OK, thanks for the warning, Lex. I won't bother with a rheostat then. So I'll have to decide whether I go back to higher-heated tallow or try to again to get used to raw suet. What do you think the minimum temp I can get away with on the tallow is?

I like air-dried meat (I sometimes leave my ground beef out so it gets an air-dried crust), but not yet fermented meat or fat. The Inuit reportedly think that if you haven't learned to love raw meat by age 3 you never will, so they would be shocked by us. They were shocked by an English man who visited them and acquired a taste for raw meat as an adult. Some day I would like to get a meat locker to age most of my meats, instead of refrigerating them, like the Paleo guy in NYC, but the only one on the Internet was very expensive, so I'll probably have to get lucky.

It was more meals then that, actually. It was one batch of tallow. But one batch is also not enough to go on. 

Do you still get that badly stressed? I can get stressed for a brief period now, but it passes quickly, even if the situating is very bad (like a physician screaming at me at the top of his lungs). It's a weird feeling to feel happy when things are bad. So different from the past when I would feel bad even when things were going good and there was no environmental stress. I tell my body, "Why are you feeling happy, you stupid body! Things are really bad right now, don't you know that?" LOL Now I know why the explorers reported that the first-contact Inuit and Bushmen laughed a lot, often for seemingly little or no reason. I noticed that in Inuit videos after the people eat seal, whale or caribou that they've hunted, they start smiling, laughing, dancing, singing, and even lifting their arms up in thanks to "the Creator." Especially the older folk (who benefited from traditional foods in their youth much more than the youth of today, unfortunately for the youths) I get this feeling after I eat good meat/fat too, and I feel like humming, singing and dancing. Many of the Inuit youth are committing suicide and I suspect that dramatic drop in D3 consumption as vs. the traditional diet is part of the reason (in addition to an increasingly desperate situation, etc.).

Do you think that I could do 190F for a longer period, or is that too low?

All I can tell you is that my normal yield is between 65% and 75%.  If I start with 65 lbs of suet I end up with between 40 and 48 lbs of rendered tallow with an average of about 45 lbs.

Lex

Tyler's confusion of fat with tallow is evident, and his posts on that subject were irrational.

alphagruis pointed out that tallow is stable at Lex's rendering temperature, and practically everyone used it in their kitchens forever without problems until synthetic fats/oils were invented.


I tried mincing and mixing raw grass-finished back fat with ground beef; it was good, but only when really fresh.
Mixing with feedlot fat was not so good, so I eat tallow with 3-hour jerky on the side.

People have tried spicing meat to get around the repulsive taste of raw (see Dr Harris' observation of an allergen in it - albumen IIRC), why not try spicing the tallow to do something about the blah taste?

If the saturate fat in tallow is quite stable at high temperature, what about the other fat (mono and PUFA) and fragile vitamins/minerals ?
And what about AGEs and ALEs created at high temperature especially in fat food (like butter and olive oil)  ?
And what about the testimonials of many rawfooders who react badly with heated tallow ?

You can't honestly ignore all these facts.

Because it's a thousand times better than SAD.