Feels like this post was a long time coming. I’ve done quite a few briskets on here, and have thrown away quite a bit of scraps. That ends today. This will be a shorter post, because there isn’t all that much to making the tallow. But you’ll see the what I did, and why I did it – and why I suggest you do the same!
Beef tallow has gotten a lot of positive press lately.. timely post indeed.
The Brisket Cook
If you refer back to the Prime Rib post, you know I was tasked with providing the protein for the family meal. It was agreed upon that the rare meat would probably not go over well, so I called back to an old friend: The brisket.
Lookit all that white fat. Pounds of product that I’ve wasted so much of in the past. I spent the time to trim it off and throw it all in a ziploc bag for later. I was planning to make the tallow the following day, so I threw it in the fridge. This brisket was going to be a 180F cook for 8 hours, wrapped, and then 225F for another 8 hours until ~203F. I don’t know if I’ve ever done a 16 hour brisket before – definitely double digits.. but sixteen seems like a long time. It was.
I love this little hot box. It fits a single full pan, and is my brisket go-to. I used to do the towel/cooler thing – but as I grow up, so does my techniques. Clamped this thing down, and waited for my wife to tell me it was time to go to the family’s house. I was going to cut this up here so I didn’t have to bring all my tools there.
This thing had every indication of being the best brisket yet. Had the jiggle, had the crust – the smoke ring, the moist. The fat cap at the bottom stuck to the butcher paper a bit, so I gotta trim better or look into that – but this one was incredible.
This was the perfect photo of it. Lean on the left, fatty on the right. I had to pre-share this on social media, and you can understand why. Anyway, this is a beef tallow post – let’s look at that fat.
The Tallow
Throw fat, add heat. Took the wooden spoon and kept it from sticking to the bottom. This took a couple hours, but when the fat is all liquid at the bottom, and your meat is crispy in the pot, it’s time to let it cool so we can strain it out. Threw a sieve over a funneled mason jar and kept the bigger bits of meat out of there.
You can see it’s not a pure product yet. Any bits of sediment is going to time limit your tallow – it’ll get nasty. So let’s do another filtering. The only thing I could do – drain it through a paper towel, sacrificing some of the fat to the quicker picker-upper, but it’s worth it.
You can see what remained before I paper-towel filtered on the left side. And you can see it collected on the right side. That’s exactly what I was hoping for.
The Result
Put it into a nice, new, clean mason jar and threw it in the fridge for a bit.
We got tallow! The only thing I have to do now is cook with it. Next week, I put it to the test. Was it worth the time and effort?
(yes.)