And then there were the food manufacturers, which stood to make very little money from my grandmother’s cooking, because she was doing so much of it from scratch— up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Traceable, Dry-Aged, Angus beef. It might have been my grandmother’s generation that raised the animals and milk to create these foods, but industry worked hard to convince those families that purchased vegetable oils were healthier than the free lard from the meat freezer. For reasons related to both history and climate, there are pronounced geographic patterns of consumption of fats and oils. account? I pay top dollar for organic vegetable oils and here I’ve got bags of animal fat in my freezer. To reduce the amount of time the fat takes to render, you could cut it into smaller pieces or even grind it in a meat grinder or food processor. Plant fats are usuaally going to be less dense and a better source for oil than most animal fats. Many cooks, seeking out local foods and forgotten traditions, have rediscovered how to render lard in their homes. Once it boils, drop the temperature to low. As a dressing on green salads, for example, a liquid oil is used to provide a coating on the ingredients; a plastic fat such as lard or butter would be unsuitable. In contrast, population pressures in the older civilizations of the Orient and the Mediterranean countries of southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East have long since made extensive raising of livestock impractical, necessitating that the edible oils of these regions be derived primarily from intensively cultivated vegetable crops. Now I have been reading about fraud in the olive oil industry for passing off lower quality oils as extra-virgin olive oil, as well as claims of completely fake olive oil made from other vegetable oils. At MOTHER EARTH NEWS for 50 years and counting, we are dedicated to conserving our planet's natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. Pollan dedicates a good part of chapter tracing the curvy line of “scientific” health claims that the public is supposed to follow, from non-fat to low-fat and all over the place. My freezer is full of beef fat and I finally rendered tallow for cooking oil. Any water left in your stored lard will make it spoil more quickly. Step 2: Heat It is time to bring these products back home. The physical nature of the fatty material is unimportant for some uses, but the consistency is a matter of consequence for other products. Rendering is simply slowly heating up fat under low heat so that it turns into a liquid but doesn’t burn. At this point, you could render the fat as it stands, but running it through the coarse plate on your Weston grinder greatly speeds the rendering process. This also works perfectly for rendering pure lard from pork fat. You use one part water to one part fat. One way to season the oil is to heat it in a pan with seasonings, such as garlic and spices. In these cases the cell walls are broken by grinding, flaking, rolling, or pressing under high pressures to liberate the oil. Most oilseeds are grown specifically for processing to oils and protein meals, but several important vegetable oils are obtained from by-product raw materials. But it’s not “slimy” or oily like just rubbing fat or oil … Just like that, a jar of lovely pure cooking oil. It turns out that rendering oil is as simple as heating the fat at a low temperature for a long time and then straining it into a jar. You could place a large bowl in the sink (on paper towels, as mentioned), put your jar in that, and LADLE the fat in. To begin with, tallow is the rendered fat of mutton or beef, though in American parlance, it almost exclusively refers to beef. The rendering process is applied on a large scale to the production of animal fats such as tallow, lard, bone fat, and whale oil. Cells of the fatty tissues are ruptured in special disintegrators under close temperature control. Step 3. Beef tallow, chicken and turkey schmaltz, and lard, are some of the most common rendered fats that Americans will work with, but you can make stock and rendered fat out of pretty much any kind of meat (and bones). I hardly needed to strain it as I poured it into a jar. It was a home-grown meal to remember — including the homegrown cooking oil! Already a Member but However, there are some drawbacks and challenges to using animal fat feedstocks. First you buy fat from a local farmer who has his animals out on pasture, and raises them without antibiotics, hormones, or other junk, and feeds them what they were meant to eat. Patience is worth it with rendering oil. Of course, we had to test it out right away with a batch of French fries. Filter If you render the fat too quickly, you’re apt to give it more of a “piggy” taste and golden color. You'll find tips for slashing heating bills, growing fresh, natural produce at home, and more. It’s really just a fancy way to describe slowly melting down fat (most commonly pork or beef) into a clean, shelf stable cooking fat … The Freedmans are one of six 2013 MOTHER EARTH NEWS Homesteaders of the Year. Fat pieces which have been cleaned of residual organ meat. You may also use the Bill Me option and pay $17.95 for 6 issues. It often takes extra motivation to try something new. I usually took the skins and fat from pork shoulder and other pork meats, put in bag of fats in freezer until I got big enough for some Ball Jars then I will render it into the lard. Tallow, rendered from beef fat, and lard, rendered from pork fat, are often used for cooking in gut healing diets like the GAPS diet. Use a sharp knife to cut your animal fat into rough cubes, no bigger than 1 in (2.5 cm). Most fruits and vegetables have from 0.1 to 2.0 percent fat, with the exception of avocados and olives, which are exceptional in their high fat content. You can also render on a stovetop, the key is to keep the temperature VERY low. Animal fat feedstocks can be made into high-quality biodiesel that meets the ASTM specifications for biodiesel. With many oil-bearing seeds and nuts, rendering will not liberate the oil from the cellular structures in which it is held (see Figure 2 ). Then, after I know how to do it, it is easier to integrate into daily living. It makes yummy fried potatoes and yorkshire pudding. It cleans just fine and smells just fine. The quantities of fats and oils in conventional food supplies vary over wide ranges. The saponifcation process is the process of turning fat into soap by using lye. Ilene White Freedman, House in the Woods Farm, MOTHER EARTH NEWS Homesteaders of the Year. Cast iron would also work well, or a heavy casserole dish. Here is an excerpt from Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Step 1: Prepare the Fat It is a high smoke-point oil that is highly saturated, with a rich flavor. If you want to make gribenes (crispy skin bits), small pieces are a must. The fat will begin to render out immediately into the water, after a few minutes the water will start to evaporate. I put off trying to make lard myself for quite awhile because somehow rendering … It is better to start with chunks of fat, as it separates nicely and barely needs straining. Wet Fat Rendering: This is probably the safest way to make lard or bear grease. You want a wide container for more surface area, making the turkey pan an ideal choice. Please select which sections you would like to print: Corrections? Good choices are olive oil, peanut oil, and sesame oil. If the fat/skin is in large pieces, cut it into smaller pieces for quicker rendering. About 40 percent of the dietary fat in the developed countries comes from isolated fats and oils, with 60 percent obtained from basic foods, whereas in the less developed countries most of the dietary fat is obtained from fruits, cereals, vegetables, dairy products, and meats, and relatively little is consumed in the form of isolated fat products. I read that blending it the food processing speeds up the process, but this didn’t work well for me at all. Use any flavorful oil. Within a day they had 10 lbs of beef fat for us, which I rendered into tallow the other day. What about the science behind food processing? First, it’s a new skill for me to render oil, albeit a simple one, but something I’ve never done before. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). How Animal Fats are Processed. As I produce eggs, meat and animal fat along with plenty of organic vegetables, this is how it used to be done on family farms. Make sure to have a lid that will cover the … Rendering fat is basically the following process: turning clumps of fat into tallow or lard that you can fry in. Waste fat from animal carcasses are removed and then made into an oil using a rendering process. Equipment: To render fat into tallow or lard you will need: 2 Large stock pots with lids. The low-heat technique worked great and produced beautiful buttery yellow oil. Our own pastured burgers on the grill, frying up some heirloom Kennebec potatoes from last summer’s harvest, home-canned pickles from the pantry, homemade mayo, and kim chi from the fridge, and a salad from the hoophouse. cutting it from an all day event down to about four hours of cooking time. Several centrifugal separation processes were developed in the 1960s. Small amount of water. In the morning, you can run a hot water over the bottom of the bowl for a second until the now solid fat releases. We raise some pastured beef for our family, and while we enjoy the grass-fed beef, we have been slower to learn the art of cooking with homemade oil. It consists of cutting or chopping the fatty tissue into small pieces that are boiled in open vats or cooked in steam digesters. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. It might hang out on my wish list for a year before finally making it to the “do it today” list. Ilene White Freedman operates House in the Woods organic CSA farm with her husband, Phil, in Frederick, Maryland. Good instruction on rendering pork fat into lard. I used a MOTHER EARTH NEWS article as my guide in rendering tallow. Just enough to barely cover the bottom. I know, “rendering animal fats” sounds both a little weird and intimidating. The protein tissue is separated from the liquid phase in a desludging type of centrifuge, following which a second centrifuge separates the fat from the aqueous protein layer. The crudest method of rendering oil from oleaginous fruits, still practiced in some countries, consists of heaping them in piles, exposing them to the sun, and collecting the oil that exudes. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. You want to heat at a very low temperature. The rendering process is applied on a large scale to the production of animal fats such as tallow, lard, bone fat, and whale oil. Rendering lard is a lost art – a worthwhile technique forgotten in a fat-phobic, Lean Cuisine-centered culture. In a somewhat improved form, this process is used in the preparation of palm oil; the fresh palm fruits are boiled in water, and the oil is skimmed from the surface. Cutting the fat into smaller pieces will make it quicker and easier to render. The ancestors of the present inhabitants of central and northern Europe obtained their edible fats almost exclusively from domestic animals. Rendering can refer to any processing of animal products into more useful materials, or, more narrowly, to the rendering of whole animal fatty tissue into purified fats like lard or tallow.Rendering can be carried out on an industrial, farm, or kitchen scale. Chicken Coops - 45 Building Plans For Housing Your Flock, Natural Cold Storage: Fresh Food in Winter, Keeping Crops Cool During Hot Weather: 13 Ways to Beat the Heat, Subscribe Today - Pay Now & Save 64% Off the Cover Price. This prevents the fat from browning as we begin to heat it up. Expect deeply colored oils to color the resulting powder. Add just a little bit of water. Clarified butter or ghee is an important item of Indian cookery, and a hydrogenated shortening called vanaspati is designed to reproduce the coarsely crystalline plastic texture of ghee. It helps if the fat is partially frozen, but a sharp knife will do the job even if it's not frozen. How to render fat into tallow . Heat source . Any impurities will be imbedded in the water and will rinse or scrape right off. And that will be your main source of oils initially. What you have there is rendered bear fat into bear "grease" and it too is good stuff. It will have a stronger, cooked aroma. Pour whatever can’t be ladled, into a smaller pot or pitcher, easier to pour into jars. I was raised in the 1970s and 80s, when the oil industry was busy selling us “healthier” oils than butter, tallow, and lard — those were farm products. Sign in with your online account. Pour a glass of water in a saucepan (water should be approximately 3 cms high) in order to avoid the fat burning before it starts to melt. For more about House in the Woods Farm, go to the House in the Woods website, and read all of Ilene's MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here. Now it is usually either rendered animal fat, coconut oil, or butter. However, for smaller batches of fuel you could use a steel bucket. Britannica now has a site just for parents! The only consistent healthy vegetable oil claim I can see is about extra-virgin olive oil. At this point you can start the rendering process with the cubes, but it’s best to grind the fat beforehand—you waste less and get more oil by rendering ground fat. Hi, thanks for stopping by. Place the fat chunks in a medium saucepan or frying pan. Michael Pollan writes in his book In Defense of Food: Part of what drove my grandparents’ food culture from the American table was official scientific opinion, which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that animal fat was a deadly substance. It was used for generations in deep-fry applications until the cholesterol scare … No more. Figure 1: Essential steps in the extracting and refining of edible oil from oilseeds. https://www.britannica.com/science/fat-processing. I used to use olive oil for most of my sauteing. Compared with conventional rendering, the centrifugal methods provide a higher yield of better-quality fat, and the separated protein has potential as an edible meat product. Omissions? I was equally empowered to make my own mayonnaise when I learned more about the food industry history. Growing up there was always a tub of beef fat in the kitchen for cooking and frying. It is processed/rendered so it will not go bad and keeps at room temp a long time. Pressing processes. We'd like to be your ranchers. So, it was hamburgers and French fries for dinner. Like to read more content, Join the Mother Earth News Community Today! It’ll still be usable, but not ideal for pastries or pie crusts. For a little deeper understanding of different kinds of oils and their health qualities, the Weston Price Foundation has a comprehensive review of oils: The Skinny on Fats. 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