Soap, Part 2 of 2

INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

: Continued from Part 1
  NOTES:
*  In the U.S., Red Devil lye comes in 12-oz containers. In Europe it
generally comes in 350-g containers, which is about 3 percent more. You
don't want to measure lye, you want to use the whole container. If your
container is not this size, then scale the recipe up or down accordingly.
Leftover lye is a serious disposal problem.
*  Where to buy 9 pounds of fat? If you're using an animal fat (beef or
pork), you can buy it from your butcher. What I find I have to do is
reserve it, because they normally don't keep the fat after they've cut up
their cow. Sometimes they will charge you for the fat (I've paid anywhere
from 10 to 45 cents a pound); sometimes they won't. I've only ever made
soap with beef fat; this makes a hard, mild, slow-lathering soap. The
recipe will work equally well with other animal fats to produce a similar
result.  Coconut oil yields a softer, quick-lathering soap. Olive oil and
other vegetable cooking oils yield a very soft soap that never completely
hardens.  Unfortunately, these oils are sensitive to air and light, and
soap made from cooking oils will spoil in a few weeks unless it is
refrigerated.
*  Volatile fragrance oils, also called essential oils, are highly
concentrated scent ingredients.  You can usually buy them at health-food
stores, and you can sometimes find exotic fragrances at specialty
food-and-spice shops.  The amount that you should use depends on how
fragrant you want the soap to be. A few drops of musk oil is enough to
scent an entire batch of soap; less-potent fragrances such as a fruit oil
might require about a teaspoon or two 5-10 ml. Soap scented with herbs is
also popular; herbs like lemon thyme or verbena or lavender work well. To
scent with herbs, make an herbal oil by packing a 1/2-cup (approximately)
container with herbs and then filling it with a pleasant-smelling vegetable
oil, such as almond oil. Let this mixture sit for a few weeks, stirring it
every day, then heat in a double boiler for 10 minutes, then cool and
strain the oil.
*  The soap works just fine with no fragrance at all, and many people
prefer it that way. I certainly do.
*  You may run into problems at the stage "Add the fat and stir until it's
all melted." I almost always do. What happens is that the water/lye mixture
runs out of heat before all the fat melts. What you have to do is add heat
somehow.  The way I do this is to grab the tub (which now contains all the
fat), go into the kitchen, put it on top of a burner, and turn the burner
(and the fan) on high. (Make sure the windows are all open too.) When all
the fat is melted, I go back outside and continue, adding the lemon juice.
*  The lemon juice lowers the pH.  The finished soap will have a pH of
about 9; you can lower this by adding more lemon juice.
: Difficulty:  challenging.
: Time:  Day 1:  30 minutes preparation; 1-2 hours cooking.
: Day 2:  usually about 1 hour.
: Precision:  Be precise.  Also be careful.
: Aviva Garrett
: Santa Cruz, CA
: Excelan, Inc., San Jose
: ucbvax!mtxinu!excelan!aviva
: Copyright (C) 1986 USENET Community Trust
From Gemini's MASSIVE MealMaster collection at www.synapse.com/~gemini

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