Forums HomeGrown Herbalist Student Forum Herbal Medicine Making Is anyone making salves with Tallow instead of oils?

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    • #61282
      nanciann lamontagne
      Student

        I am getting ready to start experimenting with making some of my salve formulas with Tallow rather than oils and wondered if anyone had any experience or guidance.

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      • #61285
        SarahBec
        Student

          I have not yet made salves with tallow, but I do make a whipped hand cream with tallow and coconut oil. My family loves it. Would love to hear how your salve experimenting with tallow goes!

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        • #61296
          Greg Boggs
          Student

            Yes! I have posted the recipe my wife and I use somewhere on the forum, I’ll find it and post it again below, but we love it and use it for pretty much every skin condition we come across

            • #61304
              Greg Boggs
              Student

                Ok I found what we use. Here is the recipe

                1 cup tallow
                1 cup dried herbs (by volume)
                1.5 tbsp olive or coconut oil (optional)

                You melt down the tallow in a pot on low, and once it’s a liquid add in the cup of herbs (by volume) and let it infuse for an hour or so keeping the heat on low. The recipe we originally found (from milkandhoneyherbs) says that the longer you can let the herbs stay in there the better, but we felt an hour was long enough. Once you’re done with that, you’ll want to strain the tallow so you don’t get a bunch of herb chunks in your new balm. By recommendation of someone else here on the forum, we put a thin towel or cheesecloth inside of a potato ricer and strained everything through that. Also, if you want to add in the oil, here is where you would do that, it just makes it have a softer consistency. Here you have a couple of options, option 1 is you can just pour it into little containers and let it cool, and then congratulations you’ve made your balm! Option 2 is to let it cool a bit to where it is still in liquid form but not hard yet, and use an emulsion blender and whip it up. We’ve done both ways and found that using the emulsion blender is really nice because it makes it all into a nice, smooth lotion. This really is an excellent skin healer and I cannot recommend it enough!

                If you want to experiment more, check out Doc’s lesson on infused oils and lotions in the Medicine Making series

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                • #62078
                  SarahBec
                  Student

                    Fantastic information! Thank you!

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                  • #62586
                    edr2005@gmail.com
                    Student

                      Thank you for sharing your recipe. Hoping to attempt a salve soon and have a decent amount of  beef fat to render.

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                • #62404
                  Ann Denison
                  Student

                    I make a hard lotion bar with herb infused tallow, cocoa butter, and beeswax. I want to try a salve using tallow and beeswax, I’m thinking maybe calendula.

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