Kara & Michael’s Blog

So I decided to try my hand at making soap yesterday. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a long time but have just never gotten around to. I’ve made liquid laundry detergent from bar soap (Fels-Naptha), sodium carbonate, and borax, which we’ve been using to wash our clothes for the past few months. That was fun, and has definitely paid for itself, but soapmaking in particular really appeals for some reason. Is it the caustic chemicals? The novelty? The idea of bootstrapping a common household item? I don’t know.

Anyway. I didn’t want to order stuff in any quantity from a soapmaking supplier until I knew that I could do it and that it wasn’t torturous. So for my initial foray into making soap, I was limited by what I could find at local retail stores (and my desire to not use animal fat, which would really have made this a lot easier).

For lye, I bought Roebic Crystal Drain Cleaner at Lowe’s, which as far as I can tell is the only remaining household packaging of 100% lye. You used to be able to get Red Devil lye in cans at the grocery store, but that product has disappeared entirely amid rumors of government pressure over methamphetamine labs. For the oils, I used what I had available, plus some pure palm oil that I picked up at a natural market (sold as shortening). I couldn’t find any cheap refined coconut oil, which is unfortunate because I’m sure it would have helped the soap lather better.

The oil blend for the soap was adapted from an online recipe, the best I could find to fit what I had on hand. It was 26 oz. of soybean oil, and 20 oz. each of canola, olive, and palm oils. The olive oil was the heavily-refined “extra light” stuff — left over from the Shangri-La Diet, as a matter of fact. I calculated the necessary amount of lye at 11.1 oz. at a 6% lye discount. I used about 26 oz. of water, though I wasn’t too precise about that. Everything but the water was weighed out on a postal scale accurate to 0.1 ounce.

Everything went according to the general cold process formula — adding the lye to the water produced lots of fun steam and fumes, and once I had the oils mixed and melted together I only had to wait a few minutes before both the lye and oils were under 125 degrees. I didn’t have any luck finding an immersion blender at the store, so once everything was mixed together I was stirring by hand — which is probably where things started to go wrong. After about three and a half hours of intermittent vigorous stirring, the soap wasn’t tracing. The palm oil had solidified but pretty much nothing else was going on, and the mixture was growing cold. So I put it back on the stove, heated it up enough to liquify the palm oil again, and started stirring like a madman with a wire whisk. After about half an hour I had an acceptable light trace and things were no longer separating into layers. I put in some peppermint leaf that I had ground into powder, and poured the soap into a clean cat litter pan that I bought for this purpose. Since heat (or a lack thereof) seemed to be working against me, I put the container in the oven after warming it up and turning it off.

This morning it looked like the soap was solidifying nicely. It’s still definitely liquid, but much thicker than last night, and it doesn’t look like it’s separated at all. The peppermint leaf is pretty — it’s turned the soap a sort of light green. I warmed up the oven a little again before I left for work. I’m hoping it sets up OK. And if it doesn’t, I can always remelt it and try to figure out what went wrong.

So those are my soapmaking exploits. If I can find people on whom to pawn off a bunch of soap (or start bathing much more often) I think I’d like to try some other varieties. If this batch turns out, we should have soap for months at home.