These Two Hands

I made soap again! This one’s the best one yet. Each time I improve on my recipe in small ways: adjusting the beeswax for bar hardness, coconut oil for lather, essential oils for fragrance.

Originally I only made soap to find a helpful way to recycle my leftover grease. See my very first soap here (along with better directions), my second here, and my bacon-celebration soap here. But now that we rarely fry anything and I can no longer eat bacon, that “wastelessness” aspect of it is becoming less important to me than simply coming up with a pleasant soap.

I do still supplement with such recycled oils, but not as much as I could. I find that they detract from the luxurious smooth feel of a more conditioning, fancy soap. (They are perfectly good for laundry soap however, and if I ever come across a treasure trove of bacon grease I would certainly make tallow soap again… just not to rub on my body.)

Even without using 100% recycled bacon grease (which sure did save on cost!), this soap came out to about 90 cents per bar. I spent about $25 on the ingredients (not counting those I had already, like fragrance). Since we love the Zum bars at our local organic grocery and will usually spend about $5.50 on each one of those, I estimate that this single batch of soap has saved us about $120.

Recipe:

• Warm together til melted:
• olive oil, 8 oz
• castor oil, 2 oz
• coconut oil, 12 oz
• shea butter, 2 oz
• beeswax, 2 oz
• recycled fats, 12 oz
• cocoa butter, 8 oz
• add to an old crock pot on “low” while you prepare the lye.

Lye:

• Wearing gloves and glasses, and with a sink full of soapy vinegar water behind you, add 6.2 oz lye to 15 oz water in a heatproof container.
• Once lye cools to the same temperature as the fats, pour it carefully into the crock pot.
• Stir with an immersion blender – do not splash! – until it reaches “trace.” Cover and cook on low for 40 minutes to an hour. Soap should be translucent and the consistency of soft mashed potatoes.
• Meanwhile, line your molds thoroughly with press n’ seal.
• When soap is ready, mix in fragrance: 1 ounce each of honeysuckle fragrance and orange essential oil, added after cooking. I also added some red mica powder I happened to have, for color.
• Spoon into molds, smear flat, and let rest overnight.
• Slice, set the bars apart from each other for airflow to cure them, and let them rest at least a week before using.
• After a week or two I wrap my bars in saran wrap so the delicate essential oils stay fragrant for longer. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2013 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Crafts, bath&body, frugality&(free)cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.