This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my Privacy Policy & Disclosures for more information.
Tallow is a saturated animal fat you’ll want to keep stocked in your pantry for its countless uses, think homemade cosmetics, candle – or soapmaking. Here are my five favorite ways to use it!
As a family who loves meat but seeks to raise animals in a way that honors their life, we try to use as much of the animal as possible.
For instance, when we butcher our chickens, the cleaned feet go in the stock pot, and the feathers go into our compost pile.
From our pig, we use every possible cut of meat and render the fat into snow-white lard that we use for cooking and frying.
In commercial meat processing situations, fat is usually collected and rendered for animal feed.
Even a small-scale pasture-raised beef farming friend of mine recently lamented the fact that his animals’ gorgeous fat was largely considered waste product.
If you raise your own cattle, or if you purchase a side of beef, consider rendering the fat into tallow. You can find easy, step-by-step instructions on how to render tallow here:
Easy Guide to Render Fat into Tallow
Once you’ve made tallow, what will you do with it? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Five Uses for Tallow
1. Make Soap Using Tallow
Tallow is an ideal fat for soap making, both because of its skin-nourishing qualities, but also because it is a homesteader’s fat. This post will walk you through the process of purifying tallow for soap making.
When you’re ready to give it a try, I recommend checking out The Nerdy Farm Wife’s Natural Soap Making eBook to learn the basics, and then dive into one of these recipes:
DIY Homemade Soap Recipe: The Modern Homesteader Bar with Goat Milk and Tallow
2. Use Tallow for Cooking
In our home, we use lard for high-temperature cooking or frying. But tallow would be just as delicious, and if you make it at home, you have an inexpensive and local fat supply. (Just as a side note, I saw a pint jar of tallow for sale in a natural food store yesterday at a mind-blowing price of $18.95!!).
Quinn from Reformation Acres says, “If you’ve got tallow to use for it make fried chicken! Holy macaroni, nothing compares!” You might also try a recipe like these Elderflower Fritters.
3. Make Tallow Candles
Pure tallow can be used to make very simple emergency candles. Tallow can also be added to beeswax candles to cut expense.
Our neighbors use up to 50% tallow in their homemade candles. They advise that when adding tallow to candles, make tapers a bit thinner, so they burn cleanly and evenly.
4. Make Tallow Laundry Soap
Once you’ve mastered tallow soap making, tallow laundry soap is quite simple to make with the addition of washing soda and perhaps some essential oils for a pleasant scent.
Tallow laundry soap cleans well but is gentle on clothing.
5. Nourish Your Skin with Tallow Balm
Tallow can be added to balms or lotion bars to create a moisturizing skin care product. I’ve been using the grass-fed tallow balm from Toups and Co. Organics.
They have done a really nice job creating a product that feels nourishing but not greasy, and the addition of essential oils add a pleasant scent.
What is your favorite way to use tallow? Let’s chat in the comment section!
Pin this post for later:
Crackling bread is made with corn meal mix like you are making cornbread then add about a 1/2 cup of the cracklings( can add a little salt since cracklings so not have any seasoning on them) into the mix and bake like you do cornbread. this is how my grandmother made it when I was younger.
Sounds really tasty!!
hello
something you said at the start about using clean chicken feet in your stock if you have dogs you can safely give them to your dogs before cooking any chicken bone can be given dogs as long as they have not been cooked never give cooked ones to them as the cooking changes the structure of the bone an makes it apt to splinter
also with chicken bones you can compost them and or dry an then grind them to make your own bone meal you need a heavy duty grinder to do bones some of the grinders used for feed would be strong enough to do bones
Sorry know I am a little off subject here but just some things that popped into my head
Grant
Thanks for the suggestions, Grant. We don’t have a dog, but we do have a compost! We add the bones to our compost, but grinding them is an interesting idea as well. Thank you!