help with the seal.

[tanyalynn]

Originally Posted by Carolyn R

I wondered if you would mind sharing where you learned to render your fat?

We raise several pasture beef a year and I would love to learn the traditional art of rendering the fat.

Thanks, and glad you found a trick that works!

I think I googled 'how to render lard'

There are also quite a few threads in this forum about rendering fat, I know I've done searches in this forum at least a couple times for the word render.

Tallow seems to work the same way, I've done it a few times and if I'm supposed to do something different, well, I haven't.

[kl5]

Originally Posted by snguyen

When an animal goes in for butchering, ask the place to grind all the trimmed fat like ground beef and bag it for you, it makes it super easy to cook down faster.

This makes so much sense, I feel silly for never having thought of it! I just emailed our beef farmer hoping to add that request to our processing order for the end of the month. Thanks!