I've Been Lyeing a Lot Lately, Part 2

Making Soap from Butcher Shop Trash

This is part two in a five part series on making homemade soap for personal use or sale.  If you want to view the first post, you can find it here.

Part Two: Rendering and Purifying the Tallow

In order to make homemade soap, you need to have oils.  Many soapers use purchased oils in their soapmaking.  I am going for a more sustainable approach, so I have chosen to render the trimmings from my local butcher shop. If you don't want to bother with this step, you can purchase lard, tallow and many other vegetable-based oils at your local grocery.  If you choose not to make your own oils, you can move right on to Part Three.

Tools you'll need

• large pressure cooker or stock pot
• a second large pot to hold all the liquids
• a sieve or strainer to catch the solids
• thermometer with temperature probe
• cheesecloth or fine sackcloth
• fire extinguisher (hopefully you won't need this!)

Contact Your Local Butcher

If you're going to render your own fat for soapmaking, you'll need a source of meat trimmings. Large butchering operations usually have a specialized company come to pick up their waste.  On a large scale, it's worth it for them  to pick it up.  So calling a large grocery or large meat packing operation may not help.

We called our local Mom-and-Pop butcher and asked them what they did with all the meat trimmings.  They told me that they just put them in the garbage.  So, we asked if we could pick them up.  They told us the best days and times to stop by.

We swung by recently and picked up this bucket of meat trimmings. The butcher actually apologized for it only being half full, but told me that if we come back in a couple days, he will have a whole lot for us, since he's preparing a side of beef for a customer.

Sort the Mess, Load it Up, and Start Cooking

When our butcher is processing meat, they often toss little bits of paper or sections of plastic wrap into the bucket.  I don't gripe about it since I'm getting all this stuff for free.  You will find all manner of stuff in here.  I recently found an entire knee joint! As long as it's not foreign matter, you can use it all; bones, meat, fat, whatever. Its usually mostly beef, but I've found a fair amount of pork meat and trimmings in there, as well.  Since rendered pork fat (lard) and rendered beef fat (tallow) have very similar properties and saponification rates, it's OK that these are mixed at an unknown ratio.

I like to use my large 21-quart pressure canner to render the fat using a wet process.  If you don't have a large pressure cooker/canner, you can use a large stock pot.  It will just take longer to render the fat.  Since there is a lot of bone and meat mixed in with the fat, I can get a couple other useful products out of the trimmings, namely a meat/bone mix that I use as food for my dogs, and lots and lots of yummy, healthy stock.

I fill my pot about 3/4 full with meat trimmings, and then cover them by about an inch of water.

I then put it on the stove and cook it at 10psi for about three hours.  If you're using a pressure cooker, I don't recommend exceeding 10psi, which is what most pressure cookers are set to if you don't have selectable pressure. Pressure cooking this stuff at higher temperatures (and pressures) can lead to some discoloration of the fat.  It will still be perfectly usable, but your soap may not be a pure, clean white color. If you are not using a pressure cooker, cover the pot at keep it at a low boil until the bones are soft and break easily. This will take quite a long time (perhaps as long as 12-24 hours), which is why I use the pressure cooker to speed the process.

Make Dog Food

Once you're done cooking, take the pot off the stove and allow it to cool. You can speed this process by placing the pot in the sink and filling the sink with cold water, stirring both the "soup" and the sink water occasionally.  When the sink water gets hot, refill the sink.

Once the "soup" has cooled enough that you can put your finger into it without a trip to the Emergency Room, (150F-160F) pour it through a sieve into another pot that can hold all the liquid.  Spray some hot water over the solids and allow it to drain into the pot with the liquid.  This will get some additional fat off the solids. Put the pot with the liquid back into the sink to cool more.  While it's cooling, you can make your dog food.

There still will be some fat left in the solids you just strained out.  We've found that our dogs get "the runs" if there is too much fat in the dog food we make, so we sort through the solids, pulling out the large chunks of fat and bones that did not get soft enough.  We usually hand those harder bones to the dogs to keep them occupied while we sort through the meat. Once this is done, we pack the meat/bone stuff into baggies and freeze it.  Sometimes, we'll put some of it through the food processor with the softened bones to make a pâté-type dog food.   

Once you're done making a sticky mess of your hands, check on your liquids.  When they have cooled to around 130F, cover the liquids and place them in the refrigerator. They will need to stay there for a couple days to allow the fat to separate and harden. This cooling is extremely taxing on your refrigerator.  Don't be surprised if some of the stuff in there isn't as cold as it should be for a while.  Try to avoid opening the refrigerator as much as possible so the liquids can cool.

Now, clean up your mess so your spouse doesn't kill you for tearing the kitchen up!

Two Days Later...

Once the fat has solidified, it's time to complete the separation of the stock and the tallow. The fat should be bright white and hard to the touch.  Take it out of the refrigerator and remove the fat from the stock.  Put the pot with the stock in it back into the refrigerator for later use.

Place the fat in a large pot over medium heat. Make sure that pot is no more than 1/4 full of oil. Too much oil in the pot can result in boilover and possibly a grease fire. Place the thermometer probe into the oil.  Slowly increase the temperature of the oil to about 300F, stirring regularly. You must to do this with the lid off so that the water vapor can escape, so watch the oil carefully!

IMPORTANT! If there is any water in with the fat, it will boil out during this process and can pop loudly and splash hot oil all over the place.  This is why it is extremely important that you stir the oil regularly so that large pockets of water will not accumulate and flash to steam. CAUTION! Please take great care when heating oil of any kind in your kitchen. Grease fires destroy many homes and kill many people every year.  If you have a grease fire develop in a pot, put the lid on it to snuff the flames. Then take it off the heat until it cools down.  If the fire has gotten out of the pot, use the fire extinguisher, or call 911. Do NOT spray water on a grease fire or you will make it worse!

You will know when the oil is done when the gurgling sound it makes from the water boiling out stops and all you hear is the faint sizzle sound from the frying of the solids that are left in the oil. Then, take it off the heat and allow it to cool down to under 180F.

Line a suitable container with several layers of cheesecloth or sackcloth and pour the hot oil through it to remove any remaining solids.  Make sure the container can take the heat! You don't want it to melt and spill hot tallow everywhere!

Gather up the corners of the sackcloth and slowly pull it out of the container, straining out the solids. Cover the container with a tight fitting lid or a layer of plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator for later use.

TIP: Some people will use a pressure canner to store their tallow in jars.  This fat is useful not only for soap, but for cooking as well.  It is a saturated fat, so be sure that you don't use a lot of it in your cooking! Canning the tallow allows you to make it shelf stable for a long period, so you can make your soap at a later time. I did some measurements, and it looks like 20 fluid ounces of beef tallow at about 100F measures out to just about 0.5kg.  So, if you want to make your recipes by metrics and store tallow in jars, only fill them to the 20oz level.  You will still need to weigh your oils before soaping, but at least you can get close.

Make Soup!

Now that you have your tallow, take the remaining stock and store it.  I prefer to pressure can my stock so that it is shelf stable.  If you don't have a pressure canner, you can freeze it.  This stock will be very bland in flavor because it has no added salt.  I always make my stock with no added salt.  I figure you can always add salt later when you need it, and you sure can't take it out very easily!

Now, clean up your mess so your spouse doesn't kill you for tearing the kitchen up!

Stay Tuned!

In Part Three of this series, I will show how I make the soap and cast it into blocks for later use in the handmilling process.