Saving Animal Fat?

[Kwings]

I've read on various posts about people using fat from the animals they raise and butcher themselves. How do you store it? What do you do to it so that you can cook with it or it is just ready to be cooked with right off?

Thanks!

[barefootflowers]

I've rendered lard from our pigs a few times. I store it in canning jars in the fridge. Other people I know store it in the freezer. It's great for frying up potatoes.

[Rustaholic]

Either cut it up small or run it through a meat grinder then use a low heat to melt it and skim off any dross.
We usually pour the rendered fat into large mouth quart canning jars and store them in the fridge to use it soon and store in the freezer to use it later.
Rendered pig fat is just like lard you can buy.

Any rendered fat can also be used to make soap.
Here is some good info take a look around.
http://www.soap-making-resource.com/...ion-table.html

[Oldcountryboy]

I've rendered it before but probably ended up throwing most of it away in the past. My wife doesn't believe in using it for cooking and she's just doesn't have enough interest to make soaps. But I've gotten to where I save any fat I can and when I have enough I render it and mix bird seeds with it. Then feed it to the birds.

[wogglebug]

It's certainly worth saving and learning to use. There is soap, and making some from wood-ashes is a useful skill to learn with the family, even if what you end up with is like "Grandma's lye-soap" and too harsh for anything except clothes and dishes. (Aging it for months will moderate harsh soap somewhat. Soap made from ashes (potash lye) rather that soda lye will tend to be physically softer, and was often favoured as shaving soap just because of that.

Another exercise for the family - lights. You can make the equivalent of a Biblical lamp with a wick or some moss in a shallow can of fat, or a candle from a wick and pure fat. I've done this under guidance of my own parents lo, these many decades ago, and a tallow candle works fine, gives usable light (not as good as a wax candle, but usable. However, don't do it in the house if you can help it. Not unsurprisingly, it smells like burning fat - unpleasant unless the alternative is doing without light when you must have some.

You'll get plenty of guidance on rendering fat here. I'll just add my personal non-standard piece here. I end up, however I got the the fat, by boiling it with clean water at a high rolling boil. That takes most impurities out and into the water. Pour most of it off the water, leaving a small amount of water, then let the fat set, then take it off the remaining water. The fat will be much cleaner - in effect it's been washed. Repeat if it really needed it. That leaves incredibly clean fat. However, be warned. Fat needs to get to the point of boiling for some cooking; and if it has water in it the water will boil and the fat will spit. Fat burns HURT! If you're using fat cleaned my way, be careful. You may need to heat it carefully, and boil any remaining water off before you use it.

Excess fat? If you're talking subsistence living, there's no such thing. Fat acts like low-speed grease. You can use it on axles, or even as lubricant on lathes and any spinning axle. Excess can be fed, a little at a time, to pigs, poultry, a little dribbled on cat and dog food over winter. I personally think it's a bad idea (mad cow disease), but you can even dribble some on food for hard-worked draught animals and horses if you reach the point where they MUST have more calories than you can provide any other way. Not that they are likely to get disease from the fat, but it could give them the taste to nibble on corpses in the field.

[fffarmergirl]

Could you can it?

[Rustaholic]

Originally Posted by fffarmergirl

Could you can it?

I would have to ask my 86 year old mom.
After giving me her best advice I am sure she would ask me why I wanted to can it.

The first pig I ever raised here for myself was 240 pounds when it was butchered.
The local guy that butched it for me drove his tractor over here, shot the pig, slit it's throat and we rolled it into the bucket on his tractor.

After it was butched I went to his place and the two halves were hanging there. Together they weighed 196 pounds.
He wanted me there to tell him just how thick I wanted everything cut up.
He trimmed 40 pounds of fat off the meat then when all the meat was cut and all the sausage meat ground up he ran all the fat through the grinder too.

I brought home that plastic lined box of fat and got out a roaster pan and started rendering it.
What came off it as dross was mostly cracklins.
Some we ate and the rest we cooked with.
The rendered lard was an oil when hot so we poured it into jars and let it cool to solid before lidding the jars.
Then we put the jars in the freezer.

I guess you could cap the jars while hot and see if they seal.
I would just do a couple as a test.
I would not want to risk all of my lard going rancid.
At any rate when you want to get it out of a jar it will be a solid so a large mouth jar lets you scoop it out.

We had grown a lot of pie pumpkins that year too so we stored those in a cool corner of the basement until we got a chance to cut them up and freeze the pumpkin. All that Winter and following Spring we were making pumpkin pies and using the lard in the crusts. YUMMY

[ET1 SS]

We render the lard from our hogs and our chickens.

We can both.