Last month I scored a great deal on some short-dated hamburger and decided the best way to store it would be freeze-dried. I cooked it up as usual with some onions, salt, and pepper. Once that was done, it was time to rinse off the fat.
I always hate doing that. Those fat calories may be precious, and I’m not fully persuaded that it’s essential to remove the fat to prevent the freeze-dried hamburger from going rancid. Cheese is high in fat and the freeze-dried product stores perfectly well without going rancid. But I’m not fully persuaded that the freeze-dried hamburger will be safe with the fat, either. Such a dilemma.
So that particular day I decided to rinse off the fat and save both the fat and the rinse water. I figured the rinse water would be like a beef broth that I could use for soup. I hadn’t decided what to do with the fat.
I poured the rinse water and fat into some ½ gallon canning jars and set them in the refrigerator so that the fat could separate, rise, and solidify. A few days later, I made tortellini soup with the rinse water, which turns out was way too salty. Next time I do this, I will probably not season the hamburger.
I then turned my attention to the fat. Ten pounds of cooked hamburger yielded a good 16 ounces of fat. In the process of removing it from the beef broth, I got little bits of hamburger and onion in there, so I just heated it up on the stove and then strained it through a coffee filter to remove the contaminants. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the white, odorless tallow I got from the chunks of beef fat I’d rendered previously. It was yellow and decidedly beefy in smell. Naturally, it was not going to work for lotion bars. Yeah, I could have used it for cooking, but I’d recently read an article on using tallow to make candles in a jar.
I decided it was time to try that out. This is what I did:
I didn’t want to use a canning jar, somehow imagining that cleaning candle wax out of a canning jar would be a huge hassle, so I used a pickle jar. (Of course, cleaning candle wax out of canning jars is a hassle. But this isn’t candle wax. This is tallow and will only need soap and hot water to clean out the jar. Next time I will simply use a canning jar.)
I couldn’t remember where my official candle wicks were, so I just grabbed some heavy cotton yarn. The end needs to be weighted. I couldn’t quickly locate a paper clip, so I opted to fold a 2x3” section of aluminum foil a few times, poke a hole in it for the yarn which I knotted at the end, and use that to weight the wick down. It worked well enough.
I added about 20 drops of cheap peppermint essential oil to the bottom of the jar. (Twenty drops was not sufficient to mask the beefy odor.)
I then poured the filtered fat in and set it in the refrigerator to cool.
Even when I got it out of the refrigerator after two days, the tallow was still very soft. The candle lit right up and is still burning well after an hour.
So while it doesn’t have the fantastic fragrance of a true Yankee Candle, it is in a jar, the price was right, and I did it myself. It didn’t take much time and is a great way to use hamburger grease. I’ll definitely do this from now on.
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