51a - Making lye with ashes

By Steve Sparkes

Commercially made soap may have unwanted chemicals in it.

Making your own soap can be a rewarding experience that allows you to experiment with different ingredients for scent and texture. You control the process, so you can ensure that the only additives in your soap are ones you want. 

  

Making homemade soap involves using the same methods that have been used for generations. The two basic substances used are lye and tallow. Lye can be bought commercially, but for truly homemade soap, make your own from wood ashes. Commercial soap is sodium hydroxide while homemade lye is potassium hydroxide. 

 

The homemade lye is actually less harsh than the commercial alternative, making the resulting soap kinder on your skin. 

Things You'll Need

• Wood ash from hard wood
• Rain water
• Two plastic buckets

Instructions

  

Making the Lye

• Burn some wood to create the ashes you need to make lye. You need to use a hard wood like ash, beech or hickory. When the wood is burnt, collect the light, white-colored ashes. Disregard any blackened, charcoal remains.
• Drill an 1/8 inch hole in the bottom of the plastic bucket (green) about an inch off-center.
• Stop up the hole in the bottom of the bucket with an 1/8-inch nail.
• Elevate the bucket (green) above ground with, for example, two breeze blocks. Place the bucket so that there is space under the center for you to put the other plastic bucket (red) to collect the lye.
  
  
  

• Scoop spadefuls of cold ashes into the bucket (green), compacting the ash down after each spadeful. Fill the bucket to about a third of its capacity.
• Boil approximately half a bucket of water (rainwater preferably) and add some carefully to the ashes. There will be some hissing and popping at this stage so be sure to wear your protective clothes, gloves and goggles from now on.
• You are in the process of making a caustic substance, which can be dangerous. 
• Initially the water will not appear to be mixing with the ashes and will just sit on top. Leave it and come back later when you can add more water.
• Take the nail out from the bottom of the bucket and come back to check it every few hours. It could take hours or days for nearly a bowlful of lye to accumulate.
• When it has done, take it to the kitchen and boil it very carefully.
• Pour the boiled bowl of lye back into the top of the bucket. 
• This is how you strengthen your lye and repeat the process later on, if necessary.
• To check the strength of your lye put a chicken's egg into it. 

• Too weak - if it sinks,
• Too strong - if it floats too high,and you should add some pure water. 
• Just right - the egg will float with about the size of a modern dime showing above the surface of the lye.

• Leave your lye in the sun in a shallow container until it dries into crystals.

Read more: How to Make Soap From Ashes & Tallow | eHow.com  

http://www.ehow.com/how_7685308_make-soap-ashes-tallow.html#ixzz221iBOcQA

51b - How to render tallow for soap

By David Fisher

On the label of many commercially available soap products you'll see sodium tallowate listed as an ingredient. Sodium tallowate is the by-product of mixing lye with tallow or beef fat. Technically, tallow is fat (beef or other) that has been rendered. The primary ingredient used in most soaps is beef fat.

  

Whether you agree with the use of animal products, there are a few simple reasons why beef fat (or tallow) is used so widely in soap making:

1. It's cheap,
2. It's readily available,
3. It makes really good soap.

The lather is rich and creamy, and hard to duplicate in vegetable oil soap. Vegetable oils are easier to store and there are a lot of people who just don't like the idea of beef fat in their soaps. 

  

So...how do we render beef (or other animal) fat into tallow? It's pretty easy.

   

1 - Getting started

    

Rendering Tallow

To render the tallow you'll need:

• 3-5 pounds of fat - chopped or ground into as small of pieces as possible.
• A large pot - you will use to make soap
• Water and some salt
• A sieve or colander
• A large bowl to cool it in
• Some large spoons, and a potato masher if you have one

Be sure to see the Special Note about the fat you get.

2 - Adding water and salt

  

Adding Water to the Pot

Rendering is pretty much just melting it to separate out the fat from the meat, gristle and other impurities. It is similar to filtering out all the olive skins, bits of pits, olive flesh and excess water from your freshly pressed olive oil.

  

To render the fat into tallow, first, put the fat into a big stew pot and add enough water to just cover the tallow. Add about 1 tbs. of salt for every pound of fat.

  

The smaller the chunks, the quicker and more efficiently it will render. Ask your butcher to run the fat through the grinder or run it through the food processor. It really makes a big difference! Don't forget to give the butcher a bar of soap when it's done!

3 - Heating the mixture

   

Beginning to Boil

Heat the mixture to boiling, then reduce the heat to a low, rumbling simmer. The chunks of fat will start to release the liquid fat, and any meat that was left in the fat will start to cook.

  

Be sure to do this in a well ventilated place or turn on the range fan - it will get very smelly!

  

4 – Letting it simmer

   

Almost Ready

The size of your fat chunks will determine how long you will have to boil the mixture. For pre-ground fat, you will only have to simmer it for about 20-30 minutes. If the chunks were larger, it will take longer. Just keep it simmering over a low heat and stir often. You can also take your potato masher and mash the fat a bit. This will help squeeze the oil out of the meat/chunks.

  

5 - Simmering until it becomes melted tallow, meat and gristle

  

Meat and Gristle

When all that is left solid in the pot is browned meat and gristle, you've gotten about all of the fat you are going to get. Yes, there may be some reluctant chunks of fat and meat still floating in the pot, but sometimes it's just not worth the extra work to get the fat separated out. If you're up for the challenge, mash the remaining meat chunks with the potato masher to get out every last drop of oil you can. That should get nearly all of the usable fat separated out.

  

6 - Straining the liquid

  

   Strain the Liquid

Now, carefully take the pot off of the stove and pour the hot liquid through a sieve or colander into a large bowl in the sink. (And just like you wouldn't pour hot wax down the drain, be careful that none of the liquid fat goes down the drain!) The colander is to strain out all of the pieces of meat and gristle.

  

Lift the colander out of the big bowl. You'll notice that the water is sinking to the bottom and the melted tallow is rising to the top of the bowl.

  

Note: You can mix the meat and gristle with some peanut butter or bran to make a treat for the birds.

7 – Cooling the liquid

   

Disc of Fat

Let the liquid cool to room temperature. Then carefully put the bowl in a cool place and let it cool overnight. The tallow will cool into a large white disc on the top of the bowl.

  

8 - Separating the tallow

  

Remove the Tallow

Using a knife or a fork, pry up the disc of tallow and put the pieces into a large bowl.

Now comes a tricky part. What's left will be a gelatinous, gray goo. You don't want to pour the left over liquid into the sink – there may still be some chunks/particles of fat left that can clog your sink pipes. I recommend throwing it out into the backyard, or at least into the toilet.

9 – Cleaning the tallow

  

Clean the tallow

On the bottom side of the tallow, there will likely be some loose pellet-like particles of fat. Wipe off as much of this as possible with a paper towel, and wash the rest off under some cool running water. Again, you don't want too much of this going down your sink drain.

 

10 - Ready to use for soap

    

Ready to Use Tallow

Cut the tallow into small pieces and put it into a plastic freezer bag. Label the bag as to when you made the tallow. It will keep a year or so in the freezer. As you need it for your recipes, just break off a few chunks and throw them into your soap pot!

Special Note about the fat you get:

Any animal fat (cow, deer, sheep, buffalo) can be rendered into tallow, but the quality of the fat you use will determine the quality of the tallow. Many people swear by only using "kidney suet", the fat that surrounds the cow's kidneys. It's much harder and whiter and makes really wonderful tallow. It's also really hard to find anywhere but a specialty butcher shop - and you're likely to pay a pretty penny for it - whereas normal, everyday beef fat from the grocery store butcher is likely to be free. Is there a difference? Probably - to the purists at least - but I haven't noticed a big difference in the soaps I've made.

As you'll see from looking at commercial soap labels now that tallow is a common oil that people use to create soap recipes. Whether you choose to use animal oils or not in your soap recipes, understanding the qualities of soap making oils, and at least knowing how to render your own tallow is a soap making experience that I think all soap makers should have at least once.

http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/coldprocesssoapmaking/a/createcprecipe.htm

http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soapmakingoils/tp/qualitiesofsoapmakingoils.htm

63a – Value chains – another example, soap

Let us explore another value chain related to the manufacture of soap. The theme sounds a bit simplistic but I think it can be of value to our rural communities. 

  

Soap is made out of one or more oils or fats mixed with an alkaline chemical such as lye, also known as caustic soda. These oils and fats can be of animal or vegetable origin. And lye can be obtained from hardwood ashes when properly treated with rainwater.

 

All these ingredients can be obtained in our rural communities and the resulting soap can be sold in all sorts of market places. Homemade soap is highly valued by many people. 

 

An example of a value chain related to the manufacture of homemade soap could be like this:

• someone raises cattle, produces and sells animal waste to farmers
• this person sells cattle to the local slaughterhouse
• the butcher buys carcasses and sells meat
• the butcher has a lot of excess animal fat that people do not want
• a local person collects this animal fat to make tallow
• the local baker uses firewood to bake bread
• someone collects the ashes from the baker and other places
• these ashes are used in the community latrines
• with rainwater and ashes this person also makes lye
• someone uses tallow and lye to make homemade soap
• this person sells soap in the community and at the city market

Here we have a value chain, a sequence of activities that make use of existing resources, such as rainwater, ashes and tallow, to develop a new product, homemade soap, which in turn provides work for one or more people. This new product for this community, soap, has value. It has value to be bartered for other products and has value to generate monetary income when it is sold to other communities or at the nearby city market. 

 

In addition, certain local resources had no value or very limited value in the community, such as the case of ashes and unwanted animal fat, but now gained value for the local soap maker. Homemade soap is very valued by many people because it does not contain unwanted additives as is often the case with industrially manufactured soap.

 

Some of these activities may be performed by the same person in one community and by different people in another community. Each individual and each community will pick and choose what will make sense. Each one will choose what activities will be performed by one or more people. In some cases some experimentation will be necessary to find out what makes sense.  

 

It is very important to know what a community needs and consumes because that is what will sell. In some situations we may feel inclined to make what we know how to make, but that may not be what the community, the marketplace, needs or wants. Soap is always needed although there is already soap in the marketplace. But if this homemade soap is better, if it smells better, if it does not irritate the skin or if it will make the skin softer, this homemade soap will sell better than the commercially available soap. 

 

The price of the homemade soap is very important so it can compete with the commercially available soap. The price has to cover the cost of the raw materials, the manufacturing costs, and the distribution costs in order to generate profit. These costs will vary from community to community and from situation to situation. But with such low raw materials costs there is a lot of opportunity for doing business at a profit. 

 

A value chain is the sequence of various activities for the benefit of various participants.

 

In this series of blogs we will explore various manufacturing processes for lye, for tallow and for the manufacture of homemade soap. We are going to explore various recipes for making soap not only with animal fats but also vegetable oils such as peanuts, avocado, cashew, coconut and other plants that grow in our climate.