#127 – How to Render Fat at Home (with Q&A)

Fat is one of the cornerstones of ancestral eating. But getting hold of good saturated fat is not easy and can be eye-wateringly expensive. Making it at home, as Andrea and I do, you can cut your costs incredibly and also feel sure of the provenance and processing.

This episode will talk you through everything you need to know about rendering fat. We’ll explain the different types of fats, their names, their properties and how you can use them. We’ll then demystify the ways you can render fat in your kitchen, no matter what equipment you have, giving you step-by-step instructions. We’ll clarify how you’ll know your fat is done, what to do with the leftovers, how to clean up, the many different ways you can store your fat and how to know if it’s gone bad.

This episode is peppered with real questions from real ancestral cooks about fat rendering – thank you to every supporter who sent in their query.

Resources:

Tallow price online link

Lard price online link

How to render lard in a slow cooker

7 ways to use lard (including a lard crackling spread recipe)

Pane con Ciccioli recipe

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Good morning, Alison. How are you?

Alison:
Hey. Yeah, I’m good, thank you. Good afternoon from a very… Oh, is it still winter, England?

Andrea:
Is it?

Alison:
I want spring to come. Yes, it is.

Andrea:
Okay. It’s weird?

Alison:
It’s been raining here for about a month.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. I understand that.

Alison:
Subtext of that is, I miss Italy. Where’s the Italian sun gone? Because it used to come out even in like January and February. And then you were like, oh, quick, sun, get outside. This is wonderful.

Andrea:
And I was even getting…

Alison:
And then you had to get back in for the summer.

Andrea:
I was getting the Italian sun through you. I feel like.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I actually feel the absence of that sun.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Because I didn’t realize how much I saw of it until I wasn’t seeing it.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Through your camera.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
It’s okay. I did, I think as I’ve alluded to before, I did watch your bows, of course, like times.

Alison:
Just to get the light, just to see the Italian light on my table.

Andrea:
Yeah, literally. I was like, look at that sign, look at that sign. But it’s okay. You know, we’re enjoying our boggy. You know the Romans hated Britain, right? Like they felt.

Alison:
Yeah. They brought oats and then they went home.

Andrea:
Never mind. It’s too moldy. we.

Alison:
Went for a walk yesterday and literally i was like oh slip slip.

Andrea:
Slip yeah we.

Alison:
Were falling over all over the place.

Andrea:
I warn people when they come out here i just tell them you know do not wear white pants and wear boots with tread and then just be prepared to slip it is just grassy and muddy and slick and it’s we’re on a hill so yeah we.

Alison:
Were trying to go up a hill gabriel at one point and said, I don’t think we can do it, mum. I think we have to go back and find another way.

Andrea:
There’s progress over here. I was trying to get home.

Alison:
How are you? Sorry.

Andrea:
No, I’m good. I’m good. I’m feeling pretty good because I’ve had a decent breakfast and what all. So let’s start out by me asking you what you had for lunch because I know you probably had something interesting, but I actually don’t know what it was.

Alison:
I did. I actually did have something interesting. I had something which I’m calling lumpy tums.

Andrea:
Excellent.

Alison:
And lumpy tums, as in tummy and lumpy.

Andrea:
None of those words make sense to me.

Alison:
No, well, there’s actually another title for it, which is a bit more rude, which I’m not going to say.

Andrea:
You’re harsh.

Alison:
It’s just something that’s been in one of the oak books, like one-line mention. Oh, in Yorkshire, they also have this other way of making porridge, which they called lumpy tums. And the previous name was?

Andrea:
So, that was an entire… What?

Alison:
That’s what it’s called. That’s what it’s called in some parts of Yorkshire and another part of, I think in Lancashire, it was called some other word, which I’m not going to say.

Andrea:
Oh, boy.

Alison:
Anyway, so porridge was usually prized for being free of lumps and really smooth. And lumpy tums is like the opposite. The point is to make lumps. So I’ve been playing around with the idea and thinking, oh, I wonder how they made that. What about this? Try this. Try this. And then we tried it and I was like, oh, that’s got to have some other things in it. So I’ve made it into not a breakfast dish, into a lunch dish, which both of my boys absolutely love. So it’s oatmeal, like Scottish oats, which you call a bit thinner than Scottish oats, which so you probably have to blitz them up in the coffee grinder for a second or two. And then using water, I’ve formed them into little balls, like maybe half the size of gnocchi. so they’re like oak gnocchi in a way but they’re smaller so you are literally making.

Alison:
Well I’m not really making balls because it’s really simple my version is anyway which is you just pour the water in and make a big ball and then you just break it up and it sort of breaks up into little kind of.

Alison:
Small balls but they’re not spherical in any by any stretch of the imagination kind of lumpy um and then i’m putting those in boiling water and they cook but because they’re not um they’re not like a gnocchi in that you know gnocchi cooks in water and then the water gets thrown away and it’s clear still the oats have smaller particles and so they’re actually producing a kind of a soupy porridge around them as well as lumpy bits lots and lots.

Alison:
Of lumpy bits and then i’ve i’m kind of developing a recipe for the book for them which um involves frying onion mushroom and bacon separately whilst that lumpy time is cooking well whilst the lumpy time is cooking in another saucepan and also then steaming some greens and then at the end i’ll put the greens onions the bacon and the mushroom in with the lumpy time stir it all around and then put a load of grated shredded cheese in stir that all around um and you end up with one dish which is kind of like a cross between a gnocchi in that it’s got that kind of lumpy feel to it but perhaps a carbonara because it’s got a really cheesy creamy onion and we’ve got bacon and mushroom in there a bit salty from the bacon and mushroom and then to finish it off as a main dish I’m putting greens in it so some steamed kale so it’s one dish kind of seems a bit like a pasta dish you know that it’s very very unctuous and and creamy and cheesy and lovely but it’s it’s like lumps of oat and all the extras around it that’s what we have for lunch amazing.

Andrea:
I mean anybody who has children well maybe you should just say anybody who has children anybody who has children with kind of sensory awareness has heard about it if there’s lumps in their porridge. But I do remember as a kid, actually, my mom made this stuff called cream of wheat. I think it’s kind of like grits with wheat. Yeah, yeah. um the idea was to be smooth but i was always kind of liked it when oh there’d be some little lumps in it you know maybe by an accident i liked the chewy texture of them so.

Alison:
Yeah sometimes you know it’s interesting doing the research that you know when porridge was cooked as porridge it was supposed to be smooth but some people liked the lumps they’re called knots that’s what they seem to be in the literature knots so some people used to make um a browse which is a traditional Scottish way of making porridge but doing it very very quickly by pouring boiling water over oatmeal, and some people liked to create knots in it by not stirring it as much you know and having lumps I quite like the lumps and Rob’s usually oh I don’t like those bits you know he’s usually fussy about that kind of thing but he really likes it he’s like these are like gnocchi they’re lovely you know are.

Andrea:
They called knots like n-o-t as and I did not stir this or knots like knots in wood With.

Alison:
A K, yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s what I was picturing. So that I could see. Also, you know, anybody who’s had a split firewood, which is probably anybody who was living prior to coal, would know how you come across those knots in the wood and there you are, stuck. Interesting.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Wow. Okay.

Alison:
So this is going to be in the old book. Knots in the woods very beautiful.

Andrea:
You promise.

Alison:
Yes, hopefully. And it’s only just off the press, really. So Katie, my chief recipe tester in Germany, hasn’t even had this one yet because I’m still thinking, oh, do I need a bit more salt?

Andrea:
That is fresh off the press.

Alison:
How’s the balance of the greens? You know, it was very much a test this time. And I think I’ll probably do one more before I send it to her. So it is hot off the press.

Andrea:
It is so great seeing her testing out your recipes today. And it’s nice that oats are gluten-free so she can run those through her kitchen.

Alison:
Enjoy them.

Andrea:
Well, my food was not— What about you? Well, it was not as exciting. I poached a couple eggs, and my mom was here on Sunday. Everybody came over for our big American football game that kind of ends the season or whatever. And I don’t know anything about football, but let me tell you, I like making the food. So, actually, half of us were upstairs cooking and the other half were downstairs watching. And those of us that were upstairs, you know, everybody come up and they’re like, come on down. We’re like, ah, I don’t know. We’re having fun out there. I don’t think so. Like, this is literally perfect, you know, to have half the people who are just excited to be able to make kind of party food and half the people who really want to watch the show. Yeah, definitely. It was a great combo. And then they would come up and tell us the score when our city’s football team won by quite a lot. So that was fun for us.

Alison:
Bonus.

Andrea:
Yeah. But… Anyways, I’ll post about what I made in the Discord because it’s a lot to go through on here. But Gary really wanted chips and he really wanted dip, which is probably a pretty straightforward proposition if you’re going to a grocery store. But I’m insisting to not go to a grocery store, so that means I had to come up with a lot. And because I was insisting on not going to the grocery store, I had to also, you know, I couldn’t like mix cheese or something. I had to make the cheese. So it became a procedure that took me like two weeks to keep everything ready. But it was just really fun. It’s not something you do all the time, but, you know, fun for the season. Yeah, definitely. And all that being said, my mom was here on Sunday, and one thing she brought was some cheese to go on some of the things that we had made. It wasn’t in any of the dishes that I prepared, but she brought cheese to go with the tacos. and um so there was a little bit left this morning and i sprinkled some on my poached eggs and then my brother-in-law and sister had got us this like black salt for christmas i don’t know if you’ve seen it before the salt is black it’s interesting is.

Alison:
That like the russian black salt that is in.

Andrea:
Um dara.

Alison:
Goldstein’s book beyond the north wind that i’ve made twice.

Andrea:
Yeah I don’t know.

Alison:
In a cast iron pan. And we had to hold it out the window.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.

Alison:
In a big window in Italy because it was smoking so much. Is that the same thing or not?

Andrea:
I’m just picturing, you know, when Life is Beautiful, it’s like, Maria, la chiave. And she throws it out the window. I’m picturing, like, listen, it will be insale. And it’s just like, salt out the window. Oh, man. Yeah, I don’t know.

Alison:
I don’t know if it’s the same.

Andrea:
No, no.

Alison:
It’s like, it was sort of burnt sourdough rye bread mixed with salt and it’s got all the charcoal and stuff in it that’s supposed to be detoxing and good for you.

Andrea:
I don’t know. I guess I’d have to look at it. I know we read it, the label and talked about it, but honestly, I don’t remember. So anyways, it was good and it looked interesting and I had a… Like a latte with, I guess, milk and coffee, and then I have a giant cup of tea here. But I also have a review from Hannah about our first cookbook that we came out with, Meals at the Ancestral Hearth. So, surprisingly, some people who listen to the podcast and also family members of mine are like, what? There’s a cookbook? So I thought I’d read this review just to remind everybody, yes, there is a cookbook. And a lot of what you and I talk about is in the cookbook just because we said let’s kind of look around our life and pick some of our most used recipes. So Hannah said, very much enjoying these recipes. They make intimidating processes like working with organ meats and fermenting very accessible. We loved the cookies and the heart and are looking forward to trying more recipes. Well, thank you, Ian.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
That was very nice.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And we just put out a new cookbook, which is all about pork.

Alison:
Beautiful cookbook.

Andrea:
I know. Delicious cookbook. A lot of listeners contributed to it. It was just going to start out to be like a booklet, and then it just grew and grew and grew. So it turned into a whole book as long as any of our other books we’ve ever put out. So, Laura said, I finally got a chance to look through the cookbook and listen to the podcast, which is our first episode of this year. Both fantastic. Thank you. Yes, the podcast episode is great. If you want to hear… Oh my gosh, Alison. So me and the kids wanted to listen to Rob’s song, obviously.

Alison:
Oh, okay. The pig’s song.

Andrea:
So the first thing we did was we skipped to the end to hear the full song.

Alison:
Don’t worry about the podcast. Let’s just listen to the song.

Andrea:
I was like, eh, pork, and let’s hear the song. And we loved the song, but I was driving, so I couldn’t stop it. you know and so then it started doing our little outro and there’s this part where i say in our outro leave us a five-star review but for whatever reason i just sound weird and do you don’t know i thought i did and now me and the kids can’t stop saying it to each other like the kids walk up in that accent leave us a five-star review we can’t stop saying it so anyways we’re entertained um so don’t.

Alison:
Ever listen to yourself that’s the answer to that.

Andrea:
Don’t ever listen.

Alison:
To anything you’ve ever recorded.

Andrea:
So it cracks me up though because now like i hand jake up something and he goes leave us a five-star review yes do leave us a five-star review guys it really helps but also, thank you for the idea you had you made a bundle and and then you told rob to put the bundle in the shop which is how things happen for us and so you can get all three of our cookbooks so the meals at the ancestral hearth the spelt book and the pork book for dollars which is six dollars off if you bought them individually so um we will put that link in the show notes so you can go yeah.

Alison:
The link is in the show notes like if you’re.

Andrea:
Not even.

Alison:
Listening to this episode if you remember in the future it’s in all of the show notes so you can get that.

Andrea:
Link for.

Alison:
The three books in there. The pork book has its own special little link. So you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash pork and you’ll go straight to the pork cookbook.

Andrea:
I hope the pork book feels special.

Alison:
Yeah, yes, it does.

Andrea:
Alison, speaking of pork, actually, that’s a great lead-in to what we are talking about today. Do you want to introduce our topic?

Alison:
Yeah, so this episode’s been on the table, as it were, for, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half. I thought we must do an episode on this. And finally, we’re getting around to it. We get a lot of questions, you know, through all of our channels on the Discord forum, particularly about rendering fat. I think that’s because the process can seem intimidating. I remember when I first started rendering fat years back now, I was just like, how do I do this? How do I know it’s done? What’s going on here? And so this episode is here to help you realize that it’s not and to give you more ideas if you’re already doing it and kind of more guidance. So we’ll talk about why you’d want to render fat we will go through in detail how to render fat and along the way we will talk about what you can do with that fat what we do with that fat what our listeners and supporters do with the fat and we will also answer questions that i put a call out for into our supporter community and we got some really good questions back lots about how do i know if it’s off how do i know if it’s done all those kind of icky questions that you know when you’ve only done a few times you’re not quite sure about. So we’ll cover those too. Before we start that, let’s go to an ad break.

Alison:
Okay, so let’s start with why render fat at home. Firstly, saturated fat is traditional and healthy. All of our episodes, you know, if you go back, we’ve got another episode way back in the annals on fat and virtually every episode somewhere we mention lard or tallow.

Alison:
And so it’s a wonderful fat to have in your kitchen that’s versatile. We will talk about the many ways we use it. um if you try and buy previously rendered animal fats on the market they are available they are so expensive and i’ve not bought these fats um myself for a very long time but i have recently seen tallow at the farmer’s market that i go to and i looked at the tag the price tag i was like oh you know that it’s a shock when i know how much it costs me to make fat at home um and you know that person who’s made that fact put a lot of time effort into it and you know paid for the stalled and made the jars and made it all sanitized and lovely so you can understand while they’re charging for it but you can do that at home and in for far less money i wanted to give a couple of examples because i looked up online the price of tallow and lard so i found one tallow which was grams which is about a pound isn’t it I think and that was . pound sterling so that works out at pounds sterling per kilogram I’m going to give you an example.

Alison:
Exactly exactly that’s what I mean the lard basically was about the same I found gram jar, which is just a bit less than half of that tallow, that was six British pounds. That works out at pounds per kilogram. So both around the same price, like over pound a kilo.

Andrea:
Duck fat would probably be even higher, wouldn’t it?

Alison:
Even higher. I would have thought on goose fat, probably even higher. Yeah. I can buy a pack of three kilos, that’s about six pounds, of back fat or beef fat from my regenerative farmer at the market for four British pounds. And from that, I make, depending on what fat it is and what else is on that fat, whether there’s bits of meat on it or not, I generally make about one to . kilos of lard or tallow. So I’m making potentially up to . kilos of tallow for £ plus the electricity, whereas that same amount of lard or tallow would probably cost in excess of £. So it’s times the price to buy it online.

Andrea:
The beautiful thing is that so much of lard rendering is hands-off. Yes. Or fat range.

Alison:
Which we will talk about.

Andrea:
So.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
It’s not really like, oh, it takes a whole day. Kind of does, but it doesn’t.

Alison:
Yeah. It’s a bit like the sourdough thing. You know, you just go back and stretch and fold it every hour, maybe.

Andrea:
Does it make you realize, Alison, if you go way back to our episode, The Fats We Love, The Fats We Leave, where I introduced the two gentlemen, Procter and Gamble, and how they were making a waste product to replace. tallow and lard.

Alison:
Yeah yeah.

Andrea:
Tallow i mean i i don’t know what the relative price was back then but consider also that animals today produce more fat you know they’ve been bred in many ways to produce more.

Alison:
Fat so.

Andrea:
It was probably a little bit harder to get so perhaps relatively more valuable, so i mean they wanted a cheap product and they got one.

Alison:
Yeah there’s um i think there’s a download for supporters on our site of you kind of flicking through one of those old crisco um i’m not sure if they can still get the.

Andrea:
Video because they don’t have that hosting program anymore that hosted the videos but i do know that there is a download of like some of the recipes and things.

Alison:
From the book because we could just basically cross out the crisco and put lard and make those recipes yeah which is fabulous yeah.

Andrea:
Anyway that’s a good episode.

Alison:
Yeah um so as well as the price if you go and try and buy um lard out in the marketplace it potentially could be horrible and you were mentioning the pork episode which headed up this year for us um i recount in there an experience that we had in this family when gabriel um tried some shop-bought lard, and was not pleased at all. So if you haven’t listened to that, go back and listen to that episode just to hear that. Um, pork lard that you buy in the store is often hydrogenated to increase its shelf life. And we all know that hydrogenation of fats is not a good thing these days. So, you know, not only are you paying more, but potentially you’re paying for something that’s horrible.

Alison:
And as I said earlier, cooking with lard or tallow and or other rendered fats like the goose fat or the duck fat you mentioned, Andrew, is an absolute joy. I mean, I just love doing it in my kitchen for pastries, for roast potatoes, for frying, in breads, all over the place. So that’s why. I just wanted to touch briefly on what you can do with it. And we will talk about this as we go through the episode. But basically, you can just eat it. So we spread bread with lard. We also, tallow’s generally harder than lard. So it’s very more difficult to spread. But the way that we get it on bread because obviously it’s great to have fat with bread is we melt tallow in a frying pan and fry the bread. So very often if we’re having bread with our main meal we will literally melt some tallow fry the bread and the bread goes crispy with all the tallow on it. You can cook with both the fats you can make them into spreads you can bake with them you can grease dishes with them and you can make cosmetics with them. And Bridget who is a community member when we brought this topic up on the discord forum she said that she makes a whipped tallow balm cream and but that someone had just given her a lard balm and she hadn’t even thought about that as a possibility so you can use both i know that there are quite a few tallow balms on the market but you can use lard in cosmetics i had a little jar.

Andrea:
Of tallow in the kitchen a couple weeks ago and i was just i don’t know sometimes i just do things without thinking and i just took our immersion blunder And I was like, what if I just, and I just like jammed it down in the jar. And it instantly. Yeah. Turned into this fluffy.

Alison:
Spreadable. I’ve never tried the whipped thing.

Andrea:
Neither did I. What do I know? Anyways, this is what happens when you do things without thinking about it. And then I had this jar of fluffy tallow. And I thought, like, is it going to melt? Is it going to, you know what I mean? Kind of like sink back into itself. I literally left it on the counter and just used it out of the jar until it was gone for a couple days. It was a small jar. and it never like unfluffed it never went hard i was like wait a minute instantly spreadable tallow so it was amazing what state.

Alison:
Was it in when you put when you.

Andrea:
Jammed your immersion.

Alison:
Blender in there.

Andrea:
Let’s see it must have been pretty sure it came off of like a pot of bones that i was cooking, and okay so it wasn’t hot i was throwing together dinner for gary as he was heading out the door and I was thinking like, what could I throw on this? What could I put in that? And I don’t even know really why I did it, but whatever.

Alison:
You know, sometimes that’s the best thing.

Andrea:
I had the jar and I was like, well. Anyways, that’s a thought. I only ever heard of whipped tallow in the context of, you know, putting on your face or something. But I thought, well, this is really, you could spread it on bread or whatever.

Alison:
I might have to try that.

Andrea:
I think.

Alison:
We’ve already got tons of tallow in the freezer maybe the next time. I did want to say that through the winter, sometimes Gabriel’s lips get quite dry.

Andrea:
Mine too.

Alison:
And we just keep a piece of tallow in a little bowl by the door. And then he just rubs it on his lips. And because we wet-rendered it, it’s really, he doesn’t smell of beef at all. You know, I haven’t mixed anything in it for him to put it on his lips. He just puts it on his lips as it is. The other thing I wanted to say about cosmetics was that in my research for the oat book, I’m doing a lot of work on the British newspaper archives, which is like an online collection of thousands of newspapers going back hundreds and hundreds of years. And very often when I’ve been looking up, you know, searching for oats or searching for some word that is some dish, i’ve come across little um recipes for lard cold creams and lard um kind of injury protecting creams and that kind of thing so it just it was normal you know a few generations back in this country for sure to just make a cream out of lard.

Andrea:
And people are always shocked that you can do things with talon and lard and that is exactly why because we i didn’t grow up with tallow and lard. It wasn’t part of my childhood. But if you want to know, well, what do you guys use tallow and lard for? Anywhere a recipe would normally call for vegetable oil, salad oil, Crisco, butter. Oftentimes, one of these things comes into the picture. Sometimes you might use olive oil, but that is just so rare for me to have olive oil on hand. I make salad dressing out of, I just emulsify it with all the other things that I want to put in it. There you go. I may not have salad oil or whatever. I don’t even know what that is.

Alison:
And do you do it from large you’ve had on the counter, or has your lab been in the fridge when you do that?

Andrea:
Let’s see. Probably room temperature. I’m thinking back… My procedures are not very precise because they’re usually rotated around, like, you know, diaper changing schedule. But what would probably happen is I’d put the ingredients on the counter and then I’d end up coming back to it an hour later. So, yeah, so it’s gone soft. More or less it’s going to be on the counter.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve never made salad dressing with lard. But I remember we had a conversation, you probably don’t remember, about, I don’t know, five years ago or something, about someone who there was that craze of having like butter trays where you mix butter with, herbs and that and then you spread it out on a tray and then you put crudités around it and that kind of thing and we were like we could do this with lard have we done it mix all these garlic and now we never of course we haven’t done yes we could how many things come into that category two million give us five more years okay um okay so right let’s move on with the episode um let’s talk about the different types of fats that you can use and specifically what you need to ask for because i think there’s some confusion around this so starting first of all with pork you can get pork back fat which is from the back of a pig and that’s the standard generally for lard you can also get leaf fat from a pig now that is the fat that surrounds the kidneys and.

Alison:
Traditionally it’s considered better um i’m not sure whether i have experienced it being particularly better but traditionally it is especially for pastry you can also get core fat which is the fat that’s around the other organs and it’s kind of it’s like a membrane um so you stretch it out it’s kind of stretchy and it’s um you can see through bits of it now traditionally that’s used in faggots in the uk um which are very similar to fegatelli which is also used for in Italy, but that can also be rendered into lard. Andrea, you had something you wanted to say here about a conversation you had on Discord, I think, which is useful.

Andrea:
Yeah, Molly had mentioned, and this does… dovetailing with my own experience, that her pork farmer, when she asked for leaf fat, said, yes, you can buy leaf fat. I sell it. It’s more expensive. But also, you can use any of the lard from my pigs as leaf lard in pastries, etc. And Molly said she’s had no problem with it. And this does confirm what I have seen, which is that we’ve bought pigs from a variety of different friends, and they’ve been different breeds. And then we’ve raised pigs ourselves, which were considered a lard breed, Minglitsa. And then we were given some pork when our neighbors moved recently, and it was from pastured pig. All these pigs have been pastured. However, I will say the lard was different from different pigs. And the lard from our lard pigs was, I mean, it is pure, pristine snow white and so what Molly was sharing was that the pigs make the lard differently and it’s not just like oh this pig has what I thought a lard pig was just say a pig has more.

Andrea:
Fat on it versus a pig with less fat but that fat is actually being made a little bit differently in the pig and i was not aware of that so also if anybody knows more about this i’m very curious to learn more about this detail it seems kind of elusive to learn much about and maybe an obscure category of fat but if you do know more um breeds and and how the fat is being put away do let us now. But I would say maybe if you’ve run into lard and you thought you didn’t like it, well, you know, if you thought you didn’t like it, you didn’t like it. And there might be better lard out there because the lard that we got from this local pastured pig, it’s darker in color and it has like a stronger taste. And we used it in muffins, you know, to replace butter as I usually do. And I regretted doing that and wished I had used our own lard because the flavor came through rather strongly.

Alison:
Gosh, okay.

Andrea:
And the kids didn’t care for it. They ate them, but they didn’t care for it as much. So, you know, just think about different types of apples or tomatoes, and there’s different types of pork, and the lard contains different. So, you know, maybe if the lard is a little different than you expected, it might not be that you did a poor job rendering it. It might just be it was a different type of pig. So you could always ask a farmer, you know, how’s the lard from these pigs? They might not know, but it could be worth asking.

Alison:
I think this is a fascinating topic and we will probably touch on it a bit again later on. Because, I mean, I’ve made ridiculous amounts of lard. And also I’ve had lard vary incredibly. And, you know, I have moved around a lot. So, you know, I’ve made lard from this country. I’ve made lard from Italy and from different farmers, different parts of Italy, different farmers in this country.

Alison:
And I really have seen lard that’s very, very different. And, you know, some of that might have been the breed of pig, as you just talked about. I think there are other things that play into it as well. And I think we can, we’ll talk about that a bit later. So let’s go on to beef before we forget that we’re in the sourcing section. I’m trying to remember. Okay, so beef fat, the fat from a cow makes tallow. But there’s also another word associated with beef fat, which is suet. And people often get confused. And I include myself in that a few years ago. I didn’t understand. Yeah, people are saying, me? Often get confused. And we had a supportive question around this. which was, I don’t understand the difference between suet and tallow. So suet is raw. It’s the hard fat found around the kidneys and loins of cattle or sheep. Whereas tallow is that fat, any fat from a cow so not necessarily from the kidneys or the loins after it has been rendered.

Andrea:
Suet is.

Alison:
Yeah so suet is hard and crumbly.

Andrea:
Yes if you get some.

Alison:
Suet you’ll find it kind of breaks up in your hands and it’s used traditionally for fakie pastries or suet puddings when you get it you should keep it in the fridge because it’s raw rendered tallow however it has a very different feel it’s waxy it’s smooth and you don’t need to keep it in the fridge it’s shelf stable and then generally we would use that for high heat frying for searing and for making um cosmetic products as we’ve talked about.

Andrea:
On the so.

Alison:
The first time yeah gone.

Andrea:
Well i want to this might be my ignorance showing but on the suet part before we move on past it i wanted to say up on the pork when you said the leaf fat was from the kidneys yes this could be my ignorance showing but when we did our pigs we like pulled the leaf fat from inside the like belly area um not the stomach but the belly and it came off in like a long crumbly strip um okay and i don’t remember it being around the kidneys but maybe the kidneys were like at the end of it or something um or.

Alison:
The other end like.

Andrea:
Like not the belly end yeah yeah i’m just trying to think where in a pig i guess it kind of would be towards the end but um yeah this could just be me showing so.

Alison:
Again i’m not.

Andrea:
A few pigs i’ve butchered i’m not butcher there so a few breeds yeah.

Alison:
So I don’t know about that.

Andrea:
But I will say on the suet, that is a difficult piece to work with sometimes because you’re like trying to crumble it away. And if you’ve ever done those science experiments or whatever, like school projects where there’s like hack away the play and find the, you know, pyramid inside or whatever. It feels like that because there’s all kinds of glands and the kidneys and stuff in there. So you’re kind of hacking away and finding them and pulling them out as you go. But I did not realize that suet had to remain raw. So now I’m thinking of all the suet that I rendered.

Alison:
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to say next is tallow, basically. So the first time I made a Christmas pudding, traditionally Christmas pudding is made with suet.

Andrea:
Right.

Alison:
And I thought, but this is just raw fat. I can’t put this in my Christmas pudding. And so I rendered it, just like you basically said, and I ended up with a waxy, smooth, shelf-stable fat, because that’s what happens if you rendered suet. But I needn’t have done that, because traditionally, suet was just crumbled up and used in Christmas puddings or other steamed puddings and sausages as it was, without actually having been rendered.

Andrea:
Well, that explains my confusing conversation with Franzine then, where everybody was like, do you render your suet? And I was like, yeah, why wouldn’t you? And she was like, what?

Alison:
Yeah, that’s not, that’s not so it. So yeah, hopefully we’ve cleared that up. There’s a couple of other sources of animal fat that I want to cover. Firstly, lamb. So there is a similar situation with lamb and you can make tallow with the fat from lamb. It has a stronger flavor, but it’s very good. And Andrea, you, I’m wondering, have you ever tried lamb tallow? Have you ever made it? Because you have some sheep, don’t you?

Andrea:
Yeah if it goes if the if the week goes according to plan some friends are coming up and we’re butchering four sheep this weekend but i don’t really know if they’ll have much fat because we don’t feed feed them grains or anything and they just roam around the property and eat grass on their own and it’s winter so and we’ll report back yeah and.

Alison:
Let us know and whether they do have any fat.

Andrea:
Yeah that.

Alison:
Would be nice to know um chicken as well chicken fat which we all love is called schmaltz. And that comes from the skin and the fat under it. And you can actually render it separately. You know, if you go online, you’ll find recipes for how to render it. You put it in water. It’s like a wet method. But generally, I’ve never done that with chicken fat. I’ve just enjoyed the chicken fat when I cook a chicken.

Andrea:
I mean, I actually, when I, all kind of chicken fat like i’ll hold it back and throw it in the broth so that it renders.

Alison:
Itself in.

Andrea:
The top so i guess it is a wet rendering but you know it’s in broth and then i ladle it off the top into jars and then it’s you know liquid gold.

Alison:
Okay because.

Andrea:
It’ll have thyme and sage and salt.

Alison:
All the flavorings oh it’s so good yeah wonderful um kim who is a supporter when she heard that we were doing this episode she said i can’t wait it’s such a great topic she asked i’d like ideas for finding budget-friendly fat it is so expensive around here we got half a cow recently and they gave us very little fat even though i specifically asked for it she went and got me an extra bag when i looked disappointed i think personally kim i would say that that person who you bought that from that half a cow is probably not used to people asking her for the fat and so you know she you ask for some fat and she’s like oh they obviously only want a tiny bit um what comes with building a relationship with farmers is that you keep saying i want more fat, and then they get used to it.

Andrea:
I don’t know if she was picking it up from the butcher or.

Alison:
The person but.

Andrea:
Um the farmer but yeah you be that person who asks because honestly Nine and a half times out of ten If they handed you that giant bag What people say is What am I going to do with all of this? And then as a farmer You’re like well I’m so glad That’s all getting thrown away So yeah It comes down to the relationship We can’t machine our way out of this We have to, Oh, yeah, but that’s such a bummer that she didn’t get very much.

Alison:
Yeah, I think keep going with it, Kea. Go back there again, and hopefully next time she’ll know that you do want more, and so she’ll give you the extra bag. And if you’re with this farmer all the time.

Andrea:
So if somebody else doesn’t want it, and I do, I always offer the farmer, and I say, I’ll pay for it, like I’ll buy it. You don’t have to just give it to me. so you know if you say somebody else is getting a cow butchered and if they don’t want the fat i’ll take it yeah.

Alison:
I’ll buy it from you yeah yeah okay let’s um go to an ad break and we will come back with how to render fat, Okay, so let’s talk about the details of the actual process for rendering fat. So, when I was interviewed with Hilda for the Western Price Foundation podcast, I think we talked about this in the pork episode, Hilda said, you know, it’s kind of intimidating to say the word rendering. Why don’t we just call it melting?

Andrea:
I agree.

Alison:
And, you know, this is what it is. It’s just melting that solid fat to get liquid fat.

Andrea:
I think I’ve said before, if you’ve ever cooked bacon, you’ve rendered fat because you probably poured fat off of that. Well, there you were. You just also ate the cracklings, you know?

Alison:
Yeah. Yum. Yum. So, yeah, it all involves basically melting it out. It is best to do it in bulk because it takes time and effort and there’s cleaning up involved.

Andrea:
I agree.

Alison:
It is also best to chop it up. That can take quite a lot of time and take quite a toll on fingers. So if you can, get Rob over and put him with a sharp knife and a chopping board and give him something to listen to.

Andrea:
I’m going to say, then you’ve got to read something.

Alison:
Yeah, don’t you have to read some Sherlock Holmes or something to him. Anyway, you could mince it. If you get a mincer, as long as your fat isn’t too squidgy or kind of dirty with bits of the muscle meat still on it, you can mince it. or ask your butcher or your farmer if they will mince it for you because they have big mincing machines and what does it take really to put you know three or four or five kilos of fat through their mincing machine the smaller you can get it the better because the kind of economics of it if you’re melting a big piece of fat is going to take longer and be slower to get all of the fat out of that than if you’ve got smaller pieces it will be more efficient if you have smaller pieces, So once that fat is chopped up, you just need to heat it. So, when we’re heating it, we talk about what you heat it in.

Andrea:
Microwave.

Alison:
And what temperature to heat it in. Well, of course, yes. I’ll just go and buy a microwave to do that. I’m now thinking of what would happen.

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh.

Alison:
We should know. There’s got to be a YouTube video somewhere of someone doing that, hasn’t there?

Andrea:
No, don’t do it.

Alison:
Would it explode?

Andrea:
Don’t do it, guys. Seems like a bad idea.

Alison:
I don’t know. No, don’t do it. Don’t put it in a microwave. You can put it in the oven, in a Dutch oven or casserole. You can do it in your slow cooker. You can do it in an instant pot. You can even render fat on the stove. When I rendered that suet for that Christmas pudding incorrectly, I did it on the stove. Temperature-wise, you…

Andrea:
I don’t think I’ve ever done it in the oven.

Alison:
You haven’t done it on the stove.

Andrea:
I’m always on the stove because I can’t use a slow cooker or the instant pot really without sacrificing.

Alison:
Oh, so you always do it on the stove?

Andrea:
Yeah, always. I don’t think I’ve ever done it in the oven.

Alison:
So, how do you control your temperature on the stove?

Andrea:
You’re assuming a lot.

Alison:
How do you know that it’s not too hot?

Andrea:
Do I know? I don’t know.

Alison:
Do you know?

Andrea:
Just keep stirring it and just look at it.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Yeah, I don’t know.

Alison:
See, I like the slow cooker or the Instant Pot because I know what temperature my slow cooker or my Instant Pot runs at.

Andrea:
See, that’s good.

Alison:
And so I know that that’s happening and what temperature it’s at and I can trust it.

Andrea:
Honestly, I’ve never stuck a thermometer in it or anything, so I don’t know. And I didn’t even know until I was reading through the notes. I was like, oh, yeah, I guess that’s probably about what it is. Because, like, if I’m frying something, I want to get the temperature up to, like, or something. That takes considerably higher heat to get my fat up to that temperature. And I know how long I have to wait for that. But when I’m rendering it, I don’t get it up very high, as we’ll talk about later. There’s reasons for that.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s talk about that now. So basically, you want to heat it up enough for that fat to start coming out. You don’t want to overheat it. So smoke points for fat are high for saturated fat, but you don’t want to push it anywhere near that. In my Instant Pot slow cooker setting, I know that that, when I put it on high for slow cook, that that is around in centigrade, to degrees centigrade. If you look at kind of charts and tables online, it says that the optimal temperature for rendering fat is between and C. So you can see that my C is quite lower than that. Now to C in F is to . So if you’re in the States, you’re looking for a temperature that’s to . You can check that with a probe thermometer. Lard has a smoke point that’s way above that, C, which is F.

Andrea:
Lard is out in the ages.

Alison:
That’s the lowest smoke point. It can go up to C for F.

Andrea:
Yeah, .

Alison:
Depending on the source and the processing method. So you’ve got a long way to go to you’re going to get larger smoke point. But generally, you want to keep it much lower. like FC. Beef tallow has a smoke point that’s around to F, to C. So again, you can see with that, you’re not, if you keep it in those low ranges, even if you’re not sure, I mean, you’ll be able to kind of see. Andrea, I saw that you said you heard once that if you see it browning and you hear it crackling, then it’s too hot. So if you don’t have a thermometer or you don’t have a device in which you can easily know what temperature it is you can watch it and once you’ve done it two or three times you’re you’ll be like oh that’s a bit too high i can see it’s starting to you know crackling or that’s not quite high enough because it’s taking me forever to get a tiny bit of fat out yeah and you’ll learn kind of yeah like if That’s a bit sad.

Andrea:
If you had it too hot when it went in and basically cracklings kind of congealed on the bottom, how else to say it, and then they made a thick layer and burned, that’s… Obviously, I don’t know anybody who’s ever done that. No, of course not. Because somebody else has done it. And I don’t know anybody who’s ever tried to use that lard afterwards. I’m sure it must just taste terrible. It’s not. It’s a dry stonky thing. But that’s how we learn when we don’t have the moment.

Alison:
Yeah, indeed.

Andrea:
Indeed.

Alison:
You’ve got something to share before we move on to the two main methods.

Andrea:
This is just kind of funny. The wet and the dry. One of our supporters said, Her daughter, who is listening her way through the episodes on this podcast from the very beginning, asked her, should I use olive oil to cook something? And her mother said, no, I don’t typically cook with olive oil. It has a low smoke point. And her daughter says, oh, so it turns into free radicals quickly. And she goes, this is your child on Ancestral Kitchen.

Alison:
Yes.

Andrea:
That was funny.

Alison:
Yes, I love that.

Andrea:
Thank you for sharing. Olive oil, in my mind, is only ever for raw. I don’t want to cook my own fucking outfit.

Alison:
Yeah, there’s a whole another issue, a whole other kind of episode we could do on that. Because some people say it’s fine, but let’s not get into that now.

Andrea:
I mean, just taste-wise, I want to be able to taste it.

Alison:
Yeah, you’re right. You want to taste it. I completely understand that. So let’s talk about the two main methods. There’s a wet method and the dry method. And we get loads of questions on what’s this, what are these different methods?

Andrea:
I think you and I are opposite in what we gravitate towards.

Alison:
Yes, we are.

Andrea:
And that’s good. It probably has to do with our equipment. Yeah.

Alison:
That’s good for this podcast because we both bring expertise to the table.

Andrea:
We could sit on air, Alison. That would be awesome.

Alison:
Exactly. We could do a contest, which is the best way. Okay.

Andrea:
Whatever gets you the fat in your freezer, that’s the best way.

Alison:
Yeah, you do it. So there’s the wet method. Now, people choose to wet render their fat because they say it gets rid of more impurities. It’s also less time consuming as there are pure stages involved. I would say it’s better if you want to keep that fat at room temperature because potentially it gets rid of more impurities. It’s also better if you want less flavor in the fat, again, because of that getting rid of impurities. So if you’re making cosmetics with your tallow or your lard, you might want to consider wet rendering rather than the other one, which we’ll get to in a minute, which is dry.

Alison:
For wet rendering also, it’s better if you’ve got fat that isn’t that clean. So what I mean by clean is like often, you know, we would have lard that still has lots of bits of flesh still on it. And when we dry render it, we’re trying to take that flesh off before we start with it because it’s not a process that’s going to get rid of impurities as well as wet rendering will. So if you’ve got fat that’s kind of not particularly clean, it’s got bits of meat on, it’s got kind of sinewy bits and things you don’t really know what they are on. and you don’t want to spend time cleaning it. as in chopping those things off, then probably wet rendering is a better choice. Andrea, I should probably state now you come down on the wet rendering side, you’re cheering for wet rendering. So tell us why you like to do it.

Andrea:
Probably related to the fact that I don’t have a temperature control device, now that I’m thinking about it, because I find I tend to be more successful if I can put the water in it. So I’m thinking about this.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Probably plays a part. I used to think that the idea with wet rendering was that you would steam off the water, but that is incorrect, as he will continue to describe. But I also find that I can be more hands-off the rendering process when I use water because I’m usually doing multiple things, coming in and out of the kitchen, teaching school with the kids, you know trying to do .

Alison:
Other things.

Andrea:
And i’m oh yeah i forgot there was a pot on the stove so that is helpful for me um.

Alison:
Yeah i can see how your combination of using using the stove, and having the kids and being in and out a lot means that you’re not able to watch it as much if you were able to use a slow cooker then maybe that wouldn’t matter so much because the temperature is perhaps more regulated but in that situation i can see how the wet rendering is really useful and we’re on a gas stove which.

Andrea:
We’ve talked about before.

Alison:
Yeah it.

Andrea:
Tends to produce like a more intense heat so.

Alison:
Heat yeah exactly so there’s a the concern of potentially if you were busy with the children that fat might burn if there wasn’t water in there okay let’s talk about how to do wet rendering so you mince chop your fat then you add fat and water to the heating vessel that you’ll use. Now, my research, and when I’ve done it before, I’ve just added half an inch of water, but you add more, Andrea, yeah?

Andrea:
Yeah. And that is based on, that i didn’t actually do any research i just just threw some water was doing what worked and what i found was when i added more water i had less risk of things burning and i liked having a substantial amount on the bottom i felt like there’s enough room for everything to get kind of sucked down into it and sometimes maybe it’s also related to allison that we’re trimming our own fat and it um sometimes even we like friends give us chunks of fat and it’ll be like hair and um like all kinds of stuff that you really don’t want in your fat and so i and and as we’ll talk about later i don’t like straining fat so the yeah but i had a lot i had i liked, I don’t know, a couple of cups, a couple of wiches.

Alison:
So a lot more. I think maybe if it’s on the stove, it’s not as sealed. Again, with the Instant Pot, it’s a proper seal. And so that water’s not going to evaporate.

Andrea:
It’s not going anywhere. Okay. Yeah. That would play a part for sure. Yeah.

Alison:
You can add salt. Do you add salt to yours?

Andrea:
I’ve never done that.

Alison:
No. Okay. So the salt’s supposed to bring out more of the impurities. When I do wet rendering, I often do add salt. And then you heat. you heat that that mixture for six to eight hours and in that time the fat will render its liquid out into the water and the impurities everything kind of all together the cracklings themselves the bits of solid fat which we call cracklings after they’ve been rendered at the end of that time should be small and brown you know darker so they’ll go in if it’s lard they’ll go in kind of really light if they’re tallow they will go in kind of yellowy and they should be darker in color and much smaller over time you begin to learn you know how long you can do them based on what size you’ve cut them to um and after that you strain out the water and the fat into a bowl and then let that cool put it in the fridge and.

Alison:
Then that will harden. Now, in my experience, this section, this bit’s always easier to do with tallow because tallow goes really, really hard, whereas lard doesn’t go as hard. So when that’s refrigerated, if it’s tallow, it will be rock solid almost. If it’s lard, it will be more solid. Then you’ve got to, what will happen is the fat will be at the top and the water, the impurities and the salt will be at the bottom. So you have to separate those two things. And for me, I’ve got a metal bowl and I’m using a kind of bendy spatula to go around the side of that cake of fat and then try and get hold of it and turn it upside down on a plate. The water gets thrown away. If you want to, at that point, you can take a photo because it looks like a cheesecake. You can share it on Discord as Andrea always does.

Andrea:
When you invert it, it’s going to look like a cheesecake with like a jelly on the top. And then I kind of, like you said, I just scoop it off. Oh, our dogs love this piece. I don’t keep this piece because there is like junk in it. If your meat was fairly clean, then I think Diana said it looked really good. So she kept it and used it for something, which would be fine. Because when we say impurities, often you’re just referring, like you said, to little bits of meat and whatnot. Not actually anything bad. But you scrape all of that off, and I get it really, really polished and clean, and then I cut my cake into literally cake slices, and I freeze those cake slices, and then I package them individually and… have a little wedges.

Alison:
So that’s exactly what I do when I wet render. So turn the thing over and throw away the water. On the bottom, there’s this, like you said, this kind of bit that’s a bit sort of not so solid and it’s a bit dark in color and you just scrape that off with a knife. And then you can do it again. So some people who make cosmetics as a business, then put that fat back into the heating vessel with more water and more salt and melt it all again. And then take it out cool it down put it in the fridge scrape off the bottom again i’ve never done that i’ve only done it the once i could see if you were doing.

Andrea:
Cosmetics maybe that would be worth.

Alison:
Yeah you may want to do that exactly so that is wet rendering do you have anything else to say about wet rendering andrew before i go on to dry rendering no no okay so dry rendering i’m on the side of dry rendering i’ve just done it more often i’ve done wet rendering like three times i think dry like a million times um i think it’s simpler because there are less stages you don’t have to refrigerate it and do this scraping thing um you can strain it if you want to get rid of kind of random bits that are in this now i do um dry rendering all the time and i get beautiful pure or white lard. So it’s not as if you do it using the dry method and you end up with loads and loads of impurities in it.

Alison:
When I pour that lard into jars and let it settle, often you’ll see with lard and tallow that if there are impurities, they will go to the bottom of the jar once it’s gone solid. And my jars of lard do not have that on it. You know, there’s not loads of bits of stuff in it. I make sure that the fat is clean before it goes into the dry rendering process. But having said that, I don’t keep my lard at room temperature. So it’s not like I’m leaving the lard out for months and waiting to see if it goes moldy or not, because that’s what some people say happens when they dry render, because there are some impurities in it. I keep my fat in the fridge in the freezer, so I never get to kind of test that.

Alison:
How to do dry rendering? The same as with a wet rendering, you mince and chop it to start with. Make sure you cut off any flesh or bits that look a bit not right, don’t look like fat. And then you put your fat into your heating vessel and you heat it to the temperatures that we were talking about a bit earlier. With dry rendering, you need to drain it regularly. And when I say regularly, at the beginning, usually when our vessel is heating up, I could maybe leave it three or four hours without draining it. as the vessel starts to get hotter then i can be draining it once an hour once an hour every hour and a half um don’t leave it in there too long because it will potentially burn so the way to tell generally what we do is you know we pack pack the vessel with um the fat at the beginning and it’s right up to the top and it’s all white it’s all beautiful and then it’s heating up after three or four hours we’ll come back and we drain it by having a metal bowl on the surface with a metal colander resting on it and then we pour it all through there the fat goes through into the bowl underneath and then all of those bits of fat which are a little bit smaller because fats come out.

Alison:
Back in the vessel to continue to be dry rendered the lid goes back on my timer goes on and we come back again you know in an hour do the same thing generally between those times when i go back and check it i like to if the fat has solidified in the in the bowl i will transfer it to a storage container so then when i come back again to drain it you know two or three hours later then they’ll just be warm lard going in there again so then so I don’t end up with tons of bowls with all this fat everywhere you know I try to keep a sort of a process line going on um you basically just keep going with that heating and draining until the um cracklings are much smaller and darker in color, and again it just takes experience with doing that to know when to stop um if you open the pan and you see that it’s kind of smelling a bit funny and it looks like the fat’s going a bit yellow then you’ve gone too far yeah um but again you know at the beginning of when I did it I took them out too early and then I put them in a pan I was like look all this extra fat’s coming off you know I didn’t leave it long enough yeah so just a matter of getting used to it based on how big you cut your fat um, Have you ever sieved your fat that comes out of dry rendering, Andrea?

Andrea:
Yeah, I have. I usually do. And I’ve also tried pouring it through multiple mesh strainers at a time, layered, you know, with the very bottom one having muslin in it. Okay, proper. Yeah, so you get it very, very, very clean that way.

Alison:
Um

Andrea:
You know this sometimes related to the aforementioned bits of things but.

Alison:
Also sometimes.

Andrea:
Just because i’m like let me see how clean i can get this but honestly that’s a nightmare to clean up so.

Alison:
Yeah and then i and when.

Andrea:
We have just this messy fat and stuff that sometimes comes to us in very chaotic bags then i’m like i’m just gonna wet around this i’m not even going.

Alison:
To struggle with it yeah absolutely that that is the way to avoid the complete mess because i think very early in my fat rendering um experience i use muslin and it’s just i mean yeah if you wash.

Andrea:
It in the sink you’re pouring fat.

Alison:
Down the drain if you put it in the washing machine.

Andrea:
You’re going to ruin your washer so then you’re like.

Alison:
It’s just boiling.

Andrea:
It pouring the water outside it’s just it’s ridiculous.

Alison:
So what’s important really is get that fat clean before you put it in there otherwise you’re going to be like left with lard that’s got bits in it which it maybe is fine if you freeze it it’s not going to go moldy or you’re going to be left with having to strain it through something which you don’t want to do because it’s going to take ages to clip up afterwards yeah that’s that’s my advice there so i have mentioned several times that i use an instant pot i use the slow cooker setting on high for dry rendering my lard you can pressure you, lard or tallow out obviously you have to add when you say the slow cooker.

Andrea:
Setting is this like the lid is off i don’t.

Alison:
Know oh no the lid goes on just like you would as if you were using it as a pressure cooker but you choose the slow cook button not the pressure cook button and then there’s the option to have it on low medium or high and i choose high and that takes it to degrees c that’s why i’ve never done.

Andrea:
That so i don’t i’m not familiar with.

Alison:
That’s brilliant yeah it’s brilliant yeah i use my instant pot as a slow cooker all the time because as long time listeners will know my so cooker blew up last year and so i replaced it with an instant pot you have not had an.

Andrea:
Instant pot as long as i have but you have used it way more than us.

Alison:
Yeah and we’re in love with it rob’s like this is the only kitchen gadget you’ve ever bought that’s made my life easier i.

Andrea:
Said that to me before it’s the best thing ever.

Alison:
Yeah he loves it um yeah so let’s just mention you can pressure cook it.

Alison:
And you add water to pressure cook it. I have tried pressure cooking tallow in the instant pot. I did it for two hours on high, but I haven’t done it again since because when I opened the instant pot after two hours, I thought, well, those cracklings aren’t very small, but I drained it. And then I thought, okay, well, let’s put it on again now for another one hour maybe. And of course it takes ages to get to blooming pressure. So I’m like thinking, oh, I’ve just depressurized this and wasted all this thing looking at it and now I’ve got to re-pressurize it again because I’ve got all these cracklings that aren’t done and I did it for another hour and I opened it and I thought those cracklings aren’t very small and in the end I was just like I’m not doing this again yeah so if you have successfully done it or wish to embark on the journey of fresh cooking your fat out then please do enlighten me as to the success way to do it because I haven’t found that yeah okay um i wanted to talk a little bit more about how different the fat will be we’ve talked earlier andrew you talked about how it potentially depends on the breed of pig i also think it depends on what it’s been fed i’ve had lard that is very soft when it’s been in the fridge yeah and lard that’s been very hard when it’s been in the fridge, I’ve also had a lot of slightly different colours. I think the most…

Alison:
The reason why lard is different color generally is that the way that it’s been rendered. So it’s very, very easy to keep your lard at too high a temperature when you’re rendering it. And if you do that, it will go yellow. So an easy kind of graphic example of this is often when we finish doing the lard in the slow cooker, we will take out the cracklings and I kind of know there’s a bit of fat still in them and I want to make them crispy for us to eat and I’ll put them in a frying pan like the cast iron pan and I’ll turn that on what I think is quite low and I’ll heat them and then I drain that fat out into a bowl or something and potentially those large cracklings that we’ve got are crispy and lovely but when that fat solidifies it is much yellower depending on you know how long it’s been in there than the lard that we’ve made with those same cracklings so when that lard starts to burn maybe the cracklings are getting too small and they’ve lost all their fat or you’ve got the temperature too high it’s more likely to go yellow that’s not the only reason why it would be yellow though but i would say that’s the main reason why my lard that i’ve made has been yellow i also think there’s a go on yeah well.

Andrea:
I was gonna say that i have had this a lard batch that i recently processed and i.

Alison:
Followed the.

Andrea:
Same process as i always do nothing was different and it was it almost looks like tallow like it’s so.

Alison:
Good gosh really but.

Andrea:
I did not overheat it.

Alison:
And it’s not the only way and it’s the.

Andrea:
One that tastes.

Alison:
Stronger so.

Andrea:
I thought well let me.

Alison:
Put that.

Andrea:
Into my anecdata folder because, made me wonder you know deb’s question yeah yeah it made me think about that because, given that i didn’t do the pig myself i don’t know when it was butchered, you know our neighbors gave it to us and i know the farmer that it came from in the farm and it’s a very good farm and i know everything’s pastured out there so i’m guessing they probably did it in the fall which is when we usually butcher too but i just thought i don’t know i don’t know maybe the pig was foraging different things yeah i think the food.

Alison:
The feed has a lot to do with it.

Andrea:
Yeah i’m sure it does i.

Alison:
Have this kind of tendency to think oh if they had more grain maybe the lard softer so maybe the lard.

Andrea:
That i got that was.

Alison:
Really soft was a pig that was more grain fed than the pigs i’ve got now.

Andrea:
Where the lard is i had pigs that they got very little grain like if they stole grain from the cows or something but it wasn’t like they were feeding on it and their lard is pretty soft.

Alison:
Yeah. So it’s not just that. It’s not as simple as that, is it? There’s so many different variables I think involved. I do think that that large you had that was yellow and the kids didn’t really like it in the muffins. What flavor did it have? It was just a porky flavor, was it?

Andrea:
It wasn’t really porky. I honestly don’t know exactly what to say. If it tasted, you know, kind of like pork, it might’ve been okay, but it was almost a little, I don’t know. But it’s not a horrible flavor, but it wasn’t like, oh, yeah, give me more of that. And, you know, Deb was asking about the different colors. And I know colors often come down to nutrients. So, you know, like the cows, you can see the color of cream change throughout the year. You know, it’s going to be very sort of white during the winter when they’re eating dry hay and things. And then in the summer, you get this very dark, golden, beta-carotene-rich kind of factor X cream that Weston Price talks about. And so you’re getting like instant visual on how their fat composition is changing. And of course, if they’re putting fat away in their muscle meat, then those nutrients will be similarly affected.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So I thought, well, maybe it’s just that maybe these pigs were foraging more of a, you know, I don’t know, colorful things or something.

Alison:
Yeah. That changed the color of the farm.

Andrea:
Yeah. Like you said, there’s so many variables. There’s the breeding, there’s the time of year, there’s the rendering methods, there’s the food.

Alison:
You need a scientific experiment.

Andrea:
The amount of sun that they get, like all of that will affect the nutrients.

Alison:
I think with the yellow lard, maybe a way to know whether you’ve done the rendering kind of optimally is I feel like lard that’s been overheated has a smoky taste to it.

Andrea:
Yeah, and I do not care for that.

Alison:
So if your lard tastes smoky, it’s probably been overheated, I would say. okay um let’s go to an adbrack and we’ll come back and talk about how to store and how you know if there’s problems with your rendering.

Alison:
Okay, how to store rendered fat. So when I make lard, generally I make a lot of it. And so I will use whatever container I have at hand. And usually after we’ve made lard or tallow, if you go into the cupboard where our containers are, it’s empty. They’ve all gone because all the containers are being used to store the lard. so I mean potentially someone who’s more organized than me would have jars that sort of don’t have, have necks that go straight up so they can be put in the freezer so they won’t smash and all stack on each other and all of this lot I don’t I don’t have that unfortunately I just have whatever containers we have available if you’re using containers that have plastic in do remember not to pour your rendered fat into those containers when it’s too hot wait until you can kind of spoon it in so you can store your rendered fat on the counter if you want to um and i think that wet rendered fat um if you’ve been following along with our kind of verses each other is probably better an easy one to put on the counter less likely to go moldy you can store rendered fat in the fridge and you can store rendered fat in the freezer um andrea how do you store yours.

Andrea:
I would definitely say how I store it is dependent on time. And I would caution against storing for a long time in a cupboard or fridge. I have done all of the methods, all of the ways, and I’ve had all of the problems and some of the successes. And I just would say for consistency, keep it in the freezer. because I would say % of the time the fat I’ve stored in the freezer did not mold.

Alison:
Yes, absolutely.

Andrea:
It just depends on how much you’re possibly willing to risk losing. And I have done meticulous sterilization following the rules to the letter and still had batches of fat mold. A friend and I have discussed this at length because we both have butchered a fair amount And we’ve both done this over and over where we’ve had some of it stays okay in a cupboard and some of it just doesn’t. And we cannot, you know, some invisible microbial variable that we’re not able to spot.

Andrea:
But bear in mind, it can come from the air. So, as clean as your container is, as soon as you ladle hot lard out of your pot and transport it through the air and pour it into your sterilized jar, it did touch the air, and the air is full of contaminants. Yeah. I would suggest freezing. I would not say to can it. It is not advised. Okay, that’s useful to know. If you put your hot lard in a jar and put a lid on top and screw the lid down, then the heat inside the jar as it cools will naturally vacuum and pull that lid down. And so people will say, oh, look, it’s sealed. Okay, that’s great. Now you have an anaerobic container of a highly base material with possible microbial contamination.

Andrea:
That’s how you make poison. Let’s not do that. So go ahead and pop that bad boy in the freezer would be my suggestion. And even the refrigerator, I hesitate for long lengths of time. And another part of that is because, as we alluded to before, there are different things making up the fat or the, you know, saturated fat or the like the way the fat is made by the animal may vary from animal to animal. And that might play a part. I don’t know for sure, but I would say that for consistency and accuracy, I would just put it in the freezer.

Alison:
I agree with you. Obviously in the past when refrigerators and freezers didn’t exist, people would have kept it in the pantry, probably the coolest place of the house. For our family, I mean, I wouldn’t want to risk losing that fat because it went moldy, because the time that I invest in it is worth a lot to me. You know, I really, it’s an investment. And we don’t have storage space to leave fat out. You know, we have no pantry, we have a tiny kitchen. And really, that’s the same is true of the fridge. it’s harder for me to store a whole batch of lard or tallow in the fridge because that fridge you know the real estate in there is very much used you know on a day that we’ve been busy that’s high priced yeah the freezer is high priced still I’ve only got a three drawer freezer and so I’m fighting to reorganize things in there to be the most efficient but still generally what we will do is keep one container out in the fridge and that’s when we start to use the rest of them go in the freezer, kind of similar to you i think kelly asked about storage methods and how long to keep including on the shelf freezing in the fridge so i think we’ve kind of covered that in the freezer i would leave lard there for i don’t know how long i’ve left it there for a year more for sure i would say on average you’re probably expecting.

Andrea:
A year because of you know you’d come around to your butchering season again so.

Alison:
Maybe even.

Andrea:
A little overlap i find sometimes you know you have a super lardy pig and that lard might take you through more than a year and um but then you know you’re gonna make donuts one day and it’s all gone so.

Alison:
Yay and enjoy those donuts yeah we had another question from danielle who all these questions are from supporters people who are members of our community and she is at belknat creek farm um you can find her online um she is really raising some beautiful meat she doesn’t ship it but if you are around whitney or late whitney um then you can pick up stuff from her and she’s always happy to see anyone who eats this way she had a question about um fact she’s saying she’s rendered cattle suet to tallow pork to lard and chicken to smolts and she stored it all either in the freezer or the refrigerator because she’s uncertain if she’s done it correctly it is too much work to have not rendered it well and have it go bad on the shelf how would i know it’s done complete finished and i mean that’s basically what we’ve just i’d say even if you did it correctly i think you’re absolutely i.

Andrea:
Am certain that i did it correctly every single time.

Alison:
And yet i still i’ve.

Andrea:
Taken some and set it on the shelf and and And then I put some in the freezer and.

Alison:
You know, all you can do is kind of do the best you can at keeping it clean. You know, if you’re worried about the impurities, wet render it. If you can cut that fat off, then you’d be fine to dry render it. But we have fridges and freezers. And so… to avoid that horrible disappointment when you know that it you know it’s gone and you’re like oh will that work then just put it in the fridge or the freezer as we for the second half of that question as we talked about earlier you know when it’s done when there’s little to no fat left in the cracklings and that kind of that knowledge comes with experience the longer you leave it you get kind of diminishing returns as you pour out the fat. But just do remember, again, not to let it overheat. Anything else we want to say to Danielle before we move on? No, I think we’ve covered it, haven’t we?

Andrea:
No, yeah, I think so.

Alison:
Okay. Kirsten, who’s in Canada, said, when does lard or tala go bad? How does it become bad? And how do I know it’s become unsafe to eat? So we’ve talked about it going bad.

Andrea:
It doesn’t listen to you. It doesn’t do what it’s told.

Alison:
Bad.

Andrea:
It doesn’t clean up its room.

Alison:
Um how do you know it’s unsafe to eat well i think like pretty much everything you know all the ferments all the things we talk about we use our nose to start with yeah so a lot of other people have said you know i know if my fat’s gone rancid immediately i know it smells horrible so really the first thing you should do is look at the container is there any mold on it how does it look is it still looking clean and then if it’s been capped you know in a jar with a lid unscrew the lid and smell it how does it smell because fat when it goes rancid has a very unpleasant smell so i think you would know from the smell and looking at it if it’s unsafe do you agree and take.

Andrea:
A long time to go rancid if it’s been well rendered in my opinion a very very long time to go rancid lard maybe sooner.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I have never kept any fat on the counter. No, that’s not true. I had some tallow on the counter the other day that I had Jacob throw away the last half of the jar, and I felt like it just smelled a little strange to me. And we have plenty of tallow. There’s no point in, you know, testing the boundaries. So I told him, just put it in the chicken scrap. But that was tallow that had been on the counter, you know, people dipping in and out of it, putting it into pans and whatnot. So it’s like not really surprising if it was sitting there for that long. But usually, like a tallow untouched in your cupboard would be okay for a long time. I pour mine into jars if I’m not freezing it in blocks. And that is so that I can see up the side of the jar. Because often you’ll see if something is going to go bad, it will be like a black mold going up the side inside the jar.

Alison:
Yeah, use glass jars when you can.

Andrea:
You don’t want that.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. We had another supporter who said she made a lot of lard over a year ago and kept it in the fridge. Someone has an off smell, rancid. I’m guessing it’s too old. so that you know she saw that it’s got an off smell so trust your instincts i.

Andrea:
Would throw it out.

Alison:
Too yeah.

Andrea:
Like you said if it smells rancid and there’s just not only is there no point in fighting with it but it’s just not going to taste good so.

Alison:
Yeah exactly it hurts um i hate that okay um what to do with the cracklings we talked a little bit about this in the pork episode i think, I eat them as is I crisp them up further in the cast iron pan If I want them to be crispier They are amazing sprinkled with salt And last weekend, I just wanted to share Gable’s enthusiasm for cracklings with a story. Last weekend, Gabriel and I went to visit my parents on the train for the day. And we had lunch there. And it was not ideal. But, you know, it was nice to be with my parents.

Andrea:
Like you didn’t bring the lunch, you mean?

Alison:
No, we didn’t bring the lunch, no.

Andrea:
I’m sorry.

Alison:
We went on the train and I was just like, oh, I can’t bring lunch. And I didn’t want to always be like, we’re the ones who bring lunch. and I’m sure listeners understand that.

Andrea:
I know.

Alison:
I wanted to share a meal with them and they kind of know what we can and can’t eat. So we’ve got sort of boundaries there, which are good. Anyway, we had a lunch which had basically no fat in it at all.

Alison:
And about halfway home on the train, it’s a long train journey, Gabriel said, I’m hungry. And I said, boy, you didn’t have any fat for lunch, did you? You know, he had these zocchi kind of rib things that I avoided, and potato no sweet potato and broccoli and sweet potato and fat and yeah exactly well because my mom said oh we pour this um vegetable over it in the oven I was like no it’s all right without fat oh okay ah yeah well I go I should have just bought a jar of large didn’t I then that would have been fine um well yeah I have done that before many times in the suitcase do I know it, But, so on the way home, I was like, I’m hungry. I was like, well, you didn’t have any fat, did you? You know, you had all that kind of bits of food, but there was no fat in it. He was like, oh, and he kind of like, I said, well, fat, it kind of helps keep you full. It makes you feel sated and also makes you enjoy your food a bit more because it carries lots of flavor. He was like, oh, flavor. And he started talking about cracklings. He was like, oh, cracklings, when they’ve got a bit of salt on them and you just bite into it and it’s kind of crunchy and a bit crunchy resistant on the outside and then you crunch into it and the last bit of fat kind of oozes out onto your tongue and it mixes with the salt and he said oh man I miss them and I thought oh that’s my son that’s a child on Ancestral Kitchen podcast isn’t it? This is your.

Andrea:
Child on Ancestral.

Alison:
Kitchen So yeah eat them with salt crisped up sprinkle them on food you know vegetables with some cracklings on the top. Scrambled eggs, cracklings on the top. Absolutely delicious. You can put them in bread. There’s a recipe in the show notes for spelt sourdough rolled bread with lard cracklings in. You can put them on flatbread so you can make like a pizza. Don’t have to necessarily do it in the oven. You can just do it in a round cast iron pan, make a nice dough and then put your cracklings on the top of it. You can put them in the food processor when they’re cold and grind them up and that could be a spread you can then mix other things into that spread there’s another blog post of mine in the show notes with a recipe for a large crackling spread that’s got hard-boiled eggs in it which is delicious and keeps in the fridge for ages i put that in the pork book because i’ve been on.

Andrea:
Your website a billion times and i did not know that was there. So I was like, this is going in the pork book. Because that is what I want to do. And I was thinking kind of exactly like what well-illustrated by your story with Gabriel. I had thought, well, that’s the perfect food to take on the road because you’re not going to be hungry minutes after you’ve eaten it.

Alison:
Absolutely you.

Andrea:
Know how it is trying to keep your kids full ah we’ve all tried to keep.

Alison:
And it keeps really well when when you’re moving as well it’s not something you need to have the cool blocks there and keep it really cold all over the.

Andrea:
Place you don’t need.

Alison:
Spoons exactly whatnot yeah um so that that’s absolutely delicious and you that spread with just you know the large cracklings um whizzed up you can spread in any laminated dough you’re making you know so you can kind of make um lovely bake things with it and then you can just put cracklings into bread that you’re making um just anything so many things i could.

Andrea:
Find on your website where you talked about using the cracklings and stuff i think i’ve put in the pork.

Alison:
Book pork book so some of what is in the pork book we can.

Andrea:
Find on your website but if you want it printable.

Alison:
Yeah and.

Andrea:
All typed out and with american measurements included there you go.

Alison:
Brilliant. Thank you. So that’s what to do with the cracklings. We kind of touched on what to do with the fat. And I gave you a list earlier on of ways to use it. Andrew, what do you do with your fat?

Andrea:
Well, everything you said in the night. We also keep like a little pint jar by the stove. I have a tray of salt and whatnot. And I have a brush there. And so then you can just use it to slap onto your cast iron pans real quick.

Alison:
Oh, I see. Okay.

Andrea:
I usually keep it a little bit in the fridge so that it’s a quick thaw, but anytime you would use butter or Crisco, and oftentimes anytime a recipe would normally call for vegetable oil, it’s just out comes the lard.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Anytime that you’re going to use any fat, you can use a home-rendered saturated fat. Fiona had a question. Fiona’s a supporter who lives in Wales. No, near Wales. Close to Wales, not Wales. It’s beautiful, though. She asked, what can you do with excess lamb fat? And for this one, I talked to Megan, who is another supporter who has a farm where she grows garlic and does wonderful things with garlic called Ori’s Farm. I think her URL is Ori’s Farm Fresh. Is that right, Andrea?

Andrea:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. You can look her up. She’s in the States. And she says she renders it. she said it’s got a stronger flavor slightly more gamey flavor to beef or lard but she loves it I actually looked up what to do with the excess lamb fat and there was something on the list that I’ve never done before and I thought oh I should mention this because maybe someone’s done it they said cook rice in it I have never cooked rice in fat.

Andrea:
You mean like.

Alison:
Have you ever done that.

Andrea:
Like, instead of water?

Alison:
Yeah, that’s what it seemed to be, instead of water.

Andrea:
What? No, never.

Alison:
Would it work? I presume it would do, because it’s liquid, and the rice just absorbs it. So, I’m now thinking, you know, you could try.

Andrea:
That seems like a food you could feed someone who, like, you’re trying to heal. You know what I mean? Like an invalid or something, or, you know, someone who needs to, you know, a child that needs to grow or something. It’s just like the most nourishing thing. Here’s a grain cooked in fat. That sounds amazing.

Alison:
If anyone wants to try it, I would love to hear what it tastes like and how you get on with it. Because that was the new one on me. Okay, let’s talk about cleaning up now, Andrea. There’s been some controversy on Discord about the way that you clean up after making fat. So spill the beans, please.

Andrea:
Well, apparently this is not something that they’re going to teach you in food safety classes. but um i am rendering everything in a huge stainless steel pot and then after i’ve scraped out all i can i just set it on the back deck and the dogs come and find it and they lick anything out and they clean that thing up real nice let me tell you and then i bring it back inside and i scrub it out and run boiling water through it so it is quite clean when i’m done but uh not one drop of our fat is wasted over here let me tell you gosh.

Alison:
That’s brilliant i love it.

Andrea:
Yeah no i.

Alison:
Bet they do i bet they do um jc said if i’m dry rendering i use a big cast iron skillet.

Andrea:
And just.

Alison:
Leave the residue.

Andrea:
In it to.

Alison:
Cook with which is brilliant i do have trouble getting fat out of the crock pot without making a mess so i usually don’t use that anymore so she’s using a cast iron skillet a big one and um, dry rendering that and then keeping it in there that’s something that I sometimes do with the cracklings you’ve talked about that I want to coat my cast iron and there’s an opportunity there to um use the cracklings in my cast iron and melt them slowly and let that fat just sit on that cast iron cookware for minutes I have a huge cast iron wok that was gifted to us and, it was it probably been used for a bit too much tomato when we got it um and we kind of gently nurtured that back to a better state by putting you know prioritizing the cracklings to go in that cast iron thing after rendering lard and tilha said doing wet rendering doesn’t seem to make too much of a mess for me and i can understand that you know based on what you said andrea one thing i try to do is use my wooden kitchen stuff while rendering so i stir the fat with my wooden spoon. I just rotate each spoon through it. I also put the fat slab onto a cutting ball when I’m taking it out of the pot. So I kind of just leave the fat mess and just clean up the pot and knife. So she’s giving her wooden cooking utensils and cooking surfaces a kind of a, nourishing layer of fat.

Andrea:
That is a good idea. I’m going to start doing that with my wooden utensils. I think that’s a really good idea. Just kind of stir them and let them basically get their.

Alison:
You know yeah polish soak it up oily yeah soak it up um i wanted to explain briefly how we clean up because we are doing dry rendering so as i said we pour that when we strain it we pour the contents of the instant pot through a metal colander into a metal bowl and then as that cools down i spoon it into our storage pots and then we keep going throughout the day so at the end of the day we generally have the instant pot the inside of which is kind of covered with fat and we have a colander which is covered with fat and a silver kind of metal bowl and then probably a slotted spoon and perhaps a knife and.

Alison:
We always lived in rented accommodation. We don’t want to put that fat down the sink because I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I think even my own house, I wouldn’t want to do that. So what we’ve kind of got used to is I have a spatula that is silicon that is very, very bendy. I absolutely love it. It’s one of my favorite kitchen utensils. I use it for many things, including bread making and for this purpose, which is once I’ve spooned all of the fat out of containers, into storage containers. I will take the bowl that collects it and I will use the silicon spatula to scrape round the outside and the rim, the inside of that to get out all that fat that my spoon didn’t get out when I was transferring it to my jars. And that works really, really well. You know, so much better than using a metal spoon to scrape. Get a silicon spatula and use it to work around the inside of all of your utensils and it will literally you know you will not it will not look like there was slippery slimy lard on it a minute ago it will look clean, the colander is a bit more difficult not necessarily the inside of it but if you turn it over the bottom um do you not use the word colander no.

Andrea:
I’m just saying it’s the worst.

Alison:
Oh no it’s the worst you know about the colander thing so when you turn it over our colander has a stand on it like a circular stand and that bit kind of catches all the other bits of lard so I’ll have a go at that with the silicon spatula trying to get as much off as possible and then I will use kitchen paper towel and I will wipe everything with kitchen paper towel you know one or two pieces just to get all the excess fat on that then goes in the organic waste which is you know because it’s just degradable paper with fat on it. I don’t know whether you can compost it. We’re not doing Bokashi at the moment because we don’t have the facility to do it in a rented place. Yeah, we don’t really have a garden at the moment. So that’s going in the waste that the council takes away.

Andrea:
Oh, okay.

Alison:
That’s fine.

Andrea:
Yeah, I see… Yeah, I was thinking if I would have to use like a cloth and I’m going to wash that.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. That’s the problem. You can’t use cloth because you don’t want to wash it. So that’s why I use kitchen towel, just to get the last bits off. Then generally what we do is, Rob does this, not me, we will pour boiling water over the utensils to get those last bits of fat off. But we do it over a bowl or the sink, not the actual sink, over a washing up bowl. And then the boiling water and the fat residue goes into that washing up bowl or bowl from, you know, the boiling water over it. And then we will take that bowl out to the back of the garden and tip it onto the soil.

Andrea:
Yep. This is why we do big batches.

Alison:
So then that’s never going down the sink. Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
That’s why i said at the beginning do a big batch.

Alison:
Because of the cleanup that the cleanup is quite something um and i wouldn’t want to do less than three kilos.

Andrea:
And the more the more freezer space you have i do what i’ve found is to be the largest reasonable size for me to do at a time simply because of i feel like there’s a sort of at least for my stove there’s a sort of terminal size of how big the pot can be before it just doesn’t render as evenly but what i have started doing is i’ll do it like three days in a row so it’s kind of back to back to back and then i get i get all my batches put away because i have the freezer space for it and i typically have either giant chunks of fat in bags in the freezer or nice small compact rendered fat which is way easier for me to store. So, I just started doing that this past year where I was like, you know what, I’m just going to do days, like back-to-back days because I didn’t want to do vast quantities per batch, but I also didn’t like cleaning up every time.

Alison:
Yeah, I haven’t done that. I don’t think I maybe did it once. But what we often do is rather than clean up the Instant Pot, we’ll put bones in it immediately afterwards and just put the bones on.

Andrea:
Oh, that’s a good idea.

Alison:
And so that fact just gets absorbed in the stock.

Andrea:
Smart.

Alison:
Which is handy.

Andrea:
Or I guess you could throw rice in it and make that rice sausage.

Alison:
Yeah, what is that?

Andrea:
You can’t throw a lot of the pork book because it’s already greased.

Alison:
Gosh, I’m getting a bit hungry now. Okay, we are almost there. So let’s talk about eating fat from the top of stock. When you make stock, there is often a layer of fat on the top. Andrea, do you eat it?

Andrea:
Yes, for sure.

Alison:
Yes, you do. Okay, yes, so do we. So do we. And we made a beef stock over the weekend and I put it in the fridge the evening we finished it. And then in the morning, I scraped all the fat off the top and put it in a container and it’s in our fridge. We have a long discussion about the question, which sometimes comes up, which is, is the fat on the top of broth rancid? And there is episode number of our Kitchen Table Chats, which is our private podcast available for supporters, where we called on the wonderful science brain, which is Hannah in our supporter group, who is… I’m going to give her her wrong job title, so I probably won’t say what she is. But she’s a scientist, a research scientist. And she is fabulous at looking at all papers on things and researching footnotes and finding out if quotes that people have said is from this article was actually valid or, you know, she digs in, digs in, digs in. And we called on her to say, look, is this true? Is this right? And she came back with some amazing, amazing answers. And we talk about it in the episode number of our private podcast feed, which has hundreds of episodes on it now.

Andrea:
I wish I could live on her brain for like one day. Just one day.

Alison:
Oh, I couldn’t cope with it. All the information would drive me insane.

Andrea:
So I said one day.

Alison:
Yeah, one day. Quick, get out here.

Andrea:
See what it’s like to be that smart.

Alison:
So, yeah, basically, you would know kind of what the answer is when we say we eat the fat from the top of the stock, because both of us do. Tilsha asked Do you keep all of the fats you make My family loves ground beef and beef burgers When we cook the beef, fat comes out I like to keep mine and then render it With all my other fats I also keep any fat from my broths This holiday our ham had more fat than we like to consume In a meal, so I kept the bits We cut off as well And of course you have to save bacon fat Oh yeah Indeed, Yeah, we keep virtually all of the fat that we make. Often when I’m doing something like beef burgers, I will try to make room in the pan and put some bread in just before to fry it in the fat that’s come out of the beef burgers. Absolutely delicious. Hannah said, I definitely keep the fat I skim off the top of broth. If it’s just a little fat from burgers or meatballs, I generally use it to season my cast iron pans. Great idea. If it’s significant, then I do save that fat in a jar and use it to fry eggs. Right now I’m using a jar of sausage fat to fry our eggs. it’s a lovely favour.

Andrea:
Yummy.

Alison:
Yes, I can imagine that. We have lots of Hannah’s in the community and that’s a different Hannah to the science brain Hannah, but the Hannah’s really loved in the community just as much as the other Hannah is. I think we only have two Hannah’s. Maybe we have three. I can’t remember. Okay, we’re on the home straight now. The fat from roasting a joint. Andrea, what do you do with the fat when you’ve roasted some meat?

Andrea:
Oh, just the same as I would do with, I guess, any drippings we’ve kind of referred to, you know, use it for toasting your garlic, blooming your spices, sautéing eggs, browning your bones or chicken before roasting, toasting bread, frying eggs, you know.

Alison:
Actually, Blooming Spices, I’ve never done that with fat left over from a joint. But that’s a great idea because the extra flavour that must go into that, rather than just using a more perhaps neutral oil, would bring another layer of taste to your dish.

Andrea:
When you say Blooming Spices, it sounds like a British swear word.

Alison:
Blooming Spices. I sound like Eliza Doolittle from, I don’t know, My Fair Lady. Blooming Spices. um okay i think that might be it andrea do we want to say anything else or obviously we do because we always do but is there anything else we want to add to this episode save your fat, and just hex melt please melt it yeah and enjoy it because it’s it’s it’s precious and it’s beautiful definitely yeah.

Andrea:
And it will keep you full as gabriel will tell you.

Alison:
Yeah exactly okay Okay, thanks so much, Andrea. I’ll see you again next time.

Andrea:
Thank you, Alison, for a lovely episode. I loved it. I learned a lot.

Alison:
Okay, I didn’t say bye at the end.