When I was growing up, my parents and grandparents didn’t let anything go to waste. I remember my mother and paternal grandmother in the kitchen rendering fat, using it to make suet blocks for the birds and serving up the “cracklins” with supper. We use the fat for suet blocks and our homemade soaps. If you’re interested in making homemade lye, the post for that can be found here: Making Lye from Wood Ashes Once you’ve got your rendered fat and some homemade lye, you may want to try a batch of soap. Recipes for that can be found here: Make Your Own Wood Ash Lye Soap and here: Homestead Lard Soap
The fat that I’m rendering here is deer fat, but you can use cow fat, hog fat or even fat trimmed from store bought meat. Rendered fat from a cow is tallow, and rendered fat from a hog or pig is lard.
Step One:
When you trim your fat, make sure to get only fat, no meat or flesh. Any meat cooked in your renderings will give the final product an off smell. Rendered fat can be “washed” to eliminate smell, (even rancid lard or tallow can be fixed) but the smell from meat cooked into your renderings won’t ever go away enough. I’ll go into “washing” already rendered fat in a later post.
Step Two:
Cut your trimmed fat into small cubes (approximately 1/8 inch).
Step Three:
Place cubed fat into a pot along with a little bit of water to get the fat started without burning. Don’t worry about having water in your rendered fat as this small amount of water will evaporate off during the cooking process. Turn your burner to low.
Keep stirring as the fat starts to cook, making sure that none sticks to the bottom of the pot and that all the pieces are getting warmed. Here’s a little of how the progression should look:
Once you start getting close to having all the fat rendered, you will notice that the bubbling will drop off significantly. Wait until you have no more of the active, large, grouped bubbles like you see in the last picture above. It will still have some, but no where near like above.
Step Three:
Place a strainer with a piece of doubled cheesecloth over a bowl or measuring cup. If it’s glass, make sure you’ve warmed it a little so that the hot grease doesn’t shatter it.
That’s all there is to it! The process is really simple and unless you leave it cooking too long, should give you a very pretty milky white fat that has endless uses. Although rendered amounts and times will vary, I’ve listed the specifics below that may be useful to you. 
- In this example, I started with a little more than 2 cups of cubed deer fat and ended up with just shy of 1 cup of rendered fat.
- Once in the pot, cooking time was 1 hour and 10 minutes.
- If you’re not going to use your rendered fat immediately, simply label it and stick it in the fridge until you’re ready.
- If you have your trimmed fat, but not enough time to complete the cooking process, freeze it. It will keep nicely for a year or more.