Squeaky Clean

You may recall from a previous post that we and our friends purchased a pig (processed) from a local farm, and that one of the products of this purchase was a sizable quantity of lard. We planned to use said lard for baking (it's fantastic), and tentatively speculated that we might also make soap with it. A few weeks ago, I decided to revisit the topic, and it became apparent that we all had far more lard than we could use up with baking. Time for soap-making!

This is not a post with instructions on how to make soap with lard. There are many websites out there that can teach you how to do that. This is just a play-by-play with photos of our day on Saturday.

We started with lard (of course), coconut oil, cocoa butter, distilled water, and lye. Yes lye, that nasty stuff you see people using on crime shows to dissolve bodies. No fingers or other body parts were harmed in the making of this soap! We also needed wax paper, a digital scale, heat-proof containers for mixing the lye, and various plastic containers as soap molds. Plus safety goggles and long gloves for handling the lye, and a cheap immersion blender because who wants to mix this by hand?

Bethany and Amanda were kind enough to handle the measuring of the lye and mixing it with water. That is the most important part as regards to safety. If you add lye to water it's an exothermic reaction (gives off heat), but if you're working with a heat-proof container it's fine. If you add water to lye it can explode. You know, little details like that.

While waiting for the lye/water mixture to cool, we measured, mixed and melted lard, cocoa butter, and coconut oil. All three have low melting points so you do have to be careful not to overheat them.

Once both mixtures had cooled to between 100 and 120 degrees F and were about the same temperature, we poured the oils into our mixing bucket and carefully added the lye solution. Saponification starts instantly, but you have to stir for quite a while. If stirring by hand it can take half an hour or longer, but we bought a cheap immersion blender that made things far easier. You do have to take breaks so that the blender does not overheat, but I would say it took less than ten minutes. Again, with gloves and goggles in case of splashing, although we really did not have any splashes.

What you're looking for is called trace, where if you drizzle some of the mixture across the top it leaves a trace or trail.

Trace is the stage at which you add other things, such as ground oatmeal (for exfoliating soap), lavender buds, or our lovely fragrant essential oils.

In several instances we were making a triple batch of soap, so we divided it into separate containers in order to add different essential oils. Rather than purchasing fancy and expensive soap molds, we used simple flexible plastic storage containers. Some were lined with wax paper, others not.

These were then sealed up, placed on our potting bench behind the window (this thing is so useful!) and left to cure for about 36 hours.

Here is the aftermath. We used up about 7 1/2 quarts of lard. There is a lot still left for future endeavors.

Early this morning I popped the soaps out of their plastic molds and cut them up into bars. Voila!

A few lessons learned from this first attempt:

1. Don't use wax paper to line the molds. It crinkled up inside the boxes and gave the soap a crinkled edge.  More importantly, the wax paper was difficult to peel off the blocks, while the soap in unlined boxes popped out easily. I think it's a good idea on top of the blocks, but next time that's all we should use it for.
2. Go easy on the mint essential oils. I am not just saying this because we used wintergreen and I don't like wintergreen. I asked my hubby (who does like wintergreen) and he concurs. It is much more potent than the other soaps, almost overpoweringly so. The cinnamon is a little strong too (though it smells delicious), so we should probably go easy on it next time.
3. Next time try tangerine instead of bergamot - the bergamot smelled great in the bottle but lost a lot of its citrus aroma in the soap.
4. Buy more oils! We made a couple of batches of unscented soap. It's not unpleasant, but smells a little boring to me. It does not smell at all like bacon - you know you were wondering.
5. Do not use a metal thermometer with lettering painted on it to measure the temperature of the lye/water mixture. Why? Well, let's just say that we may owe Bethany a new thermometer...

I love the random "4" just sitting there.

So how many bars did we make? I actually did not count them all, but it's over sixty. It was pretty easy, and also fun! We will definitely do this again. I'd be tempted to see how easy it would be to make our own molds, rather than paying $30 for a single one in the store. All in all, I would consider this first soap experiment a success - way to go, ladies!