Home Soapmaking Made Easy

Reader Contribution by Lacy RazorĀ 
Published on August 15, 2008
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Soap is essential to our existence and enjoys a rich history of prolonging human life (and enabling us to tolerate close quarters with one another). As with any process that dates back a few millennia, there is quite a bit of legend and myth surrounding both the origin and the manufacturing of soap. One of the best known legends is that soap takes its name from Mount Sapo, the location of many animal sacrifices by the ancient Romans. Rain then washed the mixture of animal fats and wood ash onto the clay banks of the Tiber where women scrubbed their families’ clothing and first discovered that the soapy water made the clothes much cleaner. Of course, animal sacrifices would probably not have created enough fat to make soap but “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” right?

Most experts credit the Ancient Babylonians as the first to produce soap since they carved a tablet with the first known soap recipe in 2200 B.C. While the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Mayans were bathing regularly in sudsy bubble baths, the early (and stinky) Europeans were still whacking each other over the head with wooden clubs in caveman fashion. During this time, soap making was actually quite dangerous. Soap makers boiled animal fats, water, and lye in large kettles outdoors. The only test for the strength of their lye solution was to float an egg in it. All of that changed when LeBlanc, a French chemist, figured out how to create sodium hydroxide (lye) from sodium chloride (table salt) in 1790. Thank goodness for the French, eh? Soap making practices dramatically improved and soap no longer “took your hide right off.”

So how do you make soap properly and why bother doing so in today’s world where it so readily available? Isn’t making your own soap expensive? Isn’t lye dangerous?

Truthfully, making soap can be as expensive and complicated as you decide to make it. If you want to keep it inexpensive and simple, well… you’ve come to the right place. Here’s how (I’ll dispel the myths along the way):

The first step is to make friends with your local butcher and ask him/her to save the trimmings of fat from the steaks and cuts of beef that come in. Since those scraps are usually tossed, you can obtain the tallow for free (cha-ching!). Gather a large pot, sieve, and cheese cloth. Set them up so that you can drain the fat into the pot. Now grind up the fat with a cast iron meat grinder or food processor.

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