Rendering Deer Tallow

This is what we call the gall fat, and this is intestinal fat that I'm going to take today, and we're going to make deer tallow out of it. So as I'm gutting it, I'm going to try to be careful not to get any blood on it and as much hair as I can get on it. So taking that out. When I was younger, um, Whenever I was— I was the family hunter, and from a pretty young age, my grandpa who lived in this house, um, would always tell me to keep the stomach fat. And so when you're gutting the deer, there's all this webbing that's kind of like intertwined in there with the guts, and that's called fat.

So you pull that out and kind of got to be gentle with it, try not to get too much mud or dirt or leaves on it. What I would do is I would just fill up my pockets, and then I'd bring it home and give it to him, and he'd always ask for it. He did a lot of that during hunting season, but he would take it and he would boil it down and make facial cream out of it. And he would joke and say that it kept the wrinkles away. As you're starting to pull this apart, you can almost see the webbing.

It's kind of like a big spider web. It's a different type of fat. Very sought-after fat. This is from, uh, 2 deer, and we're just going to cut it into chunks and put it into a boiling pot of water with some salt and let that simmer and render down. And then we're going to strain it and put it in the fridge overnight.

So it's kind of a 2-day process. A lot of people do this with, uh, all sorts of animal fats. They'll do it with bear fat, they'll do it with seal fats. One of the main ones in this part of the world. This goes back to traditional ways as we try to use as much of the animal as we can.

So a lot of people think you're going to go get a deer, or you're going to go get a moose, or you're going to go get a bear and you're just going to eat the meat, but that's not true. We use, we use a lot of the animal, from the fat, from the insides, to the bones, to the hooves, to the hide. I have also used this same gulf fat on different hunts where I do overnight hunts. If I have a camp set up, like I go up on the mountain, I have before taken this caul fat as a webbing and wrapped like a backstrap of a deer or a tenderloin of a deer in that caul fat because it's kind of like a web. If you pull it out like you were just able to see, it's kind of like a big web.

So I've taken that out and wrapped meat in it and cooked that over the fire, and that's really good. So we just cut the caul fat up the deer, and now we're gonna stick it into the boiling water with a little bit of salt to start the rendering process. The purpose the salt does is it allows the impurities to separate from the fat and drain into the water when you go and start the cooling process, and maybe even during the boiling process too, I suppose. Boiling it and strain it will get rid of all the hair and the blood, just any impurities you see. In the fat.

One thing I remember about my grandpa was he was real meticulous about how he did everything. He, he made sure his knives were sharp, he made sure the surfaces were clean, everything was put in order, and he was prepared to do what he was going to do. So he moved really slow. I think he was probably 90 years old when we did this. He had everything in place, everything was laid out, and he was just ready to go.

So when he was ready to cook it and, and render it down, it went fast and smooth and My main job, I remember, during that last time of cooking tallow was after he rendered it down and poured it, he would pour it into these Dixie cups, these little waxy Dixie cups, and that's what he would store them in. And my job was to take a Sharpie and just go about 2 inches from the bottom of the cup and mark all the way around, and that was our fill line. So when you pour it in there, you'd fill up that and then he'd also use that line. He'd take a knife and cut it, and then so it's like a puck. He would call it a puck, and that's what he would use.

And so as he was rubbing it on his face and it was using it up, he'd have to take the— cut the Dixie cup further down and further down to— pretty soon it would fall out and he would just have like this little puck. As it cools, the water separates from the fat. The fat becomes solid, the water stays liquid, and You're left with just rendered deer fat with water underneath. You pour the water out and you scrape the bottom of the tallow. The way that we'll probably do it is we're gonna— we'll reheat it just to get it to a liquid form to pour it into Dixie cups.

There's a picture of my grandpa there, and you could tell that he doesn't have— he's probably about 99, 98 in there. He doesn't have any wrinkles on his face, smiling really big. The last time I did deer tallow was with him, and it was about 25 years ago. So it looks like the tallow set up good. The water separated from the deer tallow.

You can see some water in the bowl here. What we will do now is, uh, scrape the back of this, get any impurities off of that, and then we're going to heat this up again and pour it into cups to make our pucks. See that? That's, that's the impurities you're trying to get rid of. Now we're going to heat it up.

I'm sure you can use it for cooking. I've heard about people using this type of, uh, rendered fat for like waterproofing boots or um, laces, stuff like that. Okay, that's done now. So that's it all the way rendered down for the second time. Pour it in nice and slow because the bottom of that, you'll see here in a second, there are some more impurities in it.

It's probably little chunks of meat or maybe some water. Boiling it down that second time, you got— you kind of did two rendering processes, so get just clean fat, and that's what we're working with. Looks pretty good. I think my grandpa would be pretty proud.

There it is. As my grandpa would do every time before he went out the house.

Mediwood. That's it.