Homemade Beef Tallow

I cook almost everything with beef tallow. In the van it’s what goes in the cast iron before a steak, and I use it for chicken and burgers too. It has a pretty high smoke point and it adds a beefy flavor to whatever you cook, because at the end of the day it is beef fat. It’s also cheap to make yourself, if you know where to get the fat.

I made this batch at my mom’s house in New York over the holidays in December 2024. You can watch me make it. The rendering starts around 13:30.

Where to get the trimmings

The day before, I tried to make tallow from the fat I trimmed off our Costco steaks, but it wasn’t much. The grocery store’s butcher counter told me to come back another day. So I went to a real butcher shop nearby. Butcher shops usually sell trimmings really cheap, maybe $1 or $2 a pound, and sometimes they’ll give them away for free because they’d throw them out anyway.

This shop asked $4.99 a pound, which felt expensive. I guess that’s a New York price. He ended up charging me $3.50 a pound, and he offered to run it through the grinder for me, which is how he makes his own tallow. I got 3.3 pounds, and the whole jar of tallow cost us $11 and some change.

Ground trimmings and a little water in a big pot.

Why the water

I add a little water at the start. It helps cook the trimmings down, and once the water evaporates, what’s left in the pot is the tallow itself.

Close to an hour in. No fat pieces left, just little bits of meat.

Grind it, it makes a huge difference

Because the butcher ground it, everything rendered down. There were no fat pieces left in the pot, only the meat bits. The 3.3 pounds filled one big jar, more than 24 ounces, I’d guess about 30.

I made tallow again in June 2025 with trimmings a Japanese market’s butcher counter gave me for free. That time I cut the pieces by hand, and they were still pretty big after 20 minutes. I cooked them more than an hour, until the trimmings started to brown and the water was gone, and it never rendered all the way down. I got about two and a half cups, about three quarters of a jar. So if your butcher will grind it, say yes.

Straining it into the jar.

Honestly, it’s messy

Making tallow isn’t hard, but it’s messy. You have to find a butcher with trimmings, then cook it down for half an hour to an hour. So when we saw jars of grass-fed wagyu beef tallow at Costco a couple of months later, we picked them up, $20 for two jars. If you can’t find a butcher, that works too. But if you can get the fat for a dollar or two a pound, or free, check with your butcher and make your own.