Question:

This time of year is perfect for bird watching and I have heard it is easy to make a Suet bird feeder and feed these wonderful creatures. Can you please tell me what exactly is Suet bird feed and do you have recipe or directions? Thank you! --Mary Hildebrandt

Answer:

Making your own bird suet is inexpensive and easy. Besides eating all the bacon and spending $1 on a pound of beef suet, the other ingredients maybe cost $3. These ingredients are most likely already in your cupboard.

You can make this recipe with slightly different variations with good results. Birds do prefer the homemade suet over the commercially made kind. Just ask them!

Beware - this suet will smell so good when you are making it! You may be tempted to eat it. Bacon and peanut butter are a perfect match!

Alright. Let's feed the birds!

Total project time - including cake cooling - is under 2 hours.

Ingredients and Directions:

6 parts Fat (bacon drippings and beef fat)
1 part Peanut butter
1 part Nuts
1 part Dried fruit
1 part Corn meal
1 part Bird seed

For this recipe you will use bacon fat, beef suet, peanut butter, peanuts, raisins, cracked corn, and you can add corn meal, oatmeal and whole sunflower seeds. You will want about six cups of rendered (melted) fat and will add roughly one cup of each dry ingredient.

Rendering the Fat:

Over medium heat, render (melt) the fat. We put frozen bacon fat that had been stored in a tin can in a dutch oven to warm up the bottom of the cans for easy release. The bacon melts super fast - less than three minutes.

If you use beef suet, chop it up before melting. You can use an meat grinder to get the beef suet into small pieces. The beef suet will melt quickly, too.

The fat melts in about 6 minutes.

Remove the pot of rendered fat from the hot stove. Please use caution with the hot, hot grease.

Add your dry ingredients and stir it up. Place the pot outside or in the freezer to cool until the mixture thickens. Stir the mixture periodically to keep the solids from sinking to the bottom.

After the suet mixture has thickened, pour it into your molds. You can use a 9x13 and an 8x8 pan.

Don't overfill your molds. Keep in mind the dimensions of your Suet cage.

Place the molds in the freezer to set - about 20 minutes.

Your birds will thank you for this wonderful meal!!

---