How to make a slow process even slower

The one where I try to render fat

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to do something you saw on YouTube and it didn’t quite work out like in the video.

Welcome to my life. 

Last time we had cattle processed I asked the butcher for the leaf fat. That’s the fat around the kidneys, and it makes the best tallow. 

What is tallow, you ask? It’s the purified form of beef fat that is great for cooking, for candle and soap making, and for use in personal care products. If you purify it twice and use only the leaf fat (not the other fat on the cow), you won’t even smell like beef.

Grass-fed beef tallow is high in vitamins A, D, E, and K, as well as fatty acids like DHA that are essential for brain growth and neuronal function. The conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in it is antiviral, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory, and super-good for your skin. I’m going to make some diaper cream for my brand-new grandbaby.

Yesterday I watched a few YouTube videos and thought to myself, “This looks so easy! Throw it in the crockpot with water and salt and in an hour [according to the YouTuber I was watching] it’s ready to strain through cheesecloth. Piece of cake!”

It’s scary how much I sound like my husband right now.

So this morning I cut up the kidney fat into small cubes and threw it all in the crockpot.

(Side note for you editors: did you know Crock-Pot is actually a trademarked name? It’s supposed to have the little ® symbol after it and be written with initial capitals and a hyphen. I learned that useless fact while working for a homeschool magazine fifteen years ago. You’re welcome.)

I wanted to use the wet method of rendering, so I added a quart and a half of water and two tablespoons of salt to my two pounds of cubed fat.

The YouTuber I watched said to turn the crockpot on low and let it cook about an hour, at which point all the fat would be liquid and you would be left with little bits of meat and gristle in the bottom, which would get strained out.

After seven hours, this is what my pot o’ fat looks like:

You can see the fat chunks are getting smaller, but this is supposed to be completely liquid.

What.

I can’t even begin to tell you how par-for-the-course this is for me. If a recipe says to add a cup of water, I add two because if I don’t it will dry out and burn on the bottom. I am the outlier in every situation in all of life. When Siri says it will take 14 hours to get to Mississippi, it will take me at least 17, and it’s not because I don’t drive 80 on the interstate. I should be used to this by now, but apparently I am a slow learner.

Normally I would be panicking about the not-yet-rendered fat chunks because my very strong enneagram 1 wing would be highly offended that this is not going according to what the obvious expert on YouTube says should be happening.

But here’s how much I’ve grown: I am simply going to leave the crockpot chugging away all night long and that’s that. In the words of my very wise former-college-roommate-now-sister-in-law, what’s the worst that can happen?

(Now that I’m typing this out loud, I am remembering just a few minutes ago when I stirred my concoction and it bubbled angrily a few times, so maybe I will turn the crockpot off overnight and then turn it back on in the morning. Then at least I won’t have two pounds of exploded beef fat all over the kitchen when I wake up. That’s a good idea.)

Stay tuned for the results of what should be a routine kitchen task but has turned into a mad-scientist enterprise. I feel like Lucy and Ethel baking bread.

A few other thoughts from this rainy Thursday:

Am I the only person who cannot type don’t correctly the first time? It always—I mean every single time—comes out do t and now even autocorrect thinks that’s what I mean and changes other words to do t. Am I the only one? Please tell me I’m not.

Last week in south-central Virginia it was 98 and 99 degrees and we were dying. Today it’s rainy and 73 and I am shivering under an afghan and a puppy. This seems like the opposite of global warming.

One more thing: I am at the age where I don’t just buy a product; I also buy packaging. I take into serious consideration how much effort it will take to extract a thing out of its coat-of-mail covering.

Just tonight I was attempting to open a small carton of organic heavy cream. First you have to unscrew the cap that’s on the diagonal side of the carton. This is hard because you can’t fit a finger between the cap and the top of the carton, so you can’t get a full grip on it. They think they’re helping by making the cap with tiny ridges, but they are wrong. One arthritic thumb is all it takes to make you contort your whole body into ridiculous positions trying to get a grip on the thing.

Then once you get the cap off, you have to grab the little plastic ring and pull out the safety seal. I must have fatter fingers than the general population, because I can’t ever get one finger inside the ring to lift it up, let alone peel the thing out. (I wonder if my dairy cow’s udder will have a safety seal with little plastic ring on it. Will her cream be unsafe to drink without one?) But I am an overcomer and grab the nearest fork to pry it out, trying not to stab myself in the chest in the process. Is this the government’s way of discouraging me from using heavy cream? Or can I blame it on Walmart for taking over the dairy industry?

Here’s what I do know: Safety seals may be a whole new sector of the business world, but Kroger has organic heavy cream in little 8-ounce bottles with one large screw-top I can get my hand around. They’re almost as easy as milking a cow.