Beef Tallow

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Jan 30, 2020
2,771
9,011
New Jersey
The price between soy and tallow narrowed in 2024 but there is a bigger problem with tallow - what to do with the waste grease? The rendering industry is in disarray. Back in the 1980's, we used to get paid by rendering companies to pick up our waste grease (each restaurant generates 2-3 50 gallon drums per week)
I knew a guy maybe 15 years ago who made a bunch of local deals to pick up their waste grease/oil. He converted both a VW bug and a truck to biodiesel and had a small building on his property where he did all of his filtering and clean oil holding. It was an interesting little setup.

Granted, at a large scale, that's a different situation but I'm still surprised there's not some type of market that has developed further since then at a more local level.

No idea if the guy still does it, but this post made me think of it.
 

ssjones

Moderator
Staff member
May 11, 2011
19,981
15,688
Covington, Louisiana
postimg.cc
I knew a guy maybe 15 years ago who made a bunch of local deals to pick up their waste grease/oil. He converted both a VW bug and a truck to biodiesel and had a small building on his property where he did all of his filtering and clean oil holding. It was an interesting little setup.

Granted, at a large scale, that's a different situation but I'm still surprised there's not some type of market that has developed further since then at a more local level.

No idea if the guy still does it, but this post made me think of it.
I think every town has a grease/bio fuel guy. But only one
 

Deano

Part of the Furniture Now
Dec 28, 2022
617
8,041
Iowa
British chef, Rick Stein stands by beef tallow, or dripping as it’s called in Oz, for the crispiest potato chips

My grandmother always rendered excess pork fat to use in cooking.
A favourite childhood rice dish was a tablespoon of freshly rendered lard, an egg, soy sauce and lots of white pepper all mixed up with a large scoop of steaming hot rice.
A scant teaspoon of Marmite or Bovril if you’re feeling flash 😋
We kept the lard when having a hog slaughtered. We gave some to my mother. My wife and mom liked it for making pie crusts.
 

alaskanpiper

Enabler in Chief
May 23, 2019
9,475
44,241
Alaska
My Great x 4 Grandfather lived in Missouri or "New Spain" as they called it then. We have a copy of the list made of his "estate" after his death, and on it was 2 "barrels" of beef tallow. It was a valued commodity.

Apparently he owned property, and may have exchanged property, with Daniel Boone.

We also have some of his pay stubs, or some kind of record of payment anyway, for his service as a private in the Revolutionary War. He was paid 6 and 2/3 dollars per month.
 

telescopes

Pipe Dreamer and Star Gazer
My Great x 4 Grandfather lived in Missouri or "New Spain" as they called it then. We have a copy of the list made of his "estate" after his death, and on it was 2 "barrels" of beef tallow. It was a valued commodity.

Apparently he owned property, and may have exchanged property, with Daniel Boone.

We also have some of his pay stubs, or some kind of record of payment anyway, for his service as a private in the Revolutionary War. He was paid 6 and 2/3 dollars per month.
Yes, it was New Spain back then. As a result of the French-Indian War, France transferred the land to Spain to keep the English from acquiring it as a war trophy. Once Napoleon conquered Spain, he transferred it back to France and sold it to America. Daniel Boone's house was not too far from where I grew up.
 
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mawnansmiff

Lifer
Oct 14, 2015
7,901
8,929
Sunny Cornwall, UK.
but there is a bigger problem with tallow - what to do with the waste grease?
Not sure if this happens in the US but there is/was a company in Suffolk, UK that somehow made lipstick from all manner of used oils, fats, grease!

Waste not want not as they say but I wonder how many women know what they're putting on their lips.

Jay.
 

Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
6,958
23,517
Humansville Missouri
Yes, it was New Spain back then. As a result of the French-Indian War, France transferred the land to Spain to keep the English from acquiring it as a war trophy. Once Napoleon conquered Spain, he transferred it back to France and sold it to America. Daniel Boone's house was not too far from where I grew up.

I have a now useless skill, of reading abstracts of title. The Missouri General Assembly passed a wise law about 25 years ago that effectively gives title insurance a monopoly and I was overjoyed to be able have a good reason to not read abstracts. It paid nothing much and stirred up much resentment.

But when I cleaned out my office there were about a half dozen or so abstracts my wife wanted to toss and I refused. I might want to read them again someday.:)

All Spanish and French land grants until 1803 were recognized, and still are.


Daniel Boone was sort of like Jesse James, he slept everywhere, and had countless homes.:)

Truth was Boone’s Missouri adventures were sort of disastrous. He nearly starved out and went home to Kentucky, but he left a trail of places that bear some kind of his name. He died of cholera, which generations of Missouri mothers to the present day use to forbid their children from drinking from streams.

My favorite place that links to Daniel Boone is where his sons found a salt lick.


At that historic site, there’s a memorial to a 16 year old kid buried that somehow fell in a caldron of boiling salt water and died a few days later.

I took all four of my children there, and would add to the story the father is buried over there in an unmarked grave where the boy’s mother put him, for not watching that kid.:)

Those people were absolutely, completely, and exactly like us,

They just wore a different style of clothing.
 
Last edited:

karam

Lifer
Feb 2, 2019
2,710
10,253
Basel, Switzerland
The old timers would store beef in large crocks with a layer of beef tallow on top, before refrigeration. They’d keep it in root cellars and the beef would last until the hottest weather.
You can find this technique the world over. Up until the point where keeping and slaughtering farm animals at home became illegal in Greece pig slaughtering would be a big family day, lard would be rendered in a big cast iron pot and meat not smoked/made into sausages would be cut into strips kept in clay pots in solidified rendered fat in the cellars. Due to the heat of the rendering it'd be essentially sterile, and the fat keeping oxygen and water out would prevent it from spoiling. Families would scoop up the lard and pieces of meat to use in cooking.
 

Brad H

Lifer
Dec 17, 2024
2,047
10,962
You can find this technique the world over. Up until the point where keeping and slaughtering farm animals at home became illegal in Greece pig slaughtering would be a big family day, lard would be rendered in a big cast iron pot and meat not smoked/made into sausages would be cut into strips kept in clay pots in solidified rendered fat in the cellars. Due to the heat of the rendering it'd be essentially sterile, and the fat keeping oxygen and water out would prevent it from spoiling. Families would scoop up the lard and pieces of meat to use in cooking.
You know, my grandmother who lived before refrigeration actually told me about this process. They kept sausage in a bucket with the fat ontop. When they wanted one they went to the bucket/pot (can’t remember exactly what she said they kept it in) and just grab a few out and the fat would keep them preserved.
Another thing they would do, they would keep eggs not refrigerated. They would dip the eggs in mineral oil, and allegedly an egg could keep up to a year not refrigerated….. not sure about a year, but it would keep a while.
 

khiddy

Part of the Furniture Now
Jun 21, 2024
972
4,510
South Bend, Indiana
blog.hallenius.org
Farm-fresh unwashed eggs don’t need anything done to them and can be kept at room temperature for weeks, as they come out of the hen with a protective coating (along with the chickenshit). In the USA, where we want everything in the grocery store to be shiny and clean, commercially sold eggs are washed before packaging, which removes the protective coating and thus they have to be kept refrigerated.

Washed eggs also age faster than unwashed, even when kept refrigerated, as they oxidize quicker without that protective coating on the shell.
 

karam

Lifer
Feb 2, 2019
2,710
10,253
Basel, Switzerland
Farm-fresh unwashed eggs don’t need anything done to them and can be kept at room temperature for weeks, as they come out of the hen with a protective coating (along with the chickenshit). In the USA, where we want everything in the grocery store to be shiny and clean, commercially sold eggs are washed before packaging, which removes the protective coating and thus they have to be kept refrigerated.

Washed eggs also age faster than unwashed, even when kept refrigerated, as they oxidize quicker without that protective coating on the shell.
It’s actually forbidden to wash eggs in Europe, they are never refrigerated and neither does anyone anywhere keep eggs in the fridge. You do get a feather and some chickenshit stuck on them occasionally but hey!