Revisiting soap making

[Berwick12]

And so it starts... I asked my father-in-law about 11 months ago the next time he brings one of his grass-fed ladies to get processed to save me some tallow. It took him a few months, a couple friendly reminders but when I left his house today I was given these packaged beauties which will eventually be made into soap. This will be a winter project as deemed by shwbo.

About 12 or 13 years ago I made a lard based soap which was really good. Hindsight being 20/20 I probably shouldn't have given as many of those away.

 

[Doc Dan]

How difficult is it to make soap? My wife and I were talking about this and wondering if it was something we could do.

 

[Berwick12]

Cold pour, the bases that you just melt and pour into molds, not hard at all you can do it in under 1 hour. Somebody last week had a post on adding some scents to a cold poor base.

Hot pour a more time consuming. You have to make sure that you separate the fat from any meat that is still there. You can either do wet rendering or hot rendering. If you don't want everything to smell like bacon you have to wet render. Then you have to decide how much lye you want to add and how "aggressive" you want it. You can also add any fats you want, Cocoa butter, Shea butter, etc that will make it more slick, soft and cushiony. The real beauty of making your own soap is you control the ingredients. you can make a soap with three ingredients fat, lye, water.

I'll take pictures as i go along and post it.

 

[geneaut]

How difficult is it to make soap? My wife and I were talking about this and wondering if it was something we could do.

You can literally make soap in a crock pot in your kitchen. There are some good forums that get into the specifics.

 

[Doc Dan]

You can literally make soap in a crock pot in your kitchen. There are some good forums that get into the specifics.

Any you can think of right off?

 

[Berwick12]

@Doc Dan pm incoming.

 

[MilkCrate]

I have read a little bit on the process. I need to dig more into the subject and give it a try. That and homemade aftershave. It would be a cool projects.

 

[geneaut]

Any you can think of right off?

If I won’t get in trouble for it:

Soapmakingforum.com

There are one or two good threads in our forums here as well BTW. At the end of the day it’s some fat, some lye, some heat, and some math and you end up hopefully with soap. The heat just makes the saponification of the fats happen quicker ( hence the crockpot ). They even have websites ( calculators ) that do the math for you based on your ingredients.

There are literally people who have made shave soap from Walmart brand lard as the fat.

 

[sarimento1]

Beautiful!
Be sure to save some for your father-in-law, perhaps along with a nice brush and razor to boot!!
Certainly will be great! Keep us posted!

 

[RayClem]

Making soap is not difficult. It can be as easy as dripping fat from meat cooking over an open fire into the ashes of the fire.

On the other hand, making a great shaving soap takes a lot more skill. There are many folks who can make soaps for handwashing and bathing that fail miserably at making a shaving soap. I made the mistake once of purchasing a shaving soap from a local soapmaker at a fair. The soap smelled great, but it would not provide a great shave. I used it in the shower. There are some soaps with wider distribution that are not much better.

Some of the best soapmakers today experimented with their formulations for several years before achieving the results you get in their products today. Those products may contain dozens of different ingredients in precise proportions.

Do not use all of your tallow in making your first batch of soap. Make a very small batch and try it out. Then tweak the next batch to make it better.

 

[Mempho]

I made lye soap once, using tallow the butcher next door gave me. It was an easy process. I gave the butcher a couple of bars of soap and he was astonished at getting two bars of soap in return for fat he was going to throw away.

But when I tried out the soap, it almost stripped the hair from my body. I put the mess in the garage, planning to throw it since it was a failure. A year later I found it was still there and tried it again. And after aging for a year, it was the best soap I ever used.

 

[Berwick12]

@Mempho The longer you age the soap the better it gets. While it might have hardened it's not done curing. The first batch of soap that I made it was hardened but not cured. I used muffin tins with a paper liner. After about 12 hours I took them out of the tins and put them on the kitchen table. Mistake. It's stripped the varnish and paint off of my kitchen table that I put them on. Silicone cups from here on out and let them wait a few days in the muffin tin before I take them out.

 

[RayClem]

@Mempho The longer you age the soap the better it gets. While it might have hardened it's not done curing. The first batch of soap that I made it was hardened but not cured. I used muffin tins with a paper liner. After about 12 hours I took them out of the tins and put them on the kitchen table. Mistake. It's stripped the varnish and paint off of my kitchen table that I put them on. Silicone cups from here on out and let them wait a few days in the muffin tin before I take them out.

If it was a paint stripper, I would NOT want to get that anywhere near my face.

 

[Berwick12]

@RayClem yeah that soap was 100%not cured yet. I waited 1 week out of cation then I used it. It was great.

 

[GR5233]

@RayClem yeah that soap was 100%not cured yet. I waited 1 week out of cation then I used it. It was great.

Depends on what soap making process is used. Sounds like in this case the soap was made using the cold process (cp) was used. CP soap needs 1-4 weeks to cure before using. Hot process (hp) soap is good to use as soon as its cooled off and has hardened. The heating process essentially causes the soap to cure as it cooks. Either method can be used to make a good bar of bath soap or certain shave soaps (soaps where the stearic acid is attached to a glycerin molecule). If the stearic acid isn’t attached to a glycerin molecule then the HP method is the need method when there’s a high percentage used (40%+)

 

[RayClem]

In chemistry the rate of chemical reactions is known to be temperature dependent. The rule of thumb is that the reaction rate doubles for every 10 degrees Celsius. Thus, the reaction rate between the fatty acids and the alkali occurs rather quickly with hot-process soaps as the temperature will be close to 100 C. In the cold process method, the temperature is somewhere around 40 C. With a difference of 60 degree C, the reaction rate of hot process will be approximately 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x2 = 64 times faster. If the cold process soap is allowed to cool to 25 C after combining the ingredients, the reaction rate will be nearly 200 times slower than hot process. That is why curing times can be so long for cold process soaps.

 

[Balin]

I am following along. My brother in law saved his tallow cuttings for me because I told him I like tallow shaving soap so now I have 2 large frozen zip lock bags that I was just going to use as winter bird feeders.

 

[Berwick12]

@GR5233 @RayClem
I will probably have some questions regarding the whole chemistry process. When I did it, more than a decade ago I was just going off the recipe lol. It is fascinating to find the chemistry behind it. Understanding it, that's a different story. I will probably have questions regarding the steric acid. I do want to learn more, but sometimes there's some stuff that's just going to go over my head. Similar to homebrewing

 

[kingfisher]

If you want to get right into making a fairly good shave soap without the years of experimentation, there was a guy on here years ago that dabbled for a long time and eventually succeeded. He posted his exact recipe and outlined all the steps precisely so that anybody can make it if they have the inclination and the time. I think the soap went by the name of Silver Fox. You should be able to find the recipe with a Google search. If you make it exactly as it is it will produce a really good shave soap. From there, for subsequent batches, it could be tweaked, if you wanted to.

I just did a quick search to make sure it was still available, and it looks like it is. www.silverfoxcrafts.com, I think, but you can Google it.

I really think this is the way to go if you want to make sure you have a successful outcome for your first batch of soap using that tallow. He discusses every detail, so it is hard to screw it up. He says if you can make macaroni and cheese from a box you can make this shave soap (obviously there are more steps, but the point is that if you can follow directions, you can successfully make a nice shaving soap using this recipe).

 

[Doc Dan]

Thanks for posting. Though the site is being worked on, it seems the recipe is still up.