Re: lard, tallow, suet?

[Guest guest]

When you render lard or tallow you end up with the lard and cracklings, which

I think of as the original bacon bits. Folks make cracklin bread (corn bread

with cracklin's). Some spread them on a cookie sheet, salt them and put them

in the oven for a while to get the rest of the fat off, then you can really

use them like bacon bits. I can mine and usually end up giving them away to

the ones that make cracklin bread.

Belinda

[Guest guest]

At 04:41 PM 4/30/2002 -0400, you wrote:

> >So ... when I bought my last side of beef I asked the packer to give me all

>the fat too (which is free: they just throw it out otherwise). Boy did I

>get it! 4 boxes worth. I chopped it up and melted it slowly to render out

>the lard,

>

>I had the butcher leave the fat on my steaks; can I just trim some off and

>melt it? When you say " render out the lard " , do you mean you end up with

>some liquid and maybe some chunks and do you just throw out the chunks? How

>long will trimmed fat stay in the fridge?

>

>Also, I have a large piece of suet, would it be better to melt for the fat?

>I would like something for frying.

>

>Joy

I used to keep a big pile of " bacon ends " in the freezer (kind of loosen

them up before freezing so they are easy to separate), and I'd just throw

one in the pan like butter and let it melt. I'd imagine you can do the same

with raw beef or pork fat.

Raw trimmed fat I'd keep in the freezer, myself. It's got all the issues of

raw meat (depending on where it was from etc.). In the old days I think

they salted it (where you get " salt pork " from). There's enough water and

protein in the raw fat that it will get pretty nasty, and probably mold.

When you " render " fat it kind of melts and you get this clear, pure fat

filling the pot with some protein/connective tissue chunks floating in it:

then you strain it and get just the pure fat. This keeps a lot better than

raw fat, obviously -- all the water is gone and it's more or less sterile

after all that cooking. Still can go rancid (according to the other posts

here from people with more experience than I do!), but it's possible in the

old days they didn't care much about that, or their houses were colder than

ours are, but they kept the rendered tallow/lard for a long time, often in

sealed jars, I guess. They used it for lamp oil, making candles (paraffin

didn't exist until pretty recently), rubbing down leather, waterproofing

wood, making soap, sealing pate's, and cooking.

I used some of mine to mix with bird seed and peanuts and hung it out in

front of my window -- the blue jays love it ---

Heidi Schuppenhauer

Trillium Custom Software Inc.

heidis@...