I've Been Lyeing a Lot Lately, Part 1

Making Soap from Butcher Shop Trash

You all know that I'm branching out and learning new skills that will help me when the Zombie Apocalypse comes.  One of the things that will become hard to get if/when the economy completely collapses is soap.

I've decided to do a series of blog posts to talk about the soapmaking process. It's just too complicated and long a process to do it all in one monster post. I will divide this post into five parts:

• A Brief History of Soapmaking (this post)
• Rendering and Purifying the Tallow
• Making and Casting the Soap
• Handmilling, Molding and Cutting
• Curing and Packaging

Part One: A Brief History of Soapmaking

For millenia, humans have been making soap from rendered animal fats and caustics. Many credit the Babylonians for being the first ones to discover the chemical process that turns fat into soap. Early recipies involved boiling meat trimmings in water with wood ash. Due to the imprecise nature of this process, early soaps were sometimes heavy or light on the lye, which could make the soap irritating or even prone to rancidity.

The Romans preferred to clean their bodies by rubbing down with oil and then scraping the oil off using a metal implement. In the first century A.D., the Romans began using soap for cleaning tasks, but it was not generally used for bathing, most likely because of the imprecision of the recipe that could often result in a lye heavy soap that was irritating to the skin.

Between the 5th and 15th centuries A.D., a period often referred to as the Middle Ages, the use of soap for bathing was extremely rare. In fact, personal hygiene was essentially non-existent during this period of 1000 years. This lack of hygiene is often cited as the primary reason that there were so many plagues and diseases that prevented humans from progressing.

It was common practice to have open sewers running through the streets, and people would often pour human waste into them from a window above.  Clearly, sanitation and hygiene weren't a big concern.

It wasn't until the late 1700s that soapmaking began to evolve significantly. Between the 1790s and the 1820s, the French discovered the precise relationship between fats and alkali in soap, which brought soapmaking into the modern era. In the mid 1800s, soap diverged into separate products for bathing and laundry.

Since the bathing soaps were no longer as caustic as they once were, personal hygiene took great leaps forward.  I find it really funny, however, that the French made these discoveries, and they still smell bad to this day.

In the 1930s, the development of synthetic detergents sounded the death knell for fat/lye soaps. Synthetic detergents could be made more cheaply, and in some cases could outperform fat/lye soaps of the time. Since then, almost all commercial personal and laundry cleaning products available in the U.S. have been made from these synthetic detergents.

We have been trained by the commercial interests that fat/lye soap is "bad." They often refer to the caustic nature of fat/lye soaps. That's true, but only if you're using a recipe from 1776. What they fail to tell us is that applying a little modern chemistry and by using accurate measurement devices, modern fat/lye soap is often superior to many of the synthetic soaps.

They don't want us to make our own; they want us to buy, buy, buy from them.

Why Make Soap?

I want to be more self-sufficient.  I want to learn how to make things that I need in an everyday situation so that I am not dependent on the infrastructure of our country.  I know this is a bunch of "doomsday prepper" talk, but I'd rather have the knowledge and not need it, than to need it and not have the knowledge.

Linda and I got a great deal on some pork roasts recently.  I trimmed all the fat off and cut out the bone. we gave the bone to the dogs.  I ran the meat through our meat grinder and froze the lean ground pork. At that point, I decided to render the fat and try to make soap with it.

After doing some research, I found a wonderful resource at soapcalc.net. On this web site is a tool that helps you calculate the proper amount of lye and water to safely make soap.

So, I obtained some lye and made soap.  It was wonderful!  It felt great! It cleans amazingly well! It didn't lather very well, but that was because it was made from 100% lard.

At that point, I was bitten.  I was really excited about having been able to make use of 100% of those pork roasts.  In the past, we always threw out the fat since we had no use for it. Now, I can make a useful product out of waste material!

Eww! Lard? Yuck!

Many people who have gotten into homemade soapmaking have decided that the use of animal oils is "yucky." Instead, they go out and purchase vegetable oils that can sometimes be very expensive so that they can claim that their soaps have these exotic ingredients.  Shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil, and palm oils are some of the more common.  I've looked in the store at these products, and the only one I'm willing to buy is coconut oil, since its price is more reasonable. It greatly contributes to the lathering capability when mixed 1:1 with tallow or lard.

Since I intend to use these products on my skin, I think that the use of an animal oil is more compatible with my biochemistry than that of a vegetable oil.  I make soap from cows and pigs. Those are both mammals.  I'm a mammal. I have a whole lot more in common biochemically with pigs and cows than I do a palm tree.  So I choose to use animal oils. They make a wonderful soap that cleans well and conditions the skin.

I can get my raw materials for free; the butcher shop will give me their meat trimmings that they would have otherwise thrown into the garbage.  So, not only am I making a soap that is more compatible with human physiology, I am making use of what would have otherwise gone to a landfill.  That's a far more sustainable process than importing exotic oils from all over the world.  I get mine about a mile from my house.

Stay Tuned!

In Part Two of this series, I will show how I render butcher shop waste into tallow, beef stock and dog food.