Since going carnivore about 16 months ago, a lot of my cooking-related hobbies (grinding flour, making bread, etc.) have been abandoned. So I've been feeling the need to explore food hobbies, ones that are compatible with carnivore.

Well, I found one! Rendering beef fat trimmings into tallow is fun, inexpensive, and actually very useful if you have a lot of uses for the tallow (and we do, we put it in everything, it's delicious).

Here's a bunch of jars filled with the tallow I just processed:

It's not hard, and there's lots of videos out there with instructions.

I imagine the first question is - how do you get the beef fat trimmings? It used to be that grocery stores that had their own meat department, and didn't just sell packaged products, would often just give the beef fat away. Our local store did, but now they're selling it. It's very cheap, though, at $0.49 a pound.

I cut the fat trimmings into smaller chunks, then just cook at a very low heat, for at least 4 or so hours. Then I press out the scraps and strain it, and pour into the jars.

I still have to work out some of the kinks in the steps - it does get a little messy - but overall I'm really happy with the results. Also, the tallow is supposed to be completely shelf stable. It's what the native Americans used in their pemmican (50/50 melted buffalo fat and powdered dried buffalo meat), and apparently that lasted for decades, in rawhide bags. So it should last for quite a while in these jars.