Today when I was finished rendering tallow in my Crock Pot, I attempted to filter it using a coffee filter. In the past, this has worked. But for some odd reason today the tallow did not want to go through the filter. So I quickly came up with an alternate solution that I ended up liking better.

For years I’ve held onto a Vietnamese Coffee filter. I think I used it once. When you have a kick ass espresso machine, all other coffee gear gets buried away. Anyway, I used the Vietnamese coffee filter and it worked great. Not 100%, but good enough for me. I guess cheese cloth would be ideal, but when you don’t have any and you need to go MacGyver, it works!

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Comments

chuck

November 22 at 2011 at 1:44 AM

quick thinking. how did u clean it? tallow was like an adhesive wax to me that i had a real hard time cleaning.

MAS

November 22 at 2011 at 1:52 AM

@Chuck - Yeah. It took a while. I have some Sals Suds, which does a nice job. As good as I cleaned it, I don’t expect to ever use that filter for brewing coffee again. :)

kimelah

November 22 at 2011 at 12:40 PM

Ha! At first glance it looked like a pot atop a metal plate atop a HUGE mason jar. Then I checked the link for the vietnamese coffee filter. Ah, understanding.

MAS

November 22 at 2011 at 12:46 PM

@kimelah - Good point. Next time I’ll put an item next to it, like I did for the huge cabbage photo.

https://criticalmas.org/2011/10/kraut-cabbage-this-sucker-is-huge/

Txomin

November 23 at 2011 at 6:38 AM

Oil filters (for cooking, of course) are cheap and work well.