Why We Render the Tallow Twice

Nobody puts on the label how many times they rendered the tallow, and it changes what you’re buying more than anything else on the jar. If you look up how many times to render tallow for skincare, the usual answer is four or five. I do it twice, and this is why.

What rendering is

Rendering is melting the fat out of raw beef fat and separating it from everything else. Most people who buy tallow have never seen it done, so here’s the short version.

Raw beef fat comes as suet or trim. It’s fat wrapped around connective tissue, membrane, water, protein and blood. You melt it, the fat runs out, you separate it from the rest, and what you end up with is a pale solid that keeps at room temperature for a long time.

There are two ways to do it. Dry rendering is heat alone, low and slow, until the fat runs and the solids brown and sink. Wet rendering adds water, sometimes salt. The fat floats up and sets as a cap when it cools, and the water takes a lot of the impurities and smell with it. Wet is gentler, and people choose it for the same reason I stop at two passes. Less heat means less of the delicate material gets destroyed.

One pass gets you tallow. Every pass after that is called purification, and it’s the same operation done again on fat that’s already clean, to take more out of it. So “triple rendered” on a label means the fat went through the removal step three times. It doesn’t say anything about care.

What most people do

Look up how to render tallow for skincare and the advice is pretty consistent. One long render to separate the fat, usually around eight hours, then purify it again, and again.

Three or four purifications after the first render is the common recommendation. Plenty of people go past that. The instruction you see most often is to smell it after every round and repeat until you can’t smell beef anymore. For some fat that’s seven or eight passes.

At the end of that you have a tallow that’s white and smells like nothing. That’s what people mean by “cosmetic grade.”

Why they do it

Tallow smells like beef, and nobody wants beef on their face.

It’s a fair reason. The biggest thing between tallow skincare and someone who’s never tried it is the moment they open the jar. If it smells like a roasting pan, they don’t buy a second one.

Every extra render pulls out more of what carries the smell. It also pulls out color, which is how you get from the yellow of raw suet to a white that photographs well. One fix for two problems, so people repeat it until both are gone.

What you lose by going further

The material that comes off in the first render is the most nutrient-dense part of the fat. It’s also the part that carries the smell. They’re the same material, so you can’t sort one from the other. Every pass that takes out more smell takes out more of the reason you wanted tallow instead of a jar of white grease.

A tallow that’s been rendered five times has fixed the smell. It’s also spent most of what it had. What’s left is very stable, very bland, and closer to a refined cosmetic base than to the fat that came out of the animal.

I’d rather keep the good part and deal with the smell another way.

What I do instead

Two renders, then the fat sits in organic vanilla beans.

It costs me vanilla beans instead of the part of the fat I want to keep. The smell it leaves isn’t neutral and it isn’t beef. What people say most often when they open a jar is that it smells like cake.

I also steep tallow in calendula. That’s separate from the vanilla, and it’s in there for a different reason.

Vanilla beans aren’t cheap and they aren’t fast. A render is heat and time and you get a result at the end. A steep is just time. I think that’s why more people don’t do it this way. Another purification pass is easier to plan around than beans that have to sit.

If you still want it to smell like nothing

Some people will read all this and still want a tallow with no smell at all. That’s fine. There are makers doing that properly and I’m not going to call them frauds.

The reason people usually give for buying tallow at all is what’s in it. It’s close to what skin already makes, and it carries fat-soluble stuff a plant oil doesn’t. If that’s your reason, five renders works against it.

If your reason is that it works on your hands, buy whichever one works on your hands. I’m not going to argue anyone out of something that’s helping them.

The rest of what goes in

The render is the part I have an opinion about, but it’s one of seven things in the jar, and I picked the others on purpose too.

Organic jojoba oil. Organic castor oil. A little of our own beeswax to firm it up. Organic arrowroot powder, added last, so the castor oil doesn’t leave you greasy. Vanilla and calendula in the steep. Tallow under all of it.

Each one has a job, and I’ve written them out one at a time in What’s Actually in the Lotion. The arrowroot took me the longest to figure out.

There are no essential oils in it. I used to make scented tallow and stopped. That story is in Why I Stopped Making Scented Tallow.

Whipped and emulsified

Most whipped tallow is tallow and oil beaten until air goes in. There’s no water in it, and that’s why so much of it sits on the skin and feels heavy.

Mine is whipped and emulsified. It comes out creamy instead of airy. It goes further and it stays on better than the airy tallow balms sold around here. Those are the two things I’ll claim, because you can check both on your own hands in a week.

The same three words get used for three different things on tallow labels, so it helps to know the difference before you buy any of them. I’ve laid the categories out in Whipped Tallow or Tallow Balm?.

How to tell how many times a tallow was rendered

Almost nobody puts the number on the label. Here’s how to work it out from the jar.

Look at the color first. Raw suet renders to a soft yellow or cream. Every purification takes some of that out, so a bright white tallow has been through several passes. A yellow one hasn’t. This is the most reliable sign there is and it takes one look.

Then smell it, cold rather than warm. A lightly rendered tallow smells faintly of what it is, unless something’s been infused into it. A heavily purified one smells like nothing. A scented one tells you nothing either way, which is one more reason to buy unscented.

Then read the ingredient list and see what’s doing the covering. If the fat is white and has no smell, the maker didn’t need much help. If the list is long and the scent is strong, ask what the scent is there to hide.

Or just ask. Someone who renders twice will tell you twice. Someone who renders until the smell is gone will usually say “until it’s pure,” which is a goal and not a number.

White with no smell means heavily purified. Yellow with a faint smell means lightly rendered. Neither one is wrong, and they aren’t the same product.

Same recipe every batch

The mix doesn’t change. Not by season, not by batch size, not because a supplier ran out of something.

That matters more than it sounds. If the recipe moves, I can’t recommend it to someone with sensitive skin, because the jar that worked for them in March isn’t the jar they get in October.

If it worked on your daughter’s eczema, the next jar is the same lotion. If it didn’t work, buying it again won’t help, and I’d rather tell you that than sell you a second one.