 Three posts ago, I showed you how to render tallow from beef fat for soap making and for old-fashioned candle making as well. The tallow can be used for incredible biscuits and pie crust too and the same process is used for rendering lard from pig fat for the same purchase. On Friday and Saturday, I cooked down 30 lbs of beef kidney fat to render about 15 lbs of beautiful, white tallow that went into the freezer. And it was when I finished the second run that I had a “well, duh” moment. As you saw from the photos, there is a lot of fat globules left over from the process and dumb me had thrown that away. As I was staring at my most recent by-product mess, it dawned on me that our bird feeders have cages for suet and we spend money every year on the stuff. Here, I had tons of the makings for suet cakes right in front of me.  Sooooo, I grabbed a bunch of my square and rectangular cake pans and poured the fat leftovers into the pans and evened out the surface. Then, I sprinkled bird seed on top and patted it down into the fat. The pans went into our big, anique Dr. Pepper cooler to cool down overnight.  The fat hardened nicely  When the suet was hard, I ran hot water over the backs of the pans and the suet popped right out onto a cutting surface.  A long blade knife worked perfectly to slice the block into squares that fit our bird feeders.  Those squares went into freezer bags and are now stored in the freezer until winter. So I got the tallow and some suet too!! I’m thinkin’ we are gonna have some pretty happy birdies!!  |
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Tags: bird seed, rendering leftovers, suet, tallow
Great inspiration! Where do you get the kidney fat to render?
Jackie, I go to a local meat packing house that slaughters and processes beefs and hogs. I actually have two source packing houses. One of them gives it to me for free and the other charges me 45 cents a pound. I just go to whichever one has the fat on hand at the time.
This is an awsome idea!