Making Soap with Lye and Lard
We recently hosted a soapmaking class at our temporary residence in Denver. Our friend Arthur from the Denver Urban Homesteading Group shows us how to make soap using lye, lard and coconut oil with some essential oil scents and turmeric spice for color.
Making soap with lye and lard turned out to be a heck of a lot easier than I thought it would be. It was certainly easier than my cheesemaking adventures, and I quickly decided to try my own batch of soap (seen in this video on my other site). But I have to admit we had the benefit of store-bought lye, store-bought lard, electric scales, an electric mixer…
If I had to make my own lye by dripping water through wood ashes, collect my own lard from butchering animals, saving bacon grease and rendering the fat… I suppose it wouldn’t seem so easy.
Making Homemade Soap with Lye and Lard:
Oh yes, soapmaking is definitely easier than cheese! I’ve thought about making my own lye too but can’t track down an affordable water tight wood barrel. Any suggestions?
That is so strange — I was thinking of making soap as I fell asleep last night. I’ve never tried it, but it would be a good use for those wood ashes I never find a good use for, and the bit of fat in deer meat.
Thanks for the great video as I was not able to attend. I am wondering if you know how to make glyserin soap too? My family can’t use lye soaps.
Thanks,
Julie
Go to your favorite bookstore or Amazon and get “The Foxfire Book”, the first of the Foxfire series. It has instructions on making your lye by dripping wood ashes, and I don’t recall them using a water-tight barrel. It continues on using the lye to make soap from lard.
Anyone serious about off-grid living should have the entire Foxfire series at hand for reference. I love the series, as my family is from that part of the world where the book was put together. And, my mother grew up off-grid by necessity (in poverty in 1930s Alabama), and they butchered hogs and made soap from the lard with these very techniques.
Woody, actually I own the entire series and subscribe to their magazine to this day. You’re right about it being a great resource. But you’re wrong about the water and the barrel. You need to drip water through the wood ashes to get the lye.
Folks:
This guy takes soap-making and turns it into some kind of science experiment! … I’ve been making my own (bar) soap for over 15 years, and the process has NEVER been presented as this complicated or “mathematical”. … It’s just SOAP!
… The kind that I make is “pure tallow”, so I don’t use (pork) lard. I use (beef) tallow and get a nice, brittle, hard, white soap that lasts for months. I don’t add ANY vegetable oils (including coconut) to my recipe. Lather is an addiction and an indulgence, not a necessity. Tallow soap (i.e. PURE tallow soap!) doesn’t “foam” – there are ONLY 2 ingredients: beef fat and lye. ONE volume measurement for each ingredient and just monitor the temperature. That’s IT! KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). — Patrick
Nov 26th, 2009 at 7:02 am
[...] the previous week, while also trying to convey that information to anyone watching the video. Click here to see the video from that class. This being my first time making soap, I look forward to sharing [...]
Dec 31st, 2009 at 6:15 pm
[...] can be – but most of us know this stuff as plain old caustic soda or lye, which I use in my homemade soap since it saponifies (turns into soap and is no longer lye) once mixed with fats like lard and [...]
Mar 13th, 2010 at 2:38 am
[...] with extra kick) is mixed with lye (which is a caustic substance used as a drain cleaner and in making soap). Didn’t I tell you it was a good time to be paying attention? The two are mixed to produce [...]