The Fastest Way To Render Animal Fat (*hint* it’s in your Instant Pot!)
I rendered over 20 pounds of pastured tallow fat into 13 quarts of tallow in an hour by using my Instant Pot! Here’s the fastest way to render animal fat, like tallow and lard, in the Instant Pot! (By the way, rendered animal fat is nothing to be afraid of! This nourishing traditional food won’t make you fat or clog your arteries… those are 1980s health myths!)
Use your Instant Pot to plan dinner, too!
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We love fat.
All the “medical advice” that warns us against fats — especially coconut oil, butter, and animal fat — it’s malarkey.
I believe my family’s good health is proof of that! Over and over, medical tests have proven that our diet, which is high in traditional fats, is not negatively impacting our health.
But… Full Disclosure: I am NOT skinny. I am a curvy size 12 with a little extra “junk in my trunk”, KWIM? 😉 According to all the “charts”, I’m technically overweight.
I also feel pretty great most of the time, have sustained energy throughout the day, and sleep like a babe.
How About Some Science, Like Health Stats?
- Weight 135 pounds, height 5’5″
- Blood pressure? Average is 115/68. Picture perfect. 🙂
- HDL Cholesterol? Last year’s blood tests showed 73 mg/dL.
- Triglycerides? 58 mg/dL… woohoo!
Y’all? I eat fat all. the. time. (Nourishing, healthy, traditional fat, that is.)
At any given time, our larder contains — at the very least — butter, coconut oil, olive oil, beef tallow, and lard.
More often than not, you could add palm shortening, avocado oil, ghee, and MCT oil to that list.
And, bacon fat? Don’t even get me started on my deep and abiding love for bacon fat.
(I have a small jar sitting next to my stove right now, actually.) 😉
I eat saturated fat like it’s my job.
So, let’s throw all that 1980s BS about fat being evil out the window, shall we? It’s 2017! Healthy, nourishing, traditional fats are totally in and totally good for us!
The Awesome Benefits Of Lard & Tallow
I specifically want to talk about the truly amazing benefits of rendered animal fats, like lard and tallow. (Rendered = animal fat is heated to release its oil, and hardens to a white solid when cooled.
The leftover bits, called cracklings, may be salted and eaten. The fat is shelf-stable and is perfect for frying, sauteeing, making pie crusts, or any other way you’d use fat.)
#1 — Suitable For High-Heat Cooking
Lard and tallow are both suitable for high-heat cooking, like frying.
Unlike olive oil — which should not be used at temperatures over 350 degrees, which is often not actually pure olive oil, and which can become rancid when exposed to air and light — lard and tallow do not easily oxidize because of their high saturated fat content. Less oxidation is a good thing. It means less free radicals (precursors to cancer and disease) floating around your body.
Also, foods fried in rendered animal fats taste second to none. You just haven’t lived until you’ve eaten potatoes or cheese curds or butternut squash curly fries fried in lard or tallow!
#2 — High In Fat-Soluble Vitamins
I just love it when my fat contains my vitamins, don’t you? 😉
Lard and tallow are both high in the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Lard is especially high in Vitamin D (but only if it comes from pastured hogs) — so eat it up this winter!
Read about 23 Ways To Eat Fat-Soluble Vitamins.
#3 — High In Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA)
CLA is a type of fat that has been shown to reduce cancer, lower body fat, and improve brain function. CLA is absolutely essential to our bodies, yet the types of food that are high in CLA are typically ostracized by conventional diet “wisdom”.
These foods include grass-fed, full-fat dairy products, grass-fed beef, grass-fed butter, and yes, tallow and lard from grass-fed animals.
#4 — They’re Traditional
When we look back at the foods our ancestors ate, lard and tallow are likely among them. (Or some other rendered animal fat like bear fat, whale/seal fat, duck fat, and/or butter.)
Our great-great-great grandmothers wouldn’t recognize tubs of margarine or bottles of vegetable oil as food! I don’t care what the “lipid hypothesis” says. 😉
Check out Nourishing Traditions and Nutrition & Physical Degeneration for more information about Traditional fats and foods. Or, here’s a free video series about Traditional foods!
#5 — They’re Sustainable
Back when people used the whole animal, a pig or cow was slaughtered and every part of it was used — right down to the fat.
Now, I buy our beef and pork from a local farmer who raises these happy animals on pasture. She takes care of having the meat butchered for me, yet I still make sure to ask for the fat.
Believe it or not, she doesn’t even charge me for it! No one wants it, and it’ll be thrown out otherwise. Can you believe it??
It’s less wasteful, honors the life of the animal, and makes our food go much farther when we use every part of the animal.
Plus, no special equipment is required to press or produce the fat (like coconut oil or olive oil). All you need is a slow cooker, a cast iron skillet, or…
an Instant Pot!
The Fastest Way To Render Animal Fat In The Instant Pot
This is no joke, y’all. I rendered over 20 pounds of beef fat into 13 quarts of tallow in less than an hour with this method! 🙂
You will need:
- an Instant Pot
- a fine mesh sieve
- a 1-quart heat-safe glass measuring cup
- quart-size, wide-mouth Mason canning jars with rings and seals
- a meat grinder*
*If you don’t have a meat grinder, ask your butcher to grind your pig and/or beef fat for you. This method is the fastest way to render animal fat in the Instant Pot because of the tiny “fat pellets”.
First, run the pieces of fat through your meat grinder, if you’ve not already had the butcher do this for you.
Next, press the Sauté button on the Instant Pot. You don’t need the IP lid for this project.
Add the fat pellets — 8 to 10 cups at a time — to the hot Instant Pot. Don’t go too far… it won’t take long!
As soon as the fat pellets have melted, strain the liquid fat through the fine mesh sieve and into the glass measuring cup. It will be hot, so be careful!
Because the fat pellets are so small, you won’t have cracklings left over.
Then, pour the hot fat directly into your jars, wipe the rims, and place the seals and rings on immediately. As the oil cools and hardens, the jars will “pop” and self-seal.
Continue adding fat pellets in batches to your Instant Pot, working until you’ve used all your pig or beef fat.
Finally, once the fat has cooled and the jars have self-sealed, transfer them to pantry storage. They will last a very long time in a cool, dark location. If you’re at all worried about the fat going rancid, you can freeze the jars, too. I no longer freeze my rendered animal fat because it lasts just fine when stored in my cool basement.
Not ready to invest in an Instant Pot? You can render lard and tallow in a slow cooker and/or cast iron skillet!
Pin it!
Do you render pastured animal fats? Have you ever used your Instant Pot to render animal fat?
This post was originally published on October 22, 2017. It was updated with new photos on April 5, 2019.
Doing this today. We drove two hours to a heritage pig farm, and purchased 20 lbs of pastured pork leaf lard. The grinder made short work of turning the fat into uniform sized nuggets, and my husband and I both said again how glad we were to have made the decision to buy one that had the power and capacity it has, because cutting the fat to put it through the grinder took longer than actually grinding it. Then into two Instant Pots and one slow-cooker. The two instant pots had the nuggets rendered down in about an hour. We… Read more »
If you don’t use a meat grinder and just chop up beef fat into small pieces, will it still work only take longer? I was wanting to make a smaller quantity using beef fat I had already set aside in the freezer but don’t want to buy a meat grinder (yet!).
You can chop it in to small pieces if you don’t have a grinder, yes. It will take longer to render all of the fat out, which is why I prefer the grinder method.
Is there a reason to make stock and render fat separately? I don’t salt my stocks when I pressure cook, and all the fat just rises to the top. The final step in making stock is to skim the fat anyway, and after refrigeration, the fat scrapes off very easily. Any thoughts?
This isn’t about making a little bit of fat that rises to the top of stock. This is about rendering the oil out of a large amount of fat — no bones involved.
awesome! do you use the “high” or “low” setting for the saute feature?
I actually wasn’t aware that the temperature setting of the Saute feature could be changed! Is this on a newer model? If so, I have the original model. So, I guess I use the “high” setting. 🙂
The method you’ve described can be done in any pot… You aren’t taking advantage of the actual pressure cooking component.
You are correct, sir. The Instant Pot has 7-8 features for cooking, one of which is pressure cooking. This post shows just how versatile the Instant Pot can be. Thanks for your astute observation. 🙂
Genuine question — if you don’t need the pressure to do this, why wouldn’t you do it on the stove, in a pot that has a handle? I’ve never done it at all, but that seems easier. Is there some benefit to using the IP that’s not mentioned here?
The pieces I used were ground up pretty fine. For soap making, do you think I should re-do it with a little salt?
I’ve never made soap with tallow, so I really don’t know. Sorry…
I followed the instructions – but mine ended up being a little yellow. Do I need to “clean” it? I’ve read about doing it again with some salt and/or baking soda? Thoughts? I’ve rendered beef fat before with water, and left it on low heat for hours and got a nice white solidified piece of tallow – but this is def yellowish. Loved doing this in the instant pot – so quick! But maybe need something else/more? Help!
The color of the fat mostly depends on the animal. A light yellow isn’t anything to be concerned about. As long as it smells ok and tastes ok, you should be fine.
by the way, my beef fat was ground up, I put 8-10 cups in the IP, and rendered until it was mostly fat, and beef particles (about 20 minutes per 8-10 cups ). Too short? I will use this for soap making and for frying up veggies, etc.
It’s ready when you say it’s ready, Shari. That sounds about right, but it also depends on how big your pieces of fat were.
Thank you for the info on rendering beef fat in the Instant Pot. I make homemade soap, and beef tallow makes a beautiful bar of soap! I haven’t been able to source it locally already rendered, so I bought some at the butchers and am going to render it myself. I figured it couldn’tbe too hard, but I hadn’t research it yet. Now I’m excited to get going on it! It’s frozen, so I am anxiously waiting for it to thaw. This is my first visit to your web site. It looks like you have lot’s of things I’m interested… Read more »
Wonderful, Kathy! I won’t render my animal fat any other way now! Best of luck and thanks for finding me!
What can I do with the leftover fat
You can season it to make cracklins! Just salt is delicious.
Wow! These are really helpful. Thanks for sharing this information to us. It makes us want to purchase IP right at this moment.
Glad you found it helpful! I use my IP for sooooo many things! You definitely need one!
I have done this in the past with my slow cooker and just a little bit of water in the bottom and it works the same. BUT, if I even get the guts to toss out my slow cooker (because the IP does the same thing) I will have to try this!
I’ve never added water to it. What does that do?
This is such an amazing idea. The IP is great for so many things. I love it!
The IP is such a handy kitchen tool!
This is genius!! I never knew you can render fat in the IP. I absolutely love lard and tallow so I will definitely try this technique.