I make my suet mixture using suet or lard. I melt the fat in a glass bowl in the microwave until liquid. Then I add crunchy peanut butter, which melts in the hot fat. Then I add the dried ingredients - corn meal, flour, oats (usually ground in blender), ground eggshells, crushed nuts, a little jam or jelly, etc. The mixture is about 1/2 fat, 1/2 dried ingredients - maybe a little more dried. I aim for a mixture that is the texture of Play-doh - it clumps together easily for the suet log, but also crumbles into pieces that I spread in a tray feeder. I made the suet log over 3 years ago out of an old red Pine log and glued lots of perches and branches. It did not have much bark on it - which is fine, except that over time the log has darkened quite a bit, perhaps because of the oils in the suet mixture. Also, most of the perches and branches have broken and fallen off. This birds don't seem to care. If you put perches on the log, this will enable many more birds to eat more easily. However, this isn't necessarily a good thing because with mine, it enables the Starlings and Blue Jays to hog the suet log, and it encourages House Sparrows. My suet log is pole-mounted with a squirrel/raccoon baffle, so nothing gets onto the log but the birds. Here's what the suet mixture looks like - Some Bluebirds on the suet log a couple years ago. They don't eat that much on the suet log any more, because I usually spread crumbles in a tray for them.

i was born on a farm way out in the county 72 years ago We did all of our own butchering and canning and gardening ect. In the fall when we butchered a cow or pig or venison or even a sheep we trimmed all the excess fat from the meat. we put it all in a large metal pot over a fire in the yard and melted it down and it was called rendering. we ladled off all the liquid and poured it into the 5 gallon lined tin cans that syrup or coffee or other bulk foods came in. we would put fresh butcherd chickens or steaks or other fresh meat in the liquid and in no time it would harden around the meats. With no electricity or refrigeration the busckets would keep for months down in the root celler. We used the lard or suet for frying food or seasoning veggies or in pie crusts or pastrys. The hard pieces or stuff that did not melt good we fed to the ducks or chickens or geese or even the pigs and the dogs loved cornbread made with lard. The fats from all the different animals was called suet or lard and varied which was used for what or as needed. the suet was not always melted but was ground up to use also. the flakiest pie crusts and pasterys were from pork lard. the beef suet used a lot in meat pies. and the sheep and venison suet used to season stews and soup and all were mixed with elk or venison that was ground for hamburger because it was not so dry then. Bacon grease was always saved to season foods cooked on the stove especilly snap beans or green beans or dry beans.

Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts. She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet. November 15, 2006 Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust By MELISSA CLARK A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig. Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma. Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue. The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again. Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings. The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice. Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order. With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil? And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way. But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there. I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa. Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite. The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost? Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said. Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations. With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level. I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie. A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen. The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away. Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings. Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter. The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way. The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert. But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings. Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky. The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive. One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content. Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard. Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/dining/15crus.html

It's really simple. Purchase white kidney or loin beef fat from a butcher. It's inexpensive. Now for the larger woodpeckers you can stop right here. They'll eat the raw chunked fat. To render suet, and make cakes to attract a wide variety of birds, ask the butcher to grind the fat. Put it in a big pot; you don't want to fill the pot any more than half full of the fat, less would be better. Heat it over medium-low heat until all the fat melts. It took a couple hours, or more, for me to do the six pounds of fat. Watch it closely; the fat can flash into flames if it gets too hot. As the fat melts, there will be bits of "cracklings" floating in it. Strain the fat to remove all the solid bits. Let the suet solidify, and then do the process over again. The rendered suet will keep for up to a year in the freezer. I mix the finished product half and half with peanut butter. Then add any combination of hulled sunflower seeds, whole wheat flour, oats, chopped corn or chicken scratch, peanuts, raisins, whatever you have on hand that birds like to eat. Pour it into molds or a baking dish until it hardens, cut into blocks that fit your feeder, and serve. You can search the web and find hundreds of "recipes" for ideas of things to mix into the suet.