Deer Tallow (white-tailed deer)

For this oil alone at 5 % superfat, with pure sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or pure potassium hydroxide (KOH); in brackets, across the published range of its saponification value. KOH is usually sold at 90 %: divide by 0.9. For a whole recipe, open the calculator.

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WHICH DEER THIS IS: the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), the deer most North American makers hunt and render, so the general names (deer fat, venison fat, venison tallow, rendered deer fat) point here. The deer-tallow record is a different animal, the Japanese sika deer (Cervus nippon), and has no measured saponification value: the 201.2 mg KOH/g the build derives from its composition is about 4 % above the 193.5 measured for white-tailed deer fat, so white-tailed deer tallow calculated on that record gets about 4 % more lye than it takes, which turns a 5 % superfat into about 1 % for that fat. The difference is in the fats, not an error: 193.5 means the acids average about 277 g/mol (SAP = 3 x 56106 / (3M + 38.05)), nearer stearic acid (284) than palmitic (256), while the palmitic-rich sika profile averages about 266. SOURCE: Treadwell and Eckstein, 'The composition of the tissue lipids of the Virginia white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus borealis)', J. Biol. Chem. 128(1):373-377 (1939), from the Laboratory of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan Medical School. Five deer from the herd on the Edwin S. George Reserve of the university's Museum of Zoology, Livingston County, Michigan, bred from four does and two bucks brought from Grand Island in 1926-27, 'in good nutritional condition' on a diet that 'most nearly simulates their natural one'; all were shot on the same day in the winter of 1938, and two (Nos. 2 M. and 3 M.) carried a lung parasite, their other tissues appearing normal. The tissues went straight into 95 % alcohol, and the lipids were extracted by refluxing with alcohol and then ether and taken up in petroleum ether, so the figures are for the total lipids of each fat depot, not for a fat rendered by heat. Adipose lipid is mostly triglyceride; total sterols, 0.18 % of the total lipids (0.12-0.25 %), are the only non-glyceride part the paper measured. SAPONIFICATION AND IODINE VALUES: Table I (p. 375), saponification number / iodine number (Wijs) of each depot sample, by animal: pericardial 1 M. 194.8/29.0, 2 M. 193.1/28.6, 3 M. 191.0/29.8, 4 F. 196.7/29.0 (average 193.9/29.1); perirenal (kidney fat) 1 M. 193.4/31.1, 2 M. 192.7/29.7, 3 M. 191.1/28.9, 4 F. 193.8/31.5, 5 M. 195.8/30.1 (average 193.4/30.3); omental 3 M. 192.1/34.4, 4 F. 194.6/32.7 (average 193.3/33.6); mesenteric 2 M. 192.6/33.1; pericecal 4 F. 193.3/27.4. 'typical' is the table's general average of these 13 samples, 193.5 and 30.4; min/max are the extreme samples: 191.0 (pericardial, No. 3) and 196.7 (pericardial, No. 4) mg KOH/g, 27.4 (pericecal, No. 4) and 34.4 (omental, No. 3) g I2/100 g. The text (p. 376) and the summary (p. 377) give them as '193.5 (191 to 197)' and '30.4 (27.4 to 34.4)'. The one mammary-gland sample, from doe No. 4 (saponification number 195.0, iodine number 40.6), is left out, as the authors left it out of their general average: it is not a depot fat. Every depot sampled is internal; no subcutaneous (back) fat was analysed. Back fat is softer, but that is mostly oleic acid in place of stearic, two C18 acids of nearly the same molar mass, which barely moves a saponification value: in the sika deer analyses on deer-tallow, subcutaneous and kidney fat work out within about 1 % of each other. COMPOSITION, AS FAR AS 1939 COULD TAKE IT: separated by their lead salts, the solid (mainly saturated) acids are 62.6 % of the total fatty acids (55.4-66.1 %) and the liquid acids 37.4 % (33.9-44.6 %), the solid acids having an iodine number of 4.5; from the iodine and thiocyanogen numbers (thiocyanogen 27.2, 24.4-30.1) the paper calculates 27.9 % oleic glycerides (23.5-31.9 %) and 3.7 % linoleic glycerides (2.0-6.7 %) in the total lipids. It does not split the solid acids into myristic, palmitic and stearic acid, and the soap-quality numbers turn on that split, so none of this is entered as a fatty-acid profile. It does show a hard fat: an iodine value of 30.4 is below beef tallow's 40-53 and mutton tallow's 33.8-43.9 in this dataset. NO FATTY-ACID PROFILE: {} here means none could be sourced cleanly, not that there is none. The gas-chromatography analyses of white-tailed deer fat are paywalled and were not read: Garton, Duncan and McEwan, Can. J. Zool. 49(8):1159-1162 (1971), DOI 10.1139/z71-176 (perinephric and subcutaneous fat of one male and one female); Rule and McCormick, Comp. Biochem. Physiol. B 119(3):563-570 (1998), DOI 10.1016/S0305-0491(98)00029-7 (subcutaneous and perirenal fat of does, by age, season and lactation); Berkley, Peckham, Sampath, Bodewes, Ntambi and Van Deelen, Wildl. Soc. Bull. 38(1):51-59 (2014), DOI 10.1002/wsb.379 (the fat of white-tailed deer, moose, beaver and cattle as wolf-prey signatures). Cordain et al., Eur. J. Clin. Nutr. 56(3):181-191 (2002), analysed mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), not white-tailed deer. USDA FoodData Central's deer entries ('Game meat, deer, raw', fdcId 173855, and its ground, loin, shoulder, tenderloin and top-round entries, 2-8 g fat per 100 g; 'Deer (venison), sitka, raw (Alaska Native)' is Sitka black-tailed deer) and the Canadian Nutrient File's are meat, not rendered fat, so none was used as a tallow profile. Gunstone and Paton, Biochem. J. 54(4):617-621 (1953), analysed the fat of a Scottish red deer stag (Cervus elaphus) in full (Table 6, % by weight: myristic 4.4, palmitic 25.1, stearic 35.4, arachidic 1.5, tetradecenoic 0.5, hexadecenoic 2.8, octadecenoic 25.2, octadecadienoic 2.6, octadecatrienoic 2.5; Table 4: iodine value 35.5, saponification equivalent 284.9, i.e. 196.9 mg KOH/g) and found it agrees 'fairly well with the less detailed analyses of the Virginia white-tailed deer'. It is another species, so it is not used as this record's profile; it does show a stearic-rich deer fat landing near 197 rather than 201. Without a profile the soap-quality numbers are not computed; the saponification value is measured, so the calculator can use the fat. Melting point and unsaponifiable matter were not measured. INCI is CosIng's entry for Deer Fat ('the fatty tissue obtained from deer', no species named); CosIng gives it no CAS or EC number.

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