Organic beef suet

Organic beef suet, in roughly 1 kg bags, at $25.75/kg. Non-GMO, pesticide-free, sold raw and frozen. This is the raw material for tallow: rendered and strained it makes the best cooking fat there is — and what is left over goes to candles, soap and balms.

Suet or tallow — what is the difference?

Suet is the raw fat, as it comes off the animal. Tallow is that same fat melted slowly, strained and cooled. It is one operation, it takes an hour, and it turns a bag of fat at $25.75/kg into a jar of clean white cooking fat that keeps for months. What you are buying here is the step before — which is why it costs what it does.

Organic Québec beef

The suet comes from our certified organic cattle, pasture-raised in Huntingdon. Fat is where what an animal ate concentrates, which makes provenance matter more here than for almost any other cut: non-GMO, pesticide-free, from an identified animal.

How to render beef suet into tallow

• Cut it small, or pulse it in a food processor. The smaller it is, the better it melts.
• Heat it very gently — heavy pan on the lowest setting, or a slow cooker on low. Add a splash of water (60 ml) so it does not catch at the start; it boils off.
• Give it 2 to 4 hours, stirring now and then. The fat runs clear and the tissue floats up and browns.
• Strain through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth, into clean jars.
• Let it cool: tallow sets to a firm white fat.

A one-kilo bag yields roughly 700 to 800 ml of tallow. What stays in the sieve is cracklings — salt them and eat them.

In the kitchen

Tallow takes high heat without smoking, which makes it the fat for chips, for onions, and for steak seared in cast iron. In baking it gives a tourtière crust a flakiness butter does not reach. A spoonful in a roasting tin and the potatoes change category.

Non-food uses

Once rendered, the same tallow goes into candles, soaps, balms and home cosmetics — it is a stable fat that goes rancid slowly. That use brings a good share of the people who land on this page, and it works from exactly the same product: the suet is identical, only what you do next changes.

Storage and safety

Raw suet keeps in the freezer for up to a year. Rendered tallow keeps several months in the fridge and over a year frozen; in a sealed jar away from light, a few months at room temperature. This product is sold raw and must be properly cooked or rendered before eating.

Beef suet price and ordering

• Regular price: $25.75/kg — bags of about 1 kg
• Yield: roughly 700 to 800 ml of tallow per kilo of suet
• Product number: 8110425
• Sold frozen and raw
• Organic, non-GMO and pesticide-free, from our cattle in Huntingdon, Québec
• Where to buy: delivery across Québec and Montréal by refrigerated truck, free from $225. Farm pickup at 62 York Street, Huntingdon.