Today I made lye soap. I just make regular plain old lye soap nothing fancy with different herbs or scents. Lye soap is supposed to be good for removing poison ivy and I also had an elderly lady who used to take in laundry tell me that it was good to rub on men's shirt collars to remove stains! I don't know how true any of these statements are, but it is fun to make.
The recipe I use has tallow, lard and olive oil in it. There are all kinds of recipes using different kinds of fats or oils, but the reason I chose this one was because I had access to tallow and lard. Tallow is the fat from beef. The last time we butchered a cow I had them save me all the fat scraps. This I then had to put through my meat grinder and then cook it down on the stove till it was all melted. Then filter it so that all the meat pieces or grissel and stuff was taken out. Then I put it in foiled lined cake pans and allowed it to cool and set up. Once that was done then I put it in plastic bags and stored it in the freezer. Needless to say one cow makes a lot of tallow! We haven't had cattle for around 16 or 17 years! The lard was a lot easier to come by as we used to have hogs and every time we butchered I had them save me the lard. They will process the lard, so I didn't have to do that! When you use tallow in soap it makes a harder soap which I like in a bar soap.
The next trick is finding the lye. Which I use Red Devil, but there are some other brands, it just has to be 100% lye, and sometimes anymore that is not always easy to find. But once you have your ingredients found you need to pick a time when you can work without any interruptions.
You need to add your water to your lye in pitcher and then let cool down to 100 degrees. Also at the same time you need to melt your fats in a pot on the stove and then cool them down to 100 degrees also. The trick is to get both mixtures to reach 100 degrees at the same time! Once that is done then you slowly mix the two together and then stir and stir and stir and stir.... which can take 30 minutes to 45 to an hour?!! But you stir until when you lift the spoon from the pot and let it drip that you can see a trail or tracings on top of the soap. That is what the first picture is trying to show, it was hard to get a picture fast enough to show up in the light. You can see a little ridge or line right above and to the right of the spoon?!
Then once that has happened you can pour your soap into your molds. This time I had saved these plastic forms from the packages of store bought cookies I buy.(That way I won't eat them, because they're not as good as home made!) Or in the past I've just used a square plastic type storage box and then cut them into bars later. I then set the molds into a bigger storage container and put the lid on and then wrapped them in a blanket to keep it from getting "chilled" and put them to "bed"!
What that essentially means is that you don't want the soap to cool to fast and you put it in a warm place where it can set for 24 to 48 hours undisturbed. Then once that time has passed you can un-mold the soap and set it out to dry and cure! It takes a good 3 to 4 weeks to cure before you can use it as the lye can still be caustic. So that's soap making in a nut shell! If you are interested there are all kinds of books out there with information and recipes. The one I like and use is "The Complete Soapmaker" by Norma Coney.
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