All Suet Is WHITE?

[Sully]

Is all suet white no matter what their fed. Cause mine is from slankers and its white.

[van]

you just haven't seen yellow suet then.  Slankers, being in Texas does not have that many months of green green grass growing conditions that will allow the cow to store carotean in their fat.  And sometimes it's older cows that store the yellow stuff.

[Satya]

Actually, some years, we have 10 months of green grass.  Slankers is in E. TX, which is wetter than my area of TX.  The ranch I use is north of Waco, and it's pretty prime pasture.  This IS cattle country!  Cows here don't have to be fed and cooped up in winter waiting for the ground to thaw.  Everyone has droughts and such from time to time, though.

That said, I will be purchasing suet for the first time next month, so have no comment on color.

http://www.burgundypasturebeef.com

[Raw Kyle]

I've gotten bison and ox suet from Slanker's and it always looked white to my eyes.

[Satya]

Okay, I just called Wendy about the beef fat.  She says the real suet is the internal fat around the kidneys, and the suet from their cattle is slightly yellow.  She said the external fat will turn yellow with the 21 days dry ageing they do with all of their beef.  She also said that that hide fat will dry out too (obviously).  The beef these people sell is ALL their own, but they also sell other farm goods outside of beef from other local farms.  But the dry ageing is the reason I have never eaten any other beef in, probably, 3 years.  It is sooo tasty!

YeeeeeHaaaaah!

[lex_rooker]

The suet and raw fat usually look off-white.  If you render it, you'll find that the rendered fat is butter yellow if the animal was grass fed.  It will be almost snow white if it was grain fed for any length of time.

Sully, the rendered fat I sent you was quite yellow and it was rendered from Slankers suet.  The yellow color comes from caritinoids (the same stuff that makes carrots orange) in the grass that the animal eats.  If you store the rendered fat in a dark place it will keep its yellow color for many months.  If you keep it in an area where the light is bright it will fade and ultimately turn white as well.

Bottom line is that the fat of young animals usually looks off-white, even when grass fed, until you render it and then the yellow color becomes apparent.  Try rendering a small amount of the fat you got from slankers and render a similar amount of fat from your local meat market and you'll see the difference.

Lex

[Sully]

 
I have seen a video of goodsmaritan's on youtube, the fat around his beef appeared to be as yellow as an egg yolk!

Egg yolks are delicous to me.

Oh and lex, yes the rendered fat you sent me is very yellow, I'll try your experiment on the grain fed vs pastured rendered fat in color.

[Satya]

BTW, what does suet taste like?  Some people don't like it.  How does it taste compared to, say, lard?  I have tasted rendered/cooked marrow/hide fat, which is pretty bland, with a beef undertone.  Raw creamy marrow is delicious.

[wodgina]

tastes creamy! But only the high quality stuff.

[Raw Kyle]

Sometimes it seems bland, sometimes it seems like a decent tasting fatty food, like raw bacon but denser. Just recently I've warmed up to the taste and texture and can eat it without any "this is kind of gross" or even "this is kind of not good" feelings. I don't love the taste or texture, but it's about neutral or slightly better than neutral at this point.

[wodgina]

i think the most important thing is its dense and kills hunger so i can get enjoyment out of other things. It takes a while to get over the eating for pleasure thing but it's a lot easier than 50-90% raw paleo which some do because your always in a battle with your cravings and lose your hunger and taste for meat and fat.

[Satya]

Most cool.  My ranch lady is giving me the fat around the kidneys; that's the real deal, right?

[Sully]

The suet i'm eating is bland, crumbly,and dry. Its frozen, so that might effect the taste. I still kinda like it... I bought some marrow, grain fed, but its from a animal that was given no growth hormones or antibiotics.

[Raw Kyle]

The first suet I got from Slankers was beef and was pretty bland and boring. I have some more of that, also I got some pig fat I'm going to try soon, and I got bison fat both suet and the other kind of fat they have. The guy that took my order on the phone didn't seem to know which was which so I ordered both.

Some pieces from the bison fat, I'm not sure which it's supposed to be, taste good. They're almost creamy, soft not crumbly like some other suet. And it seems to not stick to my teeth as much, also I think it helps I'm cutting it into smaller pieces and not grinding it. There are pieces I'm finding now that I don't much like, either very hard or slimy feeling or otherwise unpleasant, so I figure since it's only about 2 bucks a pound I can afford to through the stuff I don't like outside.

[yon yonson]

i just got some fresh suet from my whole foods. I always tell the guy only grass fed and it's usually pretty consistently good and there isn't much diversity in what it looks like each time i get it. but today, when i got home and opened up the package, i saw that about half of the suet was similar to what i usually get (yellowish and hard, but still with some blood) but the other half was completely white. it smelled a little different that the other suet too. i can't really figure out if maybe it's just a different type of suet or if it's grain fed. another possibility is that the white stuff is the REAL suet and i've just been getting other pieces of hard fat from other areas of the cow. i ate a little bit of it and it actually tasted pretty good but should i keep eating it? im thinking if it's not grass fed i might just use it to make pemmican... any thoughts? i should also note that the white stuff was a little softer than the usual stuff.

[Raw Kyle]

All the suet I get has always been white. It's usually crumbly and rather bland and if you put a bunch in your mouth at once and chew it sticks to your teeth.

As Lex pointed out, one litmus test of grass fed (or rather of carotenoid pigments, which is an indicator of grass fed) is to render some of it. It should not be pearly white after rendering but at least a little yellow, the more yellow the more carotenoids.

[Satya]

Here is suet from the kidney area of a 100% grassfed cow.  The label says tallow, but it's obviously raw chunks of fat, as you can see.  My Rancher at Burgundy Pasture Beef specifically packaged the kidney fat from cows dry aged 21 days, as I told her I wanted to make pemmican (haven't gotten that far yet).  They sell the best tasting meat I have ever eaten.  And the meat is Burgundy in color too!

[Raw Kyle]

Is the color just a coincidence with the name or did they name it after the color of their meat?

[Satya]

Is the color just a coincidence with the name or did they name it after the color of their meat?

I'll ask.  Just really super people who raise my beef.  I learn so much every time we talk.

[JaX]

I have never seen yellow suet (even from grassfed cows) but nearly all other fat on the beef can acquire a yellow color if it is grassfed.

I think a good way to check if the animal is grassfed is to check the color of the fat in ribeyes (or other fatty muscle cuts). Fatty muscle cuts from grainfed beef always contain a white fat which is harder (tougher) in consistency than the yellowish fat found in grassfed beef.

[LvB]

I just bought suet for the first time today. At a farmers market last weekend, which is held at a place where they raise 100% grass fed cows, I asked some of the people selling meat if they knew where I could get suet. One of them referred me to a family owned processor, the same place that slaughters cattle for farm I was visiting. He said that they should have some grass fed beef. When I called them and asked if the suet was from grass-fed cattle, the person on the phone said "yes, it's mostly pastured beef, it comes from local farms in the area as well as our own cows" asked again then if it was grass-fed, and they then said "Some of them get some grain" which makes me frustrated. I bought it anyway, 5 pounds for $5. When I looked at it it was white, but the chunk that I ate from had some pink tint towards the center. Does the pink color mean anything? I'm going to render some to see if it's yellow or white, maybe tomorrow if there's time.

About a month ago I called and emailed around to some grass-fed beef farmers in my state, a bison farm said they would have suet in the summer. I'm yet to call them about the suet, they are quite far away, though I guess I may end up relying on them anyway, since most other places said no or didn't even know what suet is.

[invisible]

So basically grass-fed fat can either be white or yellow, but grain fed fat can only be white

Sometimes I've seen regular supermarket/butcher beef have a yellowish tint to their fat. Usually the cheaper grades, whereas prime is always very white. Grading beef is based on marbling and fat content, maybe the cheaper grades get a lower grading because they spent less time in a feedlot thus less fat and are actually more grass-fed than the Prime grade cuts.

[LvB]

I rendered a bit of my suet, and it cooled white, so I'm going to make a trip to a grass-fed bison farm about an hour away, they told me they'll have some suet.

[Josh]

I think, in England anyway, suet can describe different things. It should just mean the kidney fat, but in practise it's used to mean the hide fat etc as well.

I just got a batch of 'suet' which is partly yellowy, partly white...they say they get 10kg per animal...so it can't be all kidney fat.