Fun with beef products

Coworker and garden friend/addict Mary recently got a 1/4 cow order, and along with that came extra stuff - bones, fat/suet, etc. She asked if I wanted part of the bones and suet since she didn't need all of it. SURE! I'll give it a try... Mary told me how she'd prepared her suet, cooking it down, straining the solids out of the melted fat, and stirring it with birdseeds and peanut butter so she could set it out for the birds. Ok, sounds simple enough. She did warn me it smelled a bit. Hm....how bad could it be?

Not really reading up on it much first, I put the big lumps of suet fat in a pot, turned it on low, and let it go....wondering how soon it would turn into a bit pot of liquidy fat - as if I were melting Crisco or butter.

Yeah, um, that never happened.

Within 15 minutes the whole house STANK, and the fat was crackling and popping but definitely not "cooking down" or "rendering". I pulled it out of the pot to see what was going on.

Ok, yeah, I knew you could get "cracklins" or something like pork rinds (MMMM!) from doing this, and it looked like that was the direction I was heading in. There would be NO bird suet if I continued down this road.

I ran up to the computer, did some research, found a variety of suggestions, and combined what sounded like would work for me...

The suet got chopped up into chunks and tossed into the food processor, where I whizzed into basically the all-fat version of ground beef. Mmmmm - doesn't that look yummy?

All of that got scraped into the crock pot, which was then set down in a giant, high-sided roasting pan, and THAT was then set on the garage floor. NO WAY did I want 1) that smell in the house, or 2) to risk the fat all melting and overflowing if it expanded a bunch.

While that did it's merry little thing, I got to work on the bones.

The Joy of Cooking suggests roasting the bones until brown - ok, can do:

Once roasted, the bones and their meat/fat were added to a big pot, along with onions, carrots, celery, a bay leaf, peppercorns, cloves (interesting!), a can of tomatoes, and enough water to cover it all. That came to a boil and then was simmered allllll afternoon/evening. This is supposed to be one of those "low and slow" and "the longer the better" kinda things.

Ok, back to the suet. Wow - the new technique worked WONDERFULLY! The smell was barely noticeable in the supercold garage, there was no overflowing, and on high the fat rendered out almost completely in maybe 4 hours? There were still some chunks, and it was getting late, so I shut the heat off, left it where it was, and the next morning put it on low for a few hours. Once all the fat was melted, I took the whole thing out to the back deck (still not wanting the smell in the house), strained it, set a little of the melted fat aside for possible culinary uses, and started stirring stuff in. Bird seed. Sunflower seeds for birds. Peanuts for birds. Some about-to-expire sunflower butter I wasn't into. Some way past their expiration date dried cranberries, which I chopped up. Cornmeal. And quick cooking oats. (these are all ideas from various stuff I researched online). Stirred all that up into a thick gloppy mess, and spread it into several loaf pans:

My intention was to let it firm up, flip it out, slice like bread, and then slide the slices down into the suet holders on the bird feeder.

GREAT idea.

NOT gonna happen. Some of the suet stuck in the bottom (I should've heated the pans before flipping them out), and there's no way the stuff would slice - it crumbled instead.

Hm.

Ok.

Change of plans.

Turns out each pan's worth of suet/seeds fit nicely in a Pyrex mixing bowl I have, and after a minute thirty in the microwave, the stuff was melted down to liquid chock full of goodies. So that new batch of stuff was then poured into old Chinese soup and yogurt containers, some of which got a loop of string tucked down in them before they solidified.

Oh, and that fat that I poured off to set aside?

Looks almost like butter, doesn't it? I've since used a little of this, combined with butter, in a crust for a chicken pot pie (check back later for that!) - pretty good, but not very noticeable. I'll have to increase the suet to butter ratio next time.

Here's Tucker watching the birds IGNORE the new suet (see it hanging on it's string?). Seems the birds didn't feel they could land on it maybe? I've since got it up against the side of the bird feeder, and now the chickadees, downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers are all sitting on the feeder and leaning over to peck at the suet! Yay - it works!

So here's the suet after it's been moved, and pulled up tight against the feeder. You can clearly see the birds have been enjoying it!

Oh yeah - don't forget the stock! So after that stuff cooked down all day, I set in the fridge over night. The next day I dumped it out into a giant bowl, and it was easy to scrape off the fat layer (plus any sediment from the bottom of the congealed stock), and then the rest of was split into three quart bags and stashed in the freezer. Let's hope this really "beefs up" some soup I'll make later! ;-)