Pure Lard Part Two: Soap

So what's a gal supposed to do with 15 lbs of lard, anyway? How much pie crust can you eat? A few weeks after rendering all my pig fat I was still trying to figure this out when I thought of making homemade soap. I remembered watching my Oma make soap when I was a little girl. It was really harsh, nasty stuff that was great for cleaning laundry - all that lye burned the stains right out of the clothes! I found the idea of using my nice organic, porky lard to wash my tender body quite delightful, so I started doing a little bit of research online. How hard could it be?

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found so much info - recipes, lye calculators, tips on what to do if your batch fails, and pictures of what each step is supposed to look like. I even found a local source of lye at http://www.dierbe.com/ . (Di Erbe actually just opened up shop at 1853 Main Street next to Don's Photo this last weekend! Funny that I had to find them by googling 'Winnipeg Lye' and they ended up being neighbours...) Anyway, I was glad to find them because lye is a little hard to find in retail stores these days - apparently it's also an ingredient in Crystal Meth.

There was also a ton of info on which oils and fats made the nicest soaps. Most recipes use a combination of tropical oils and almost every recipe included coconut oil, which is desirable due to its abundant lathering capabilities. It was pretty difficult to find information on lard as the main ingredient but I eventually discovered that soap made of pure lard is known to be slightly soft, quite moisturizing, but with meagre suds action. It was pretty universally recommended that you add beef tallow (or even better, coconut oil for hardness and bigger bubbles!) to lard soap to make sure you get nice soap.

I wasn't terribly interested in besmirching my 100-mile lard with mangrove-destroying, plantation-grown palm or coconut oils, so I started to look for tallow. However, it turned out that NO ONE in Winnipeg even knows what tallow is, let alone sells it. Only a handful of the dozen butchers I called even knew what suet was, let alone tallow. I finally found suet (from veal - yikes!) at DeLuca's. They gave me four pounds of it for free! Time for more rendering!

The online soap calculators are really neat - you input exactly how much and what kind of oil or fat you have, and it will calculate exactly the amount of lye and water is required to saponify the amount of fat you have. I think this is why the old fashioned stuff was so harsh - people used to use a lot more lye than necessary.

My first batch of soap did turn out slightly harsh, due to my inexact and bouncy kitchen scale. Maybe I'll get a better one for Christmas, hey Santa? I made a bigger batch the second time around so I would be able to measure larger amounts at a time and therefore get slightly more accurate measurements.

Anyway, this is how you make soap.
1. Weigh your fat, and melt it.
2. Weigh your lye and your water, and then add the lye to the water in a WELL VENTILATED AREA. Lye fumes are pretty nasty - My Aunt Mary told me scary stories of damaging her respiratory system when making soap in her basement many years ago. It can also burn your skin, so you have to be careful with that, too. Wear your gloves and your gas mask!
3. Make sure your lye mixture (which gets really hot when you mix it together) and your fat are both around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then mix them together.

4. And then mix together and mix together and mix together until the whole mess starts getting thicker, kinda like thin pudding. This is called 'trace'. It probably took about 15 or 20 minutes for my soap to trace. When your soap starts to trace, add your scented oil and colours (I used a vanilla pomegranate scent and a bit of paprika to add a bit of colour) and mix it up.

5. Pour the thickening soap into your primary mold and let it sit.

There was a lot of info online about how to primary molds, but I used the good old fashioned milk carton like Oma used to, which worked out well. The soap continues to heat up as it hardens - you want to keep it warm so it can finish going through the magical chemical process of saponification.

After a day or two, you can take it out of the mold and cut it into blocks and lay it out to cure a little longer. Apparently soap made from animal fat solidifies a little quicker than soap made from pure vegetable oil, which can take a little longer to harden properly. I let my soap dry out for a couple of weeks before I tried using it.

In the next few weeks while I was waiting for the soap to harden I read up on milling processes. Milled soap is basically regular soap that's shaved and then melted down and poured into molds. It's the FANCY stuff! I ended up melting down most of the first batch and about a third of the second batch to make some new exciting molded soaps. I made some lemon scrub soap with turmeric, lemon zest and cornmeal and a couple batches of cinnamon oatmeal soap.

EVERYBODY will get soap for Christmas this year. Make sure you look surprised when you open it up!