Rendering Tallow from Deer

The tallow above is from the deer we took and will be used for soap. The final product is milk white and very pretty, but it didn't start out that way. I read several different methods for rendering online and finally picked the simplest method. I likely will get more tallow another day and I may try another method then and compare the results. For now, I'm happy with how things turned out.


So this is the tallow we collected from my buck and Joe's doe. We didn't scrape for every last bit, but we collected quite a lot. The was slightly more than pictured here... We started cutting before I nabbed a picture. I rendered the tallow the evening that we processed deer, and only the day after we got them.


The first task was to clean up the fat a bit, cutting off extra prices of meat and tendon that were left from the rough cuts processing the deer. I read that most people will get the tallow coursely ground before rendering. While my family has a grinder, it is currently in my uncle's possession in Iowa. So I opted to just roughly chop everything. And a thanks to my dad for helping with all of this :). If you did have a grinder it would most likely save time and make this portion easier. I also read that you can also use a food processor, but that you must partially freeze the fat first or it will turn into a mess. To me, that process sounds too complicated and is unlikely to truly be worth the effort. This worked just fine.


I believe that completely chopped up we had about 7.5 lbs of fat before rendering. My mom actually helped me trouble shoot a bit as she remembers her parents rendering lard as a child. This is just a large roaster.


The whole thing went into the oven at 225 degrees F overnight... About 10 hours. It likely could have gone more, but at 5 am before I left for hunting it was good enough. I supposed this is a good point to address the smell. Everything you read says the same darn thing, "rendering tallow smells sooooo bad." Well it doesn't smell sooooo bad, and it definitely doesn't stink up a whole room. The smell is slightly unpleasant, but I think that frying hamburger is a similar contender for unpleasant smells.


The set up for straining was just a ladle and a couple pieces of cheese cloth wrapped over another pan. At first I used the ladle, but eventually I just poured it all over the cheese cloth. The chitlins (fried bits) were still quite soaked in tallow so I gathered up the cheese cloth and twisted and squeezed as much as I could from them. The chitlins are basically connective tissues, bits of meat, etc and the tallow is the pure fat from the animal. In processing lard from pigs, I'm told the chitlins are really tasty. I doubt they are from a deer... I couldn't bring myself to try.


The next part is just to ladle it into jars. I used a canning funnel to help out and it went very smoothly.


Here are the jars right after they were filled, the tallow looks quite yellow at first. I put in the liquid hot and as a bonus most of the jars sealed. Tallow, in any container, should last about a year in a cool, dry place. So, I'm not relying on the sealing to really preserve it, but it is kind of nice to know there is some added help there. You cannot can tallow the regular way, you risk exploding fat from the heating process and the tallow itself is supposed to interfere with with how the cans seal. Some people can clarified butter in a similar way with success. I would use common sense and not rely too heavily on sealed cans to preserve the tallow.


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Location:Excel,United States

I know it's the same picture as above, but I had to end with the pretty tallow in the jars again :). I will note that there are some impurities at the bottom of the jars. Next time I may try rendering the tallow in water. The impurities are supposed to sink to the bottom of the water and the tallow just solidifies on top and can be removed. The only disadvantage as it is a bit more complicated than the way I tried. Still, if I try it next time I will be able to compare the two processes.