Make Soap the Old-Fashioned way

Learn how to make your own lye from ashes, and then 

use it to cook up a mild, soft soap perfect for personal use.

By Susan Verberg

Soap-makers love to tell the story of how ancient Romans first “discovered” soap by burning animal sacrifices on Mount Sapo, and how the creeks at the bottom of that mythological mountain were the best places to do laundry. They’ll tell you that the water, ash and animal fat on those sites accidentally created the soap that filled the creeks. The reality is that the Romans didn’t actually make soap. They traded for it with the Celts, who dominated the market because of their access to abundant limestone and seashells [writer's note: this would be access to marine plants for soda ash as opposed to potash, not limestone which is calcium oxide], from which they produced slaked lime [soda ash] to make a caustic soda lye (sodium hydroxide).

After years of professionally making all-natural goat’s milk soaps to sell at our local farmers market, I decided to develop a self-sufficient soap-making process based on ancient techniques. My goals were to make my own lye and to turn kitchen-waste fats into soap. I finally took the plunge… and what an interesting adventure it became! I dug through old articles and manuscripts, learned to decipher medieval English, and filled my kitchen with weird, bubbling concoctions. And I wondered how something that seemed so simple could be so challenging.

Don’t let me discourage you. If you’re an outdoor enthusiast, you may have made soap already. Scrubbing a greasy frying pan with campfire ashes doesn’t just scour the dirt away: when rinsed with a little water, the hydroxide salts in the ashes combine with the cooking grease to form a primitive cleanser.

Understanding Soap-Making Basic

To undertake the process of soap making, known as “saponification” (from sapo, the Latin word for soap), let’s first review what soap is and why it works the way it does. Because soap is made from water-soluble bases known as alkalis, it neutralizes acids while retaining its ability to be dissolved in water. More specifically, soap is a surfactant with the unusual ability to diffuse fats and oils into water, which is why it can rinse away oily stains.

Soap is made by mixing dissolved hydroxide salts, generally called “lye”, with fatty acids. To make your own lye that you can use to produce a soft soap, you leach (or drip) water through ashes to dissolve the hydroxide salts. Ashes are highly concentrated minerals of hydroxides, nitrates, carbonates, sulfites, and more. The quality of the lye produced depends on how well the plant material was burned. I’ve found that the more complete the burn (all organic material combusted), the more hydroxides will be dissolved, and the more basic (that is, higher pH) the resulting lye will be. In the case of incomplete burns, such as you’d find in fire pits and fireplaces, you can add lime to help change the carbonates (charcoal) into hydroxides.

My drip lye made from ashes has a pH of about 11, while commercial lye has a pH of 14 – making it 1,000 times more basic than ash lye. This is a big reason why making drip-lye soap is so different from conventional soap making. Because of the lower pH, drip lye is a lot less dangerous to handle than modern commercial lye. As a precaution, though, you should always keep some vinegar handy during soap making because its acid will help neutralize the lye’s base.

Making soap using drip lye can be challenging because the purity, density, and consistency of home made lye is uneven. For home soapmakers, I recommend preparing hot-process soap (which I describe below) rather than cold-process because an exact amount or specific purity of lye isn’t required for successful saponification. In hot-process soaps, saponification – the chemical reaction between lye and fat – is controlled by added heat, not by the pH.

During my research, I uncovered a historic trick for checking the density of drip-ash lye using a fresh egg. Because an egg has about the same density as lye that’s the correct strength, the egg will float. Many colonial recipes for drip-ash lye recommend using homemade lye if it can float an egg with ¼ of its shell showing about the liquid. This lye will produce “Black Soap”, a strong laundry soap that historical re-enactors complain is too harsh. On the other hand, I uncovered a 16^th century shampoo recipe that recommends using lye dense enough to suspend an egg in the middle of the liquid. Suspended-egg lye makes near-neutral soap, perfect for personal use because it does not “bite”. This same historic recipe also confirms the 3-to-1 ratio of lye to fat that consistently works for me: “thre pottels of lye to one pot of oyl”. It’s nice to find confirmation that’s five centuries old!

Based on experience and historical research, I’ve developed these instructions for making a soft, creamy, hot-process soap from scratch – including homemade lye.

Soft Soap in 8 Steps

1 - To make a leaching barrel, drill a small hole at the bottom of a 5-gallon bucket and stuff it with a piece of dishcloth as a filter. Fill the bucket with sieved ashes, tamping down intermittently. Level the top, leaving about 2 inches of headroom. Slowly pour in about an inch of rainwater. When the water has absorbed, add about an inch more. Continue to slowly add water until liquid starts to drip out the hole in the bottom of the bucket – it should take about a day. Prop the ash bucket on top of a second bucket to collect this drip lye. (Or build a setup like in the illustration at the left.) You’re ready to test the strength when you’ve collected about 1 gallon.
                                                                                

2 – If you’ve used regular ashes from a woodstove or fireplace in Step 1, the drip lye will be dark brown and probably won’t suspend an egg. Slowly heat the the drip lye and allow it to evaporate until it has the desired strength, which is likely to about a quarter of its original volume. Use stainless steel vessels for heating lye, never aluminum (which creates noxious gases in combination with lye) or enamel (which lye will etch). Cool down the lye before soap making. Contaminants will settle to the bottom. The next day, pour the purer lye solution off the top (that is, decant it). If you’ve used white ashes from a high-efficiency stove in Step 1, the lye may be light yellow and will float an egg from the get-go. Use this lye as is to make a strong, sharp laundry soap. To make neutral hand soap, slowly add water in small amounts until the egg is suspended in the solution.

 3 – Measure out (by liquid volume) 3 parts lye to 1 part oil. Fats that are solid at room temperature, such as tallow and lard, should be heated until they liquefy, and then cooled. If you’re a soap-maker beginner, use olive oil because the process will be easier. Add the lye to the oil and mix well – a stick blender works great – and let sit overnight.

 4 – After 12 hours rest, the solution will have separated. Mix it very well. Heat the solution for an hour or two in a slow cooker on the high setting with the lid in place. Stir only occasionally, as the soap should not be allowed to cool down. When the soap starts to rise, you’ll see foam forming under the lid. Remove the lid, and stir the soap well to settle the foam. Replace the lid, but prop a toothpick under the lid to create a little gap for hot air to escape.

5 – As the soap cooks in the slow cooker (still on the high setting), you’ll see bubbles form at the edge of the ceramic insert. This is the soap “turning itself”. It should only bubble at the edges – never boil in the center. You’ll observe finished soap starting to form on top. Stir occasionally to ensure that no areas dry out at the edges of the insert. Be sure to stir gently, because the mixture can foam up suddenly at this stage.

6 – The soap will get thicker and thicker until it incorporates, or finishes. Remove the slow cooker’s lid so excess moisture can evaporate. This soap will look like custard (soap-makers call this “trace”), leave droplet marks (“trace marks”) on the surface when scooped and drip off the spoon in globs. You’re nearly finished!

7 – Cook until it starts to have a glazed, sleek look, like petroleum jelly, and leaves little wavy points when stirred. If you part the soap at the bottom of the cooker, it should not come back together. Stop cooking at this point for a thin, soft soap. Or, keep evaporating the moisture until the soap is your desired density – it will never get hard. I prefer a whipped cream consistency.

8 – Your finished product will vary by color and consistency. I’ve made successful batches of soap using “old-fashioned” techniques and each one takes about six to seven hours. If you decide to try this process over open heat, be aware that a more erratic heat sources will make the soap behave erratically as well, and your mixture may not come to trace.

Making soap from homemade drip lye is a fun and rewarding project, and one that doesn’t require specialized or expensive equipment. I hope you’ll give it a try!

Susan Verberg is the founder of Far Mountain Soap in Ithaca, New York. Find her handmade soaps at www.FarMountainFarm.Blogspot.com

From the December 2016/January 2017 Mother Earth News issue, page 40-42.

Soapy experiment

I've been wanting to make a purple marble soap for a while, so when I ended up with half a jar of burgundy lees from my blueberry mead making I decided to use that. Lees is the sediment, all the minerals and larger organic particles, from the honey, fruit and yeast used in the mead making process. Sometimes wine is aged on the lees, sur lie I think it's called, but most times the liquid is racked off (funneled with a hose) into a new container without disturbing the lees. Then the lees gets tossed...

Which I just could not do, not even for chicken scraps, it's all the good stuff and then concentrated! I decided to use it to marble in a soap recipe even tho I could not find any mention on google anywhere of soap makers having done that before... Of course, I make soap with whatever I can stuff in so that does not deter me too much but it's always nice to know ahead of time what to watch out for...

First odd thing that happened was that when I added the bright burgundy to the early trace soap the color immediately changed to bright green. The stuff is acid and I added it to a base! My goodness, chemistry at work :) Only too bad that bright kelp green did not last either, it again changed and now to a deep golden yellow. During gelling the color deepened, as gelling tends to do, from gold to chestnut and made quite a nice marble pattern.

Second odd thing was that the brick did not want to gel properly. I did not use heat, only my new foam insulators, but kept it covered for too long apparently as the oils in the soap partially separated. But only in the parts of the soap with the lees, not the standard soap mixture... weird. It did firm up nicely, and cut easily, but the colored marble has coconut oil beads all around the edges which does not look too good (it is a build in moisturizer tho). And then it hit me - lees is alcolic! And highly alcoholic, at least as high as wine! The soap seized from the alcohol, and that prevented proper gel...

So for my new Apple Jack soap, made with apple cider mead lees, I slowly boiled the lees to evaporate the alcohol, as I normally do when making beer or wine soaps. I hoped to make two recipes of this for my sales inventory and are really glad I found out before loosing another batch! Oh well, we live and learn - and now have a stack of beautiful marbled moisturizing soaps for gifts :)

Soap heat box

With this long and cold winter my basement workroom is colder as it has ever been before... it does not make much sense in heating it for me, I'm mostly waiting when making soap, except I did not realize how much it was influencing my soap process as well! The first batches I made this year would not gel at all even though milk soap normally creates enough internal heat to gel without external heat or even wrapping - so I added external heat... and overheated the heck out of it!

Normally the soap brick gels from the center, creating an oval of dark semi transparent soap which creeps to the outsides, and just before it does that (and then overheats) I stop the process by cooling down, either by unwrapping or placing on concrete floor. Gelled soap creates a better quality soap so I think it's worth the trouble. Except because of the extreme low temps the center would overheat before the edges of the soap brick would gel...

A bit of thinking made me realize it was the cold air of the basement keeping the outside from gelling, so I devised this foam edge to cut on draft and keep the heat in. I first used heavy blankets but that did not work anymore (as it did in previous years). Rescued pieces of heavy insulation foam (from a construction site, also used to insulate my chicken coop west wall and two top bar hive lids) were used for the bottom, top and sides. It's very easy to cut to size with a band saw (our new tool) and with a piece of butcher paper on top to protect moisture beading from leaking chemicals it makes for a perfect heat box. Tho I am sure a styrofoam cooler would work just as well :)

deer tallow

I laid my hands on some deer fat and rendered about a gallon of the stuff on the wood stove... it took about a day and rendered and smells similar to beef tallow with a bit more spice. Now, what to use it for? Anti scent hunter soap? Guess it's time for google!

What's in my soaps?

My goat's milk soaps and specialty soaps are made with organic ingredients when affordable, locally sourced when possible and home grown when available!


The oils & fats I like to work with:

sweet almond oil; natural or organic
canola oil; organic and locally sourced through Regional Access or Greenstar
castor oil; natural
cocoa butter; organic
coconut oil; organic
lard; organic, local (Kingbird Farm at the Ithaca Farmers Market)
olive oil; natural (no chemical extraction methods used)
palm oil; organic - refined (white) or unrefined (retains the orange fruit color)
palm kernel oil; organic
shea butter; natural, imported from Africa
soybean oil; not available local for some reason tho grown all around
sunflower oil; organic and locally sourced through Regional Access
wheat germ oil; natural or organic

beeswax & raw honey; local (Waid's Apiary, Rowland's Farm or friends)
vegetables & fruit; home grown, Greenstar or organic from the Ithaca Farmers Market

My palm oil is farmed and is not part of rainforest deforestation.
I don't use hydrogenated oils (like shortening) because I don't want to lather myself with something I wouldn't want to eat :)

About Far Mountain Soap...

 

Far Mountain Soap specializes in fragrance and essential oil free all natural goat's milk and specialty soaps; made with organic when affordable, locally sourced when possible and home grown when available. We add subtle scents where needed using choice flowers, spices and/or herbs and do the same to create specific soap colors - all without adding any chemicals, of course.

Started in the early winter of 2011 - you know, winter, when for the homesteading artist there is not much else to do than our favorite pass of time: bookkeeping... with the help of my accomplished soapmaking sister, Far Mountain Soap was born. I make my soaps using the traditional cold process method, the bars are hand cut and given at least a month to cure. This creates a high quality long lasting bar that retains the naturally occurring properties of the great ingredients I use. The bars are also naturally high in glycerin, a humectant that leaves the skin feeling clean and fresh without stripping it of its natural oils.

While we make basic soap batches, like the traditional Lye Soap with only local lard and well water, I enjoy developing and making unusual soaps. Like my Coffee Bar and Kitchen Hands soaps made with local Gimme! Coffee brew and grounds, my Apricot Wheat and Partly Sunny soaps made with the same beers from our local Ithaca Brewery and not to forget our signature milk soaps Milk & Honey and Winter Sunshine, made with milk from our own goats!

My soaps are free of preservatives, dyes & colorants, petroleum products, synthetic fragrance or essential oils - and of course: 100% biodegradable!

Please note - my soaps are hand made & hand cut, therefor every bar is unique; you may get a bar that does not *exactly* resemble the picture, but it will always be from the same recipe and it will always be just as pretty.

Handy Tip: handmade soap will last a long time if kept dry between uses. Please use a draining soap dish and keep the bar away from direct streams of water (and yes, we do sell reclaimed wood cedar soap dishes).

Soap Resources

Mountain Rose Herbs
Large selection of organic and non organic oils, butters, herbs etc.

Tropical Traditions
Has bulk regular and organic high quality coconut oil, keep an eye out for their free shipping and other sales.

Essential Wholesale
Has bulk regular and organic oils, nice materials but not that good customer service. Also sells cosmetic bases if you don't want to cook your own.

Brambleberry
Nice soap website with neat molds, melt and pour soap bases, fragrances and nice containers.

Lye Depot
Agway does not sell lye anymore, but I did find a great source for food grade lye on the internet.

Of course Regional Access for locally made and processed oils & honeys.

Milky Way Molds
Great selection of pvc soap molds; many, many to choose from.

Majestic Mountain Sage
Good recourse for materials, recipes and hosts the MMS Lye Calculator.

Miller's Homemade Soap Pages is full of technical know-how and recipes.

Soapnuts
A good resource for recipes, ideas and tips.

rebatching soap

Sometimes when making soap something does not go quite as planned - not all the lye was diluted when the lye mixture was added, during gelling the soap overheated, the soap was mixed too long and seized, forgot to add an essential ingredient. But soap does not need to be thrown away, not even funky soap, as long as the basic recipe measurements (balance of lye to oil/fats) stay correct. 

If you have a batch of soap that went really wrong and parts separated, make sure to save EVERYTHING including the yucky gobby stuff as it is all part of the original recipe.

Below is how I rebatch soap:

Noodle the soap (preferable not that old, like in a week or two after the initial batch) with an electric kitchen grater (like zucchini) and add noodles to a large non aluminum pan. Lightly pour milk (any milk) over top of noodles (I use about 1/2 to 1 cup; more for older, drier soap) but not so much it pools on bottom of pan.

Have the inner pan with noodles nestled into an outer pan with boiling water, the technique is called au bain marie. This way the soap can not scorch as the bottom of the inner pan never gets hotter than the temperature of boiling water. I use a lid to help with heat retention.

 

After a bit, half an hour to an hour, the noodles start melting. With a large spoon or ladle scoop from the bottom to the top, to stir the mostly melted with the hardly melted at all.

Keep an eye on it and stir every once in a while, like very half hour or hour or so. Also keep an eye on the outer pan water level and refill if needed. Make sure to evenly stir unmelted parts together, also the bits stuck to the sides, so it's mostly at the same melting stage when ready to pour.

When the batch is done, the melted soap kinda looks like lava, a bit thicker at the top and edges and pretty liquid in the hot middle.

Mix everything up one last time especially the edges and pour quickly into a block mold. I don't have much luck pouring rebatched soap in shape molds without bubbles so I stick to block molds and cut down to size later.

At first the poured soap will be quite dark, but over time it will lighten up. Rebatched soap will not have the same color as the original tho it will be close. This soap was more a pastel yellow but rebatched became bright yellow. Rebatched soap also tends to have a pearlessence to it, the folds and whirls of the thicker poured soap stay slightly visible in the body of the soap and looks very nice cut. I also found rebatched soap does not cure as hard as the original (or it just takes much longer) but don't know if that shortens it's shelf life or not. Certain soaps I prefer rebatched over straight, especially because of the pearlessence look, but probably also cause they really like to overheat :)

Why does soap sometimes overheat, in case you're wondering?

A biggie is forgetting it's still plugged in and wrapped up. I gel my block soap on a seed starter mat covered with a piece of insulation foam and wrapped in a moving blanket. I leave the seedstarter on for 15 minutes to an hour depending on ambient temperature (basically, is it summer or winter), unplug it and leave the mold wrapped for another hour or more, until it's mostly gelled (check out an earlier blog post). And sometimes I forget to check in time... darn the kid :)

Another one is a large amount of soap made with milk and added honey. Milk soap runs hotter than regular soap (no seedmat needed, wrapping enough). Add honey and you don't even want to cover it (which is why making milk & honey soap poured into bubblewrap such a skill, hihi). And if you make a batch of milk soap with honey (like my Bee Good) and pour the whole recipe into one block mold the mass of the soap generates so much heat it needs to be cooled down - I place it, uncovered, on my concrete basement floor. And yes, it's easier to make this soap in winter!

We're going national!

 

Far Mountain Soap officially opened shop on Etsy.com today :)

visit us at www.etsy.com/shop/FarMountainSoap
to check out the first listing of our best seller milk and honey bars...

which reminds me, we're on Facebook now too!
visit us at www.facebook.com/FarMountainSoap and "like" us.

my sister the soap maker

I just had to share these wonderful little soaps with you! They are the creations of my sister, the first soapmaker in our family and the one who taught me all! Left you see "Pommander", then from top to bottom you see "Mystic Musk", "Berrier Reef" and "Koala Treat".

I love being in charge of her website - yes, I'm Middle Earth Studio as well -  as that gives me a first and often a behind the scenes look of her products. And a change to pretty much try them all as I get samples for the site's product images :)

To see more of her work you can visit her website at www.AtelierCherubijn.nl

gelling soap

I got a question a while back on what gelling of soap means. When I saw this batch I had to take it's picture as it is a perfect example of a well gelled batch! For the non soapers under us, when you make soap you can pour it and cool it (most small shapes are made like that) or you can pour it and gell it, as in heat it (but not to much) so it transforms into a better quality soap. Individual soap molds do not have the bulk to easily generate the heat needed to gel so I only gel my soap batches. Another thing is that gelling changes the color of the soap, and even tho I can make a nice bright yellow regular soap, when that same recipe gels it's more of a dull orange which is not as effective with my sunflower shape molds.

You know a soap batch is starting to gel when from the inside a dark translucent oval forms which will work it's way slowly to the outside. If cooled too soon it might only be gelled in the center and your soap might be colored unevenly, if heated too much it might overheat and separate - an overheated soap is not a loss, but it does need to be rebatched (noodled and reheated) which is a pain in the butt!

The way I have pretty consistent success with gelling batches of soap? I put the 31 bar batch on a seedling hatching mat for about an hour on top of a piece of pink foam insulation with another piece over the mold and horse blankets wrapped all around. Sometimes I heat it for 15 minutes, sometimes for 2 hours, kinda depends on how hot it went in (140F or 90F makes a difference, tho I aim for 120F it does not always work out that way) but I leave it wrapped until the next day (maybe with a peek just to make sure it didn't go too far). When you peek and a batch is gelled like the pic above take it out and let it cool down, it can't gel any more than that but it can overheat.

I find that properly gelled soap is easier to get out of my molds as well. My experience is that soap recipes without shea butter release well with a little oil rubbed inside the mold (I use a piece of paper towel, rub the inside of the container I measured my oils in and use that to oil the inside of the mold - that way the same oils go in the recipe) - recipes with shea butter only release if gelled nearly completely...

Something else, last time I ordered molds from Milky Way Molds they send me the sleeping cat (front) instead of the sleeping goat (middle)... since I do not make cat milk soap (har har) I did not quite know what to do with it, until I whipped up a batch with paprika powder and poured a bunch of Garfield cats! Customers really seem to like them, for some reason; then again, don't most cats like milk?!

how to render lard from pork fat

This fall my regular lard supplier did not have a butcher to render the lard for them, so they ended up giving me 400lbs of different types of pork fat. I figured, what the heck, it's free, I always wanted to buy a turkey fryer, let's do this! Little did I realize it would take me two weeks of four days a week of rendering to get thru the 400lbs :)

I did learn a couple things or two along the way: a major one being if the fat burns it smells and if you makes soap from smelly lard it will still smell burnt as a bar of soap as well... so, don't use burnt lard, use that to make birdseed cookies with instead... they don't seem to mind.

Needed to make lard:
- a turkey fryer with propane tank and large pot.
- a clean bucket with metal sieve to drain cracklings
- a metal pot with mesh sieve and cheese cloth to filter rendered lard
- a clean bucket with lid to store rendered lard
- a bucket or large box with bag for drained cracklings
- a cutting board and sharp knife to cut fat down
- large plastic gloves to protect hands and arms from fat splatter
- a large flat spoon to agitate rendering fat
- a spoon to scoop rendered lard from cooking pot
- a mesh spatula to remove cracklings from lard

A box of fat strips. I cut the fat up in two inch strips, size does not matter too much as long as they are mostly the same so the smaller fat pieces or cracklings don't start to burn before the larger fat pieces are done.

 The main thing to keep in mind is that to cook fat down to lard without burning the fat pieces you need a starting amount of lard. You might want to cook down some fat indoors on the stove (easier to control heat, smaller pot) and use that as starter lard in the turkey fryer. I would have about half a pot of lard and add about the same amount of fat (no higher than the ring indentation of the pot which is the maximum oil level) for a full load. I would be able to do about three full loads in about five hours.

Another thing is to keep an eye on the temp of the lard, to not let it get too hot. When the lard starts to smoke you're burning it! It's a fine balance between turning up the propane when adding cold fat and turning down the heat when the fat is hot and starts to melt / render to keep it simmering until it's all rendered.

I used a double layer of cheese cloth to sieve the lard I would scoop from the top of the turkey fryer. Do NOT pour hot lard into a plastic bucket, it will melt the bottom!

The sieved lard would go into a food grade plastic bucket. By this time the lard is cooled off enough it does not melt the plastic. When the bucket is full close with well fitting lid and store somewhere cool, like on a concrete floor in the basement (or in the freezer).

I used a metal colander (has larger openings than a sieve but I'm sure both work fine here) and a mesh frying spatula to scoop the cracklings from the turkey fryer pot. I waited for the cracklings to turn golden before removing, I could go longer but it becomes easier to burn the cracklings and so darken the color of the lard. The cracklings still have lard in them, by sitting in the colander and mashing and squeezing them for a bit most liquid lard is released. I add this back to the big pot (not to the bucket with cheese cloth) to keep rendering.

Collect all the cracklings in something. These make good winter bird food as well as winter chicken feed. I set the box in the chicken run and the dozen girls took about a month to eat the whole thing, and it never got moldy or buggy. Not all that healthy as chickens that are too fat don't lay well, but it did not seem to matter - this time :) If possible, bag it up in smaller portions and freeze to feed later when it's really freezing.

A soap display for a vintage store...

It took some thinking and looking around the house and workshop to see what could be repurposed - about two weeks worth - and in the end came up with quite a nice display, I'd say!

The base is a small 4 foot wide desk (the display could not exceed 4 feet wide) friends of ours were throwing out and I picked up for my sunroom. It looked a lot nicer to store our fruits and veggies in the summer (we ripen peaches and brandywine tomatoes indoors) but now we're back to a regular plastic folding table... The little flat crates with slots are half and third apple crates. I pick them up at yard sales and use the table saw to cut them in slices, then add a solid plank bottom and hardwood slats from pallets (I save nice thin pieces especially with these bins in mind). The two slender boxes in back are from one old wine crate cut in two and set on their side as a shelf. I found a whole bunch of these on trash day a while back but was not the only one - after some arguing about who was first we realized there were so many we ended splitting them up :)

The vertical shelf is a large window with an added frame of really old barn wood, all weathered and full of holes (character I think it's called) I got with a dump load of scrap wood from the Ithaca Re-Use place. Tthey demolish old buildings in town for salvage and will deliver wood that's only good enough for burning around town instead of dumping it at our local landfill, yay! The three foot bin below the table is an old photo display bin my husband built years ago and that was sitting in storage.

All in all a nice display which fits right into the store's vintage look!

soap stuff...

I had some questions on how I mix water and lye for soap making so I thought it nice to share this picture. This is my typical set up for water/lye, where I have the water for soap measured in a large beaker which is placed in a bucket with cold water and a frozen icepack. It feels safer somehow to walk around with a bucket with the lye mixture rather than holding the beaker in my hands (I mix outside and then transfer the bunch downstairs to my soap making room). Plus it leaves one hand for opening and closing doors etc.

I also like the cooling down effect of the water & ice (this works better than snow, like cooling soda cans with ice cubes is slower than using a water & ice cube mixture - more cold surface to cool down I guess) and now it takes about 20-30 minutes to cool down from ca. 180-200 degrees F instead of forever LOL

Just a nice picture to show the maple leaves I like making with left over soap from larger recipes. I bought some candy boxes with a see thru lid and made gift sets, each with three differently colored leaves, and I think they look great! I'm real curious to see how they'll do coming market season...

soap making tricks

two things I learned along the way which make making soap easier:

influence the time it takes for the soap to trace
The closer together the temperatures of the oils/fats and liquid/lye the faster they'll trace. So if for instance you make a slow tracing milk and honey soap it's good to really cool down the oils but if making a pumpkin or cucumber puree soap, where adding the mash tends to immediately trace the soap, it's good having some extra time - thus if you keep the oils/fats about 20 degrees from the liquid/lye you buy yourself some extra time to properly mix the soap and the mash.

cooling down the melted oil/fat mixture by adding cold liquid oils at the end
Meaning you can measure out olive oil, for instance, but keep it separate and add it at the end when the solid oils/fats are melted to quickly cool down the recipe. I do take the crockpot out of the heater and place it on a cold concrete floor for a bit before adding the cold oils, otherwise it heats back up pretty fast. The crock pottery retains a lot of heat (or cold).

I tend to put the crockpot on the floor, get all my lye stuff together, depending on the temperature (< or > 140F) put it back in and add olive oil or mix my milk/lye first and then put the crockpot back in, add the olive oil and add the milk/lye (keep an eye on the lye, don't let it sit for too long). This way I can make two recipes in one toddler school day :)

my soaps are now at Ithacamade!

My natural soaps will now be available downtown at Ithaca Made, a quirky locally owned gallery, stocked with locally made arts & crafts. Check it out next time you visit Mama Goose or Mimi's Attic!

For more info you can also check my soap blog at www.farmountainfarm.blogspot.com

How to keep a milk lye mixture cool

Which is actually surprisingly easy: just freeze the milk :)

Why would you need to keep the milk/lye mixture cool? For one, the heat will change the color of the milk from milky white to bright hunter orange and that color will transfer to the finished soap. So unless you make bright orange soap, the burnt milk will throw off your finished product's color at least a little.

But also, burnt milk means the heat broke down all the good stuff (you know, vitamins, minerals...) that are part of the milk - and which are actually why you want to use milk to begin with. Which means soap made with orange milk/lye is not of as good a quality as soap made with cooled down milk/lye.

How do I keep my milk/lye cool? I measure my milk beforehand (in fluid ounces, as milk is heavier than water) and store it in ziplock baggies in the freezer. Since my recipes are pretty much tailored to my crockpot that means I mostly use 32 fl oz of milk at a time.

When my oil and fat mixture is to temperature, between 100-120 degree F depending on the fats used (some need more heat to melt first and then I place the crockpot directly on the concrete basement floor to cool down) I take out a baggie of milk from the freezer. I run the baggie under a hot tap to release it from the inside, and to create some moisture to start the dilution process. I also use a little bit of water to rinse the milk residue out of the baggie and pour that over the frozen milk, which wets the chunk and gives some starter fluid in the tub to stir (but is not necessary).

I place the chunk of frozen milk in a plastic tub and make sure the outside of the frozen milk is wet (if you let it sit a bit it will freeze up again). Then I sprinkle a layer of lye crystals over the chunk and stir constantly (no splattering!) to prevent any one place from heating up. The heat of the lye will melt the frozen milk, so whenever the lye sluices off I add more crystals. It takes me about 20 minutes in all to slowly but steadily add the lye to the milk and most times only have a little frozen chunk left which will melt on it's own (but keep stirring).

Do's and don't's of the milk/lye mixture:
- Never let it sit (to heat up or cool down) as the fats of the milk will saponify.
- Keep stirring, as milk does not transfer heat as easily as water; it will build up heat locally and thus burn that area of milk (mixture turns first yellow then orange if you're really not paying attention).
- Add lye crystals steadily but slowly, no sense in hurrying as you have to wait for the frozen milk to completely melt anyway.

If the milk/lye looks off white or slightly green (like whey) the temps are around 80-90 degree F. If the milk is turning pale yellow to yellow it's closer to 90-100 degree F. I have not temped orange milk/lye yet, as that happened once (my first, uninformed, attempt at milk soap) and have tried my all to never have that happen again!

I also started to freeze other liquids like coffee, tea, apple cider, wine etc to be able to make low heat lye mixtures as these liquids also have ingredients like vitamins which you'd like to retain to work for you in your soaps.

The best thing about low heat lye mixtures? Hardly any caustic fumes! I do turn on my (darkroom) fan and wear a gas mask, but that's more for just in case than really needed, seems like.

Glycerin?

Something neat I thought I'd share:

What you see here is a raw soap mix, as in the oils & fats are chemically altered by the lye (saponified) to form soap, stirred with a hand blender. While blending something really neat happens on the surface: the formation of pure glycerin!

In commercially processed soap the glycerin formed in the saponification process is separated from the main soap to be sold separately, leaving the soap itself more harsh. Which is exactly why any hand made cold process soap is immediately nicer in use than commercial soap as the naturally occurring glycerin is still in the bar.
Here I stopped blending and the glycerin whirlpool sinks / absorbs back into the soap mix. This particular mix is Lye Soap, made with local organic lard and well water.

How did I do that?!

I've had quite some success with this soap texture - and not many people who've guessed correctly how I did it :)

I'll share below how I do it, but don't think it's my original idea - lots of people use this stuff in all kinds of genius creative ways...

As you can see, the texture is bubble wrap, but when used as a mold it looks a lot like the inside of a beehive - which is exactly why people like me love to use it for honey type soaps!

First off, cut the bubble wrap to size and fit into your mold. I use dollar store drawer dividers, tape the wrap on each long end, and then stack it into another divider so it does not bow out as much when the soap is added (these things are not very sturdy).

Pour in the soap, making sure the wrap is all the way to the bottom and into all the nooks and crannies. Otherwise soap will puddle around the wrap, the corners will become rounded, and the soap on the outside will be discarded.

One soap bread is demolded (back), one is waiting to go.

Turn the mold upside down, release the soap from the mold and gently drop on work surface. Then unpeel the wrap's edges to slowly but steadily pull of the wrap from the soap bread. I do not reuse the wrap but I do have enough from my photography business anyway.

And that's all, folks!

A couple things to think of, tho... regular soap needs to be insulated (even heated a bit) to reach the gel stage. Milk soap only needs some insulation, I find a piece of insulation foam on top of the mold to be enough, as milk soaps runs hot. Add honey to the mix, and the soap heats up really, really easy. So - DO NOT INSULATE, COVER or sit CLOSE TOGETHER. The soap WILL overheat!

And this is for regular milk with honey soap! Add insulating bubble wrap to the mix and you're in trouble... What I found works real well is to remove the bottom dividers when the soap set enough to retain shape (about an hour) and place the molds right onto a cold concrete floor - it sucks the heat right out of the soap just as it does out of my feet :)

what the heck?!

This is what happens when a goat's milk with honey soap recipe overheats... I knew something had gone wrong when after an hour or so after pouring I checked the heat with my hand and pulled back fast as the middle was angry, angry hot! And I was left with a big spongy spot middle + honey leaking + oil separating = big mess...

My method (trial and error) of gelling the soap (letting it get hot enough to gel / cure but not so hot that it separates) is heating pad and insulation for water only soaps, insulation for milk only soaps (i.e. piece of foam on top - nothing else) and no insulation whatsoever for soaps with milk AND honey. BUT what I learned last week is that if it's a large mold of soap with milk & honey ALSO put it on the cold, cold concrete floor - just in case :)

I rebatched this batch of Bee Good and the result was actually nicer than the straight up soap. The bar has a very nice opaque silky look to it, very fancy.

The way I rebatch soap is putting it thru the kitchen machine to noodle (like zucchini). Put all the noodles in a stainless steel pot (not aluminum) inside another pot with hot water and a heat resistant trivet (to keep space). Pour a little milk (goat, cow, soy, whatever) over the noodles, enough to make them look wet but not so much it puddles on the bottom. Add lid, boil water and keep it at a slow boil while stirring occasionally. It will take hours for the soap to liquify enough for pouring! When the soap starts to get liquid again and is pretty easy to stir, pour into mold. It's better to heat and wait, than to pour too soon - if the soap plops instead of pours into the mold it's likely too chunky and will not set with that silky opaque look but instead look like old crumbly cheese...

I have not had success using rebatched soap in small shape molds, the soap is too thick and sticky to get into all the little bits and pieces of small molds.