Rendering Beef Tallow in a Crock Pot

Today I rendered beef tallow from suet. The beef fat came from 100% grass pastured animal. I used the instructions from the post Make Your Own Beef Tallow with one exception. Instead of using an oven, I used my Crock Pot on the low setting.

beef-tallow-2-jars

Here are the delicious crunchy remains (aka “the cracklins”).

cracklings

The benefit of rendering tallow in a Crock Pot is you can leave the house and go for a walk. This is what my neighborhood of Ballard looked like today.

ballard

24 Comments

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  1. Hey MAS – What are you going to do with the tallow?

    I got some a few months ago from an organic butcher and I’m struggling to use the stuff. I find it very waxy, even when fully melted and mixed with lemon juice. I prefer (pork) lard and duck fat.
    Best regards,
    Glenn

  2. i picked half a cow in the fall and asked for some suet. they gave me about 10 lbs. of beef and bison suet which i also rendered in my crock pot. that was the easy process. my first and only attempt at pemmican was a long an tedious failure. tasted terrible to me but my dog loved it.

    i still have a bunch of tallow though and i agree with glenn. what do you do with the stuff? clean up after cooking is a nightmare. it is liking trying to clean off candle wax. any advice would be much appreciated. for now i am sticking to butter and pork fat till i hear of a good way to deal with this stuff after done cooking.

  3. I use it primarily for cooking veggies. I had been using lard for the past few months, but I wanted to mix it up a bit.

  4. do u find clean up to be difficult?

  5. Not that I recall from the last time. I believe that if you have a soap with a high PH like “Sal’s Suds”, it makes cleaning easier. It still will be tougher on cleanup than other fats.

    I really like coconut oil as well. I also need to buy some Palm Oil, but will have to do mail order, as no one in Seattle seems to carry it anymore.

  6. those cracklins look good!

    off topic: do you still eat canned fish, such as eels, tuna, or sardines?

    I saw the post about your canned eel sushi.

  7. @Sheila – Yes I do. More sardines than tuna these days.

  8. how do you eat those sardines? cook them in something or straight? can’t say that i’ve ever had sardines but have heard good things about them. not sure how they taste though.

  9. @Chuck – I just eat them right out the can. Sometimes I’ll add hot sauce. Not very imaginative. Only buy the spring water sardines. Almost all the other options have soybean oil.

  10. Hi Michael, I was wondering if you had a good source for suet or tallow in Seattle that is relatively easy to get. Is there a store or farmer at the farmer’s market that has it available? Thanks!

  11. @Corinne – The Farmers Markets. University on Saturday or Ballard on Sunday. I’m actually rendering lard as I write this from pork fat I got from Olsen yesterday. $3/pound.

  12. Thank you!

  13. Hey Mike, I’m trying this method right now as I have 24 pounds of fat from my meatshare haha. How long did you leave it in the crockpot for?

  14. @Mountain – 24 pounds! wow. My Crockpot has some temperature issues, so yours may be different than mine. I think mine took about 3-4 hours. I don’t remember. Post in the comments how long yours takes.

  15. So the first time I tried it, I didn’t really watch the time. I was unhappy with the cracklings though…They weren’t really crunchy and still had a lot of fat inside.

    The second time, i had it on over night at Low for 4 hours then Keep Warm for the remainder. When I peered into it after waking, the solids were all congealed in the center. I turned it off and went to work. After I got back, I filtered out the rendered tallow, then put the remaining solids to the stove top. They melted down a bit more but produced a more murky tallow…not sure if that’s safe to store? Anyway, the cracklings this time turned out super small =( I don’t seem to be able to get the cracklings to come out right.

  16. MAS, Mountain,

    Any updates on temperature and time for rendering tallow on a Crockpot?

    P.S. I’m rendering suet from Mountain’s left over meatshare! haha

    Best,

    Henry

  17. @Henry – My most recent experience: I chopped the fat up to about dice sized and then filled the Crock Pot 2/3rds of the way full. It was done in 3-4 hours (at the low setting).

  18. Are the cracklings supposed to be as crunchy as the ones you buy at the liquor store, or do those go through some industrial process?

  19. @Mountain – I don’t know about the liquor store product. I used to eat the cracklings, but something I read on The Perfect Health Diet made me stop. I can’t find it now, but there was a question as to if they are toxic.

  20. J. Scott Shipman

    May 2, 2012 — 11:32 am

    Hi Michael,

    I’ve three pounds of suet in the crock pot on low. I ran mine though a food processor (saw it a Mark’s site)—it was something of a mess, but not too bad.

  21. @J Scott – The one mess I made was not having a metal colander ready to filter, so I used a plastic one (forgive me Paleo Gods). Nothing could clean it and I ended up having to throw it away.

  22. J. Scott Shipman

    May 2, 2012 — 11:57 am

    Hi Michael,

    It has been in the crock pot for about 90 minutes. Looks like it will be quite a mess to clean up.

    Thanks for the heads up on the metal colander—that is what I plan to use.

  23. Do you need to cover the crockpot? Thanks. Marion

  24. @Marion – You can leave the lid off.

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