Handmade Tallow Soap Bar – Cold Process Soap

We’ve been out of soap for awhile, and while I have a few recipes I absolutely love, we moved houses and half of our stuff remains in a storage unit (not for much longer!). This has made me get a bit creative with my skincare recipes. 

I have two bins of soapmaking and skin care ingredients, but wouldn’t you know, only 1 is at our current rental place. I had the lye and distilled water. That’s about it. 

I had just rendered a batch of tallow though, that I needed for my magnesium balm.  So, I figured that I could probably get away with just using tallow.  If making tallow isn’t your speed yet, you can get great quality tallow from here.

I plugged all of my information into SoapCalc and was able to come up with this chart for the recipe! 

There is a spot for essential/fragrance oil, but that was also in storage so here we just have beef scented soap, the dogs will love me! 

When I was pouring my tallow into the measuring bowl, wouldn’t you know I only had 85 grams of lye. So I just threw the rest of it in there, so I didn’t have to save 3 grams of lye. Call it lazy or minimalist, but I’d prefer you called it minimalist. 

The rest of the process is the same as always.. but if you’ve never made soap before, you don’t know what that means. Definitely watch a few YouTube videos on the safety aspect. 

Always have vinegar handy, as that will counteract any burning the lye could do to your skin. I like to keep mine in a glass spray bottle for this reason, but it’s also a great degreaser. Also, wear gloves and glasses! 

You’re going to add your lye into the water. This is very important because, if you put “water into lye, you shall surely die”. Ok, you won’t dye, but this saying does always help me remember we’re putting the lye into the water. Super important! The lye/water mixture will heat up, as a reaction to the chemical process. What process? Not sure. But as I’d tell my kids  “science”!!

Once you do that, you just melt your tallow in a double boiler. I don’t have a double boiler, but I do have a pot I use for all my cosmetics & skincare products, and a big glass bowl that goes over it. 

Once the tallow is melted you want your lye/water mixture and your tallow to be around 100-110*F. And then you’ll add the tallow into the lye/water mixture. 

And then you use a stick blender to emulsify the water & fat together. And as you do it you’ll notice it gets a lot thicker. You want it to be the consistency of pudding, or where you can see the trail you make with your blender. 

Lastly, pour it into your molds (or be like me and reuse containers) and then let it sit for 24 hours. 

After that, it should be hard enough for you to remove the soap from the molds (or the reused container) and you can cut it to your desired thickness! 

Let cure somewhere kinda dark and undisturbed, I put mine in the hallway closet, on a cookie cooking rack for 6-8 weeks. I know. It’s hard to wait. And sometimes we only make it like 1 week, and we’ve never had anything bad happen to us, but let’s maybe listen to the professionals because, science!! 

That’s it! Almost 100% off grid soap! I know you can use ashes from a fire to make lye and one day I am totally going to try that! But for now, we’ll just get lye from Amazon, because we can! 

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