There has been a lot of information coming out about the use of beef fat/tallow for coking. I am sure that most of the tallow that you buy would have been rendered and purified just for cooking. What we are doing is just using it along with cooking the hamburger mostly, like if I am making stirfry with meat and veggies using hamburger chunks. If I just cook a hamburger patty, and we do not need the fat for anything else we are cooking, then I pour it over the dog or cat food for them to have extra good fat in their diet. We also save bacon fat when we have that and use it for cooking eggs or potatoes in . I used to have a regular little container with a strainer on the top to save the bacon grease in , but I don’t have one anymore, so we either use it right away , or it goes to the critters.
Yvonne--I usually cook a pound of bacon on a baking pan. We eat what we want and then put what's left in a zip bag in the refrigerator for sandwiches or whatever. I pour the grease into a small custard cup, let it cool, then cover with saran wrap or foil and refrigerate. It keeps for quite a long time and is handy for cooking beans or whatever needs a little flavor.
Oh my goodness! Not $4300, I need an editor. I think it was about 50lb's, that is fifty pounds of chuck roast.
I keep my bacon grease in the fridge in a small 1/4 pint canning jar, and my reduced butter fat out on the counter in a 1 pint canning jar (which is what 1# of butter yields.) Regarding tallow...when I moved into my 1st home in 1978, the 80+year old guy next door worked maintenance in the White House since he was a teenager...meaning 1915 or so. He told me he had tallow candles kicking around the house he snagged at some point in his career. I don't see where tallow is available at my local stores.
Walmart and Amazon both have cooking tallow for sale. I am not sure if they carry any in the store, most of what I am seeing on Walmart app is for shipping. But more and more people are buying it as they dump the terrible seed oils (which they call vegetable oils and are not made from any kind of vegetable). Even restaurants are now advertising that they are frying in tallow and not seed oils like Canola.
I just learned the difference in tallow and lard. Tallow comes from mutton or beef; lard comes from a pig. Not heard what tallow is used for but know lard is used for baking, frying and seasoning. I do know lard needs no refrigeration because it used to be on center isles in grocery along with bottle or canned oils. Although it wasn't ai tight in a waxy cardboard box. Also, since most food was fried with lard when I was a kid, nobody ever put it in fridge, just a covered grease can on the stove or nearby with a strainer to store it.
My English Mother-in-law used to make the very best pie crust pastry that I have ever tasted in my whole life, and she only ever used lard for making pastry. I think that most oldtime cooks used lard for a lot of their baking, but then along came P&G and made free cookbooks for everyone that only used Crisco in the recipe, and it was made from “crystallized cottonseed oil” which is how it got the name “Crisco”. Until then, cottonseed oil was used for machinery, and tallow and lard for cooking and baking, but Proctor and Gamble called it “vegetable oil” even though cotton is definitely NOT a vegetable, nor are any of the other seed oils that are sold as vegetable oil.
It still is, at least in Kroger. I use it when I make refried beans. I just watched a video about tallow. Authentic tallow is made from the internal fat that surrounds the organs, not the fat that is attached to muscles. They are chemically different from each other.
Who would have thought that we'd ever be discussing this corrupted stuff with a Kennedy on the horizon as a solution?
We save all the grease in cans from vegetables, tomatoes etc bought at the store. They are emptied, cleaned and then put in the cabinet above the stove. I hope they don't come tumbling out if they l lose their stability if I put up too many. My mom used to make soap with the grease as a charitable church activity.
And suet is supposed to be from the kidneys. I melts at a higher temperature and was/is used in a lot of those boiled puddings on reads about. One place I read that frozen butter or ghee can be used as a substitute for suet if you cannot get it here in the U.S. There also are two types of lard. Leaf lard is pure white and is deemed the best for baking. I think the darker lard is used for frying. If you butcher your own pigs, you can see the difference just by looking at it. When it is rendered, the water is removed and that makes it more shelf stable, although much of the commercial lard has a preservative in it--BHT I think. We usually put our lard into jars and sealed it when hot. Keeping it from the air in a dark place made it even more stable.
Mary I will save it once but after that I dispose of it. Oils aren't what they used to be, maybe peanut, some olive and real veggie and lard is, not sure. But we don't use that much oil anyway.