By Dylan Clay
The best way to render beef tallow at home from your brisket trim is by boiling the trimmed beef fat in water – this method is called “wet rendering.”
I find this method to result in the purest tallow where-as dry rendering has far less yield and more impurities which can result in a smell and taste taint.
In order to render your own beef tallow at home, you will need:
*The grinder is totally optional as you can simply use a knife to cube the trim up; Though, a grinder exposes far more of the fat for rendering purposes and increase your tallow yield.
If the brisket trim is frozen, allow it to thaw until it’s somewhat malleable.
If it’s unfrozen, put in a freezer bag and toss in the freezer for 30-60 minutes.
With your knife, start by trimming the meat – removing large pieces of lean.
Remember: Our “liquid gold” comes from the liquifying of the fat, not the meat.
While there may certainly be intramuscular fat within the lean, it’s not a significant amount in comparison to large pieces of hard fat.
Once you’ve trimmed the lean as best you can, start sending this through your meat grinder or use your knife to cut the fat into a fine mince.
You can spend as much time as you’d like here when using a knife but as the fat comes up in temperature it will start to smear and become a pain to work with.
As you trim, transfer to your stock pot.
Wet rendering simply means to render in a liquid – in this case water.
To wet render, you will need:
Add your trimmed meat to the stock pot.
Add 10+ cups of water to the stock pot.
You then want to get the water to a boil; Boil for 2 hours.
Continue stirring/agitating the trim throughout the 2 hours.
After two hours, allow the pot to cool and then transfer to your refrigerator.
It’s winter as I’m writing this so I simply put the stock pot in a snow bank and waited.
Once the tallow/fat has solidified on top, you can simply pop the “disc” of hard fat out.
There will be some gritty bits that remain on the bottom (from the water/lean meat), you can use a butter knife to scrape this away and remove it.
Don’t worry if some remains, this will be filtered later on.
Then reheat the tallow disc – only enough to liquify it.
DO NOT heat this to an extreme temperature where-in you’re deep fat frying the sediment that remains.
Take a cone coffee filter or a cheese cloth and put that at the top of the mason jar and then pour some of your liquified tallow into the coffee filter.
If you have a funnel, use it.
This process will take several hours (possibly all day) but it really helps to ensure the tallow is as clean as possible.
Note: If you notice that your coffee filter isn’t dripping as efficiently, restart with a new coffee filter.
You may very well go through 10+.
Once completely drained, put your airtight lid on and store the tallow in your refrigerator. The tallow will solidify and you can use as needed.
Tallow rendered this way is far cleaner and has far less odor/taste taint than other methods you’ll find online.
