Tallow: noun

1. a hard fatty substance made from rendered animal fat.

Rendered beef fat.  If you had told my younger self that beefy lotion would be a normal part of my skincare routine, I would’ve called you crazy.  Hard pass.  Yet here I am, so determined to slather myself and my family from head to toe in sweet moisturizing goodness, that I’m not only using beef tallow as a skincare balm, but I’ve learned how to make it from scratch at home!

Our tallow journey started about a year ago.  My husband was listening to a podcast, as is the way many of our unconventional endeavors begin.  It was Mellissa K. Noris interviewing Emilie from Toups & Co, and they were discussing the ingredients in skincare products and how so much of what goes into our lotions and soaps and other stuff is just straight up toxic. (Really informative podcast, I highly recommend listening it it!)

As the largest organ in (or rather on) our body, the skin does an incredible job at absorbing into our bloodstream whatever we put on it, and if we’re loading up our skin with toxic lotions, soaps, shampoos, and balms every day, we’re setting ourselves up for a whole lot of extra struggle in the health department.  Not only that, but these products often create a frustrating cycle of dry-oily-dry, and leave us with skin in worse condition than before we started using them.

Well, every winter my husband ends up with these horribly cracked fingertips – sometimes to the point of bleeding.  He has tried tons of different lotions and creams, but he really doesn’t like the feeling of lotion on his skin and it never seemed to make a huge difference anyway.  But the tallow balm that they were talking about in this podcast seemed really promising, and it fit right into our journey of cleaning up our diet and purging our house of toxins.  So he ordered a jar to try it out.

Toups & Co has TONS of AMAZING products!

It was life changing!  He’d slather his hands at night before bed, and in the morning he’d wake up with incredibly hydrated skin.  Over time the cracking decreased, and he definitely noticed if he missed a night, unlike with the lotions.

But we quickly discovered a problem.  A 4oz jar of the tallow balm was close to $60, and we were blowing through it in just a couple months.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong believer in paying a fair price for a good product!  Especially when it’s organic and from a small business.  But our budget just couldn’t sustain that purchase on the regular.  And I wanted to start using it for my own skin too, which meant we would need to buy even more!

So that left us with two options: abandon our beloved tallow balm, or, in the spirit of our diy lifestyle, learn how to make it ourselves.

At first I figured “how hard can it be?”  So we bought a hunk of ground beef suet at the local butcher shop, chucked it in the crockpot, set it on low, and strained out the chunky bits once all the liquid had rendered out.  But it turns out that while that method makes a yellow, fairly beefy smelling tallow that’s great for cooking, it isn’t ideal for creating tallow fit for a skincare product.

It took some trial and error, a really stinky first batch, a whole lot of googling, and a little bit of YouTube watching, but I finally found a process that produced a lovely batch of white, odor-free tallow!  Here’s a step-by-step breakdown from start to finish, plus the recipe I use to make a lovely moisturizing skin balm.

How to Render Tallow (to Make It Odorless for Skincare)

Step 1: Buy beef fat

We purchased suet (beef kidney fat) from our local butcher shop in town.  100% grass fed suet will be the most nutrient dense and give the best results for your skin.  I’m not sure if ours came from grass fed cows, I forgot to ask.  Probably not honestly, so I need to look into that more in our area if I want to find a good source of grass fed beef fat for future batches.

Step 2: Begin rendering process

I used a crockpot in my folk’s shop next door for this batch.  The steady low heat makes it easier to avoid burning the tallow, but you can totally do it on the stove if you have time to babysit a pot and make sure it doesn’t burn.  I have a baby and a toddler.  So crockpot it is.

I put about three pounds of frozen beef fat into my crockpot, covered it with water, and added probably around a quarter cup of salt (not an exact science).  The water helps keep it from burning and the salt draws out the impurities.  My crockpot is older so I used the high setting, but if you have a newer crockpot that cooks hotter you should probably use the low setting.

Fat, water, & salt ready to go

Mmm, so appetizing… lol

Let your mixture cool enough to handle without burning your hands.  Then pour or ladle it through a fine metal strainer into a bowl.  I used glass because thats what I had on hand, but you can use a metal bowl too.  Just make sure it’s sloped enough to be able to get the tallow out once it has solidified.

Set it in a cool place (I used the refrigerator in the shop).  The water and impurities will settle to the bottom and the tallow will rise to the top and solidify.

Step 4: Remove impurities

Once your tallow has hardened, remove it from the bowl and turn it upside down on a flat surface.  You will likely see icky brown stuff all stuck to the underside.  These are the impurities that would otherwise give your tallow a strong beefy odor.  Go ahead and scrape that off with a knife or a spoon until you see white all the way across the surface.

My pictures aren’t great for this step, apparently I didn’t let it harden enough before I tried to take it out of the bowl and it went a bit crumbly on me.

Oops, still too soft…

Impurities left in the water

Step 5: Purify

Now if you’re just using this tallow to cook with, you could just be done here and have an awesome healthy cooking fat that makes your food taste really good!  But if you want to use it in skincare products (and not have your dogs trying to lick you all day) you’ll want to do a purifying step to remove any remaining odor-causing impurities.

Go ahead and put your tallow back into the crockpot and repeat steps 1-4.  This time when you go to strain, line your strainer with cheesecloth to get your finished product as clean as possible.  Chill, scrape, sniff, and repeat as many times as necessary to get a white, odorless product.  I’ve found that two purifying rounds usually does the trick for me.

Second round of rendering, aka purifying

Thoroughly chilled this time lol

Look how much cleaner that water is!

So pretty! 😍

Final note, when pouring the melted tallow into your jars, you’ll likely notice a little bit of water settled at the bottom of your pitcher.  Try not to let any of that go into your jars, or else it can cause the tallow to mold.

Chill the jars to let it all set up, and then you can store it in the fridge or the freezer or even at room temperature, depending on how long you think it’ll be until you use it.  The balm I make stores at room temperature just fine, but we easily use it up within a month or two, so I haven’t tested how long you can have it out before it goes bad.

Voila, the finished product!

And there it is folks, how to render tallow for skincare products!  Or for if you just don’t want beefy smelling tallow for cooking.  This method also takes most of the flavor out as well, if you’re looking for a cleaner taste.  I like the beefy flavor, I think it adds a little something to my fried dishes, but to each their own.

The whole process takes a little bit of time overall with the heating and chilling, but the amount of time spent actually handling the product isn’t all that much once you get the hang of it.  Maybe an hour’s worth of work total.  Definitely worth it, considering how much money we’re saving by making it ourselves!  And it feels soooo good knowing that we’re using a product on our skin that not only isn’t contributing to the toxic load in our bodies, but is actually contributing to our overall health!  If you’d like to read more about the benefits of beef tallow, Bumblebee Apothecary has an excellent article on the subject!  Her blog was my main resource for learning how to do this.

Now that I’ve figured out how to make my own tallow balm from scratch, my next experiment will be making a tallow-based shampoo.  Before all my tallow research I didn’t even know that was a thing!  But I’ve been looking for a non-toxic way to clean my hair for a long time, so I’m excited to try it out!  Stay tuned for that article. 😉

If you try this method for rendering tallow, let me know in the comments how it works out for you!

As an added bonus, here’s the simple recipe I use to make my basic tallow balm:

1 cup tallow, melted.

2 tablespoons olive oil, organic if possible.

40 or so drops essential oils of your choice, depending on what effect or scent you’re going for.  Lemon and lavender make a lovely combo!

Mix it all together and pour into little glass jars, label, and enjoy!