A huge welcome to Steve's kitchen, it's that time of year, it's getting exciting
coming up to Christmas and I will be using suet in the Christmas puddings
we're making here on Steve's kitchen and also in my mince meat and mince pies. Now
I always get asked this time of year what exactly is suet and the simple
answer is it is the hard visceral fats that are found around the organs in beef,
it can also be found in lamb and pork. Now a lot of butchers will know exactly
what so it is and they will be able to provide it for you, you can go into
supermarkets, there's a company called Atora that have been making suet for
decades and that's generally not too difficult to find but if you can't find
it, today we're going to show you how to make your own. Now there is also
vegetarian too, it it's not my favorite. I don't think it gives the same flavor or
distinct tastes that I expect this time of year in the dishes that we make. Now
if you want to make your own vegetarian suet you can by just using the hard
coconut fat's, grating them down and coating them in a little bit of flour,
I think Crisco works quite well also but today we are going to take a look at a
simple process of making suet for yourself at home and if you decide to
follow along, I'd love to hear your experiences and I would love to see if
you're going to join me making Christmas pudding in an episode coming up very
shortly.
Now if you buy suet from the butchers this is what it's going to look like.
It's a hard fat, even made harder by the fact that I've left this in the freezer
overnight. I want it solid, it's easier to process
if it's frozen. Now I must shout out hear to my dear
friend, Anne of EZ gluten free and she has got some wonderful gluten free
recipes by the way and and I made this two or three years ago in the food
processor on the grater and it was to be honest ,it's quite a waxy fat, so it was
quite hard to clean the processor afterwards lots of hot water and soap. I'm
going to try a slightly different method today and see if it works better, so Anne
if you're watching, we can give this a try. I'm not going to grate it I'm actually
going to process it with the normal blade and I'm going to add some flour in there,
gluten free or regular flour, it doesn't matter, to help keep these bits of fat
into their smaller particles. Now I've managed to get about 250 grams that's
about half a pound of this fat from my local butcher. I'm just going to pop it
in the food processor but before I blitz it I'm going to add some flour.
Now it really doesn't matter how much flour we put in you can put in up to
about half a cup because we're not going to be keeping all the flour, this is just
to help separate out the fats. I might as well pop that in there, I've gone with
about half a cup. Now don't forget the suet has to be frozen and we are going
to pulse this for about a minute or so until we get a coarse sort of meal. Now
I've only actually pulsed that for about 20 seconds and you can see that the fat
itself has completely broken up, don't be tempted to over blitz this, I want some
texture left in this because I want to sift the flour out and if it goes to
fine it will go straight through the sieve. This is just about perfect, still
got some texture, so I'm going to put about half of my suet and flour into the
sieve and what you're going to do now is just tap it backwards and forwards. Now
if you look underneath you can see the flour is just dropping through into the
bowl below. Now we don't have to get rid of all the flour but just in the top
left in the sieve here is this beautiful suet and that's exactly what we're
looking for. Now I'm going to put the suet separately in another bowl and I'll
carry on and just do the last of the mix. So I'm pretty pleased with the way
that's come out, I've got this beautiful flour coated suet here don't waste that
flour by the way I'll be using that for my Christmas pudding, so you can use it
in any savory dishes you like. A quick note to Anne and anyone else that followed
me last time, this is going to be a lot easier to clean. So we've got our 1/2 a
pound or 250 grams of suet here, I'm going to be very shortly making some
delicious mincemeat to make some mince pies for Christmas and we'll be doing of
course our Christmas pudding as well, coming up on Steve's kitchen. So don't
forget subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and we will see you very
shortly, take care