Bear Grease and a cast boolit connection

[JRD]

I've got a good story for you cast boolit folks.
A couple weeks ago there was a post in the muzzleloading section about bear lard. The gist was someone was asking about greasing round ball patches with bear fat. Someone else said, heck it's great for leather boots. Then the subject changed to using bear lard for cooking and it made such good food that you should stop wasting it on patches and boots.

I had a bear hunt planned in Alaska with a good friend who is an avid bear hunter. I asked him about cooking with bear lard, and he said he had a bunch of fat rendered and it wouldn't be a big deal at all to bring a can of it to camp. So me reading he bear lard thread on this forum lead to me eating homemade donuts fried in bear grease for breakfast while in a remote hunting camp in the Alaskan bush.

A funnier coincidence is that another hunter I met in camp turned out to also be a bullet caster and a member of this forum- AlaskaScott. So last week two forum members wound up eating donuts cooked in bear grease together as a result of that thread here.

No bears were harmed by cast boolits on our trip, but we had a great experience. I took a nice black bear with a German 16 gauge over 7x57R drilling. My dad took a bear with a 1950's Marlin 35 Remington, and Scott's six year old son took his first bear with a 10mm TNW carbine.

Jason

[Bazoo]

An awesome story, thanks for sharing. So, was the bear lard as excellent for cooking as expected?

[JRD]

The donuts were delicious! All the food tasted better at bear camp just because of the setting, but the bear donuts other than being delicious had no unusual bear like flavor. I even took a bunch of fat trimmings home with my meat to render my own bear grease.

Not that it’s related but the menu for the week included multiple meals of bear stew (with fresh bear), moose tenderloin, moose sausage, and fish and chips made with halibut. For living in an off the grid camp, we ate very well!

[contender1]

Several of our local bear hunters like to gather as much fat as they can to render down for the lard/grease for cooking!

[10x]

An awesome story, thanks for sharing. So, was the bear lard as excellent for cooking as expected?

Bear lard can be heated to a higher temperature than vegetable oils.
Bear lard and Beef tallow make the best cooking oil.
My dad used bear lard while tapping threads in cast iron and steal. He used beef tallow when the bear lard was not available.
In about 1932 my uncle used bear lard on the horse harness - It was apparently impossible to put that harness on the horses until they boiled it in lye soap a and worked in neats foot oil

[.429&H110]

Bear grease mixed with beeswax will waterproof leather...
but then becomes an irresistible chew toy for a dog,
my beagle thought so anyways.
And any bear a mile downwind will smell that yummy leather, too.

[Thin Man]

"And any bear a mile downwind will smell that yummy leather, too." Careful, someone might get busted for "hunting over bait" in this instance...

[GregLaROCHE]

We need to get back to cooking with natural animal fats again. It tastes better and is healthier than all the seed oils used today. It’s less than a hundred years since we started using replacements for animal fat and look at how unhealthy so many people have become.