Got a bag of fat. The fat was mostly two very large chunks that still contained a wrapping of skin.
The skin covered all the sides, but not the ends. I got it frozen as part of my meat order. Do I need to render it down or do you think since most was wrapped in some kind of natural skin, that once removed that it would then be safe to eat as is? Here was my plate with some on it. I started eating and my wife forced me stop eating it - thoughts?
I take it this is beef fat? Not that it matters, really.
If it’s cooked, you can eat it as is. If you want to use it for cooking, you will probably need to render it.
Let’s forget now that I cook the hell out of almost everything.
It would depend on how much I trust the source, if I ever will eat raw stuff, that will be from the nearby beef farm but they don’t freeze things, they butcher and sell immediately…
To be safe, I would cut off the parts exposed to the outer world and cook those.
Of course I know not much about what is actually safe, I just use my common sense and whatever I have 
I was hoping raw, yes. While I trust the source, there is an intermediary at the slaughterhouse, so I cannot say for sure.
Beef fat isn’t what you render to use, Tallow / Suet is. If it has skin it’s beef fat. Why would just eat that?
Technically, suet is raw beef fat, tallow is what you render out of it and cook with. As you render, you strain out the bits of connective tissue and such to leave pure fat behind.
It all depends on the source and how comfortable you are with it. Some carnivores eat raw fat; I’ve never done so.
The two alternatives I’ve had experience with are rendering it or frying it. The latter seems to have grown in popularity recently - the idea is to make it soft inside and crunchy outside, and you gain lots of tallow as a by product.
I think beef suet is a limited area of fat:
I think it’s akin to our visceral fat.
I find it hard and crumbly. I’ve eat it raw (from frozen), and can do so if I add a bit of it to my meal. I tried eating a lot of it first, and got too much of a stomach upset.
It’s > 50% saturated fat, while most (all?) other fat in beef is >50% MUFA.
I’ve used suet to make tallow, which is easy to make if you have a food processor (to grind into small bits) and a slow cooker (to cook low and slow).
When I was testing a high saturated fat diet, I used the tallow to fry things in. In particular, there’s this idea that if we only ate McDonald’s fries back when they used tallow, we wouldn’t be fat. The saturated fat was supposed to make us full.
So, I made fries using the tallow…and proceeded to eat ALL of them…while also having burgers (with no bun for me). I would’ve eaten more of the fries if I could have, but I only made them with a few very large potatoes. As in, well over a pound of potatoes - probably a few pounds.
My wife also participated in this experiment. Neither of us felt any satiety, and we both would’ve eaten more fries if there were some left. She forbade me from making them ever again, as we both overate.
We talked about these things several times but I can’t resist 
I will try to be short. Or a bit different from other times.
So many things are supposed to make us full. It’s very individual.
But protein has better chances (well, not alone, with fat to get energy too, maybe it’s not needed for people who can handle small meals) and still, lots of people can say a type of meat that leaves them hungry or not but they can overeat it very easily.
Satiation is one thing but being able to eat much more, there appetite and novelty may come into play too… Some food just triggers almost compulsive eating. If it’s a very satiating food, that keeps us from eating very much but if it does little in that department, sometimes nothing stops us from overeating. I know it’s true for me.
And it has the biggest chance is the thing is new in my life or rare. If I have it all the time (and if I train myself), it often loses from this compulsive power more or less quickly and drastically. Not always, some food is just too irresistible to me even after a long time…
Suet may have the role in one’s diet, no matter if it is particularly satiating or not Sometimes I need some not satiating fat… (I believe they are satiating - for me - longer term, I just need to manage to get satiated during/after the meal somehow and that’s where fat helps but only with enough protein.)
Empty fat calories without real nutrition behind it comes to mind. It’s literally the equivalent of a normal carb dieter putting down a sweet potato which actually has nutrition and just spooning sugar.
I have never heard of fat being any more dangerous to eat raw than the meat it comes from, but … Do you like it? Even if I’m just adding in fat for satiety, I can think of a lot more pleasant forms to add!
And why would empty calories be a problem? It’s good for fuel and @Naghite has a big enough energy need and good woe to get enough nutrients from other things even in the presence of relatively much fat like this
Anyway, we are ketoers, most of us eat some added fat without a problem
Oh. I thought that there were certain vitamins that were soluble only in fat. Live and learn, as my Nana used to say!
Testing my prescription digestion meds and wanting to temporarily up my fat intake. Part of next experiment on myself. And it tasted fine, pretty much everything from animals tastes good to me.
I think however that I will go ahead and fry it all up as per @Septimius and then add it to meals as needed afterwards. I have been eating the rest of my suet in the meantime, which tastes identical. The only reason I know it is not suet is I got the kidneys with the fat attached as well.
You can also bake it, which I’ve tried too. You bake at a low temperature, say 200F for a while. There were threads here that stated how to do it. You do get some “tallow” that renders out, but not a lot. Some people then quickly run it under the broiler to get some crispiness. I tried that, and it has to be short, otherwise, you’ll get a ton of tallow.
I always thought this was true. Like eating a salad with only vinegar (which I did for years when on the Pritikin diet). With no fat, you should get less of the fat soluble vitamins. Or at least that was what I thought.
And fat itself isn’t devoid of nutrition. It can’t be, otherwise people like Amber O’Hearn and Siobhan Huggins would be pretty bad off, since they eat very high fat, low protein.
Same reason empty calories are always a problem, because they’re calories that give you no nutrition, which is a waste vs actual food that’s doing something for you. I can get energy from meth, but there’s really better ways.
A,D,E & K are fat soluble, but needing fat to properly absorb a vitamin and eating hundreds of calories in emptiness is two very different things.
Still don’t see the problem… What if we want mere energy as we already got lots of nutrients from our other food?
We all eat added fat, it’s normal… Some people on this forum eat A LOT of it.
I for one definitely doesn’t want protein toxicity (but even before that, it would be super wasteful to go for protein and avoid fat). I need fat with my meat…
