Beef Tallow: Uses, Calories and How to Store It

Tallow is beef fat, rendered: melted slowly, strained clean and set hard. It is the densest food I keep, it does a dozen jobs outside the kitchen, and a jar of it lasts years if it was rendered right. This page covers what it is good for, how many calories you are storing, how to render it, and how to keep it from going rancid.

The best tallow comes from suet, the hard fat around the kidneys and loin. It is more saturated than the fat under the hide, so it sets harder, keeps longer and has less flavor of its own. Any beef fat renders, but trim fat gives a softer, beefier tallow.

Rendered tallow is roughly half saturated fat, most of the rest oleic acid, the same fat that dominates olive oil, and only a few percent polyunsaturated. That low polyunsaturated share is why it resists rancidity far better than vegetable oils, and why it sets solid at room temperature. It melts around body temperature, between about 95 and 113°F depending on the animal, and its smoke point is around 400°F when it has been rendered clean.

Tallow is almost pure fat, and fat carries 9 calories a gram against 4 for carbohydrate and protein. That works out to about 250 calories an ounce, 115 a tablespoon, and 4,100 a pound. A pound of white rice, flour or dried beans is roughly 1,500 to 1,650 calories. Pound for pound, and jar for jar, nothing else in a pantry stores energy this tightly.

It also fills a gap the rest of a stockpile leaves. Grains, beans and canned meat are mostly carbohydrate and protein. A body living on lean meat alone cannot use it: past roughly a third of calories from protein the liver cannot keep up, and the result is nausea, diarrhea and constant hunger no matter how much you eat. The old name for it is rabbit starvation. Fat fixes it. When carbohydrate runs short the liver turns fat into ketones, which the brain and muscles run on, and that lets you keep going on tallow and dried meat for a long time. Pemmican is exactly that pairing.

Buy suet from a butcher, or ask for it: it is often nearly free. Rendering is slow heat and patience.

A pound of suet gives roughly three quarters of a pound of tallow, more from clean kidney fat. The cracklings are food; salt them.

Three things spoil fat: air, light and heat. A fourth, meat or water left in the jar, spoils it faster than all three. Clean rendering does more for shelf life than any container.

Signs it has turned

Rancid fat is not poisonous the way spoiled meat is, but it tastes bad and its vitamins and much of its value are gone. Demote a rancid jar to candles, rust coating or fire starter rather than eating it.

Keep it keeping

• Date every jar and lid, and put the oldest at the front.
• Smell a jar when you open it and once more before it goes into food.
• Keep the working jar small and refill it from sealed stock, so the big jars stay sealed.
• Rotate: a pound a month is easy to cook through, and it is the only way tallow at a year old stays a year old.

Working from calories, a pound of tallow a person a month is a sensible floor: it adds about 135 calories a day to a stored diet and covers the fat the rest of the stock lacks. It is on the what to stock list, and the shelf life table has it beside the other fats. Keep most of it frozen and a jar or two on the shelf, and render a fresh batch each fall when suet is cheap.

Prep hard, people.