Scrub-a-dub-dub
I’m getting ready to go on a new short-term foreign mission trip — my first in six years. This one has been several years in the making — it’s to Sierra Leone, in West Africa, and there have been several postponements, including one long one during the Ebola outbreak.
LEAMIS International Ministries founder Debra Snellen and I will be presenting content to some pastors who will be brought together by our host, the Rev. Gregory Bangura. Most of the content will be a leadership workshop, but we’ll also teach a few cottage industries and other skills which they can take home to their congregations. Debra, at Rev. Bangura’s request, has asked me to teach a soapmaking workshop.
I first learned cold-process soapmaking from Carolyn Schussler, another friend of LEAMIS, for my 2005 Kenya trip; I’ve taught it a few times since. It’s a fun hobby, and I really ought to do it more just for my own benefit, and so I can send one of my brothers and his family what they happily refer to as “Uncle John soap.” Right now, I need to make a new batch if only to make sure I am still comfortable in the process. I’ll also need to take some samples with me, since whatever we make during the workshop won’t have time to cure while I’m in Sierra Leone. I want to be able to give the students a sample of the finished product, even if it’s just a little cube or chunk.
What I teach as a cottage industry will be very, very simple, using lard and/or beef tallow (whichever is more available in Sierra Leone) as the fat. It’s also traditional for hobbyists here in the U.S. to start with lard, which is cheap and which makes a relatively reliable soap on its own.
Once you’ve learned the technique, though, part of the fun is trying to mix and match different types of fat (using the incredibly-helpful SoapCalc website) in order to balance and optimize the qualities you want in soap. Some oils give you better conditioning; some give you more lather; some give you a harder, longer-lasting bar, and so on. By mixing various oils, you can try to find the recipe you like the best.
For my samples, I should probably make soap with 100 percent lard, since that will be the most representative of what I’m teaching. But I think my next batch will be lard, olive oil and coconut oil.
The other half of the equation is lye — sodium hydroxide. When Carolyn Schussler first taught me soapmaking in 2005, a small-volume hobbyist could pick up Red Devil lye in the drain-cleaner aisle of any supermarket. You must be sure to get a product that you know is 100 percent lye; there are some powdered drain cleaners that combine, for example, lye with an abrasive such as metal shavings to help scrub away a drain clog. You would not want metal shavings in your soap.
The trouble is, lye is not only used by soapmakers and people with clogged drains; it’s also used by meth labs. For that reason, Red Devil got out of the 100 percent lye business not long after I started making soap. I bought a few canisters on clearance sale back then, and I’ve used them for my sporadic soapmaking ever since. (I’ve even used some as an actual drain cleaner once or twice.) I still have one canister, but it sounds as if the remaining lye has solidified into one solid chunk, and since lye is highly corrosive and must be treated as a hazardous chemical, I don’t really relish the idea of trying to try to break up that chunk and scattering it everywhere. I think I will save it for the next Household Hazardous Waste collection event.
Some hardware stores — and, according to the chain’s website, our local Lowe’s is one of them — still carry another brand of 100 percent lye drain cleaner. There are also places to order lye online, but the shipping costs (because it’s a hazardous material) are $10 or $15 or $20 for $5 worth of lye. I do not want to buy a larger quantity; some of the online sources are more geared to the people who make large quantities of soap for craft fairs and boutiques. So I guess I’ll stop by Lowe’s some time in the next week or two. I also need new safety goggles and some rubber gloves, and I can probably get those there as well.
In case you’re wondering, cold process soapmaking leaves little room for adding colorants or fragrances during the soap-making process. While the soap is still curing, it’s still quite alkaline. Eventually, all of the lye combines with the fat to form soap, but that takes time. And the alkalinity tends to negate or alter most of the subtle fragrances or colors you might try to add. There are a few really intense essential oils that can be added that will survive the curing process.
If you want coloring or fragrance, a better way is to “rebatch” the soap — basically, after the soap has cured, you grate it and melt it down before adding whatever you like to it and pouring it back into molds. I have tried rebatching a few times over the years but I do not yet have the knack for it — my rebatched soaps wind up with a cottage-cheese appearance. If you’ve ever seen something described as “milled” soap, that’s basically another way of describing this process, except that milled soaps are ground mechanically into a much finer product than grating by hand.
By the way, if coloring or fragrancing the soap is your main interest, there’s a related — but much easier — hobby called “melt and pour” soapmaking. For this, you buy already-made “melt and pour soap base” from Hobby Lobby or some other craft store. Melt and pour is to other types of soap what Velveeta is to cheddar cheese; it’s formulated specifically to melt down smoothly. You melt it down, add whatever colors, fragrances or exfoliants you like, and then pour it into molds.
When I was a kid, there was a brand of soap which came with a little plastic figurine or toy embedded deep inside each bar. You could probably create something similar with melt-and-pour, although you wouldn’t want the bar to wind up in the hands of a child young enough to choke on the toy.
Getting back to cold-process soapmaking: It’s called “cold process” because you are not cooking the soap mixture the way your great-great-great-grandmother used to. There is some heat involved, however. You melt your fats together in a non-reactive stockpot. Meanwhile, in a glass measuring cup, you add lye (measured carefully by weight) to water. Never add water to lye; that can make it splash and boil over, which would be dangerous. The lye, once added to water, will immediately cause it to become quite hot. You take your fats off the heat, and you stir your hot lye water into the hot fat.
When I teach soapmaking on a mission trip, as a cottage industry, I teach stirring it by hand — a slow and constant process that takes quite a while. The mixture must be stirred constantly because it’s basically oil and water, and it will want to separate until enough soap has formed to serve as an emulsifier.
As you stir, and as the lye and the fat combine to form soap, the mixture will eventually start to thicken. You’re looking for a degree of thickness that soapmakers call “trace,” meaning that if you pick up your spoon and drizzle some of the soap down onto itself, you can see the line, at least for a few seconds.
As I say, this process takes a while — 30 or 45 minutes — when you’re stirring by hand. It could be even longer if you’re in warm temperatures (say, in an open-air shack on a foreign mission trip) or if you started with unusually warm ingredients. With an immersion blender (also called a stick blender, or, if you’re Emeril Lagasse, a “boat motor”), it only takes five minutes.
Once your soap traces, you add any essential oil or exfoliants and pour it into molds right away. In a day or two, the soap will probably have hardened enough to remove from the molds, and you should do that, but you must wait weeks (a month is recommended) to make sure that all of the lye has saponified and the soap is safe to use. All of your ingredients must be carefully measured so that there’s at least enough fat to saponify every last bit of the lye. A little bit of excess fat is good — it’s called “superfatting” the soap, and it improves the soap’s conditioning properties — but too much will cause your bar to be soft and squishy. Most of the recipes you find will have an appropriate amount of superfatting built in.
If, after the appropriate curing time, your soap shows signs of too much lye or too much fat, it’s possible to correct this by rebatching the soap and adding fat (or lye) to correct.
There are also a few recipes that replace the water in the recipe. Goat’s milk, substituted for water, is supposed to make a fine soap, and I want to try it some day. There’s also what is called “gardener’s soap,” in which brewed coffee (!) takes the place of the water and some of the coffee grounds are added to the soap to provide a scrubby texture for washing dirty hands.
In the past, I have taken a non-reactive stock pot and a cheap kitchen scale with me when teaching soapmaking, and then left them with our host church for that trip. I’ve told Debra that I’m not going to do it this time — I’m going to try to buy something in-country rather than complicate my packing. After all, if I can’t find it in-country, they may not be able to find it either, and so what would be the point of teaching them the skill? Packing for two weeks in Africa is hard enough as it is. We have always had them acquire the lye and the fat in-country.
The lye is sometimes a problem to obtain overseas as well — because of terminology. “Lye,” which is how we in America refer to sodium hydroxide, is sometimes known as “caustic soda” in other countries — but the term “caustic soda” can refer to sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Potassium hydroxide is used in some types of soapmaking, particularly for liquid soaps, but it can’t be swapped out one-for-one in regular hard soap recipes. When I was in Costa Rica, the host pastor had purchased potassium hydroxide prior to the trip and we weren’t able to find sodium hydroxide while I was there in country.
Well, this has been a little more rambling than I intended. I do not mean this to be a reference work on soapmaking; you can find many fine web sites and books on the topic from people with real experience. I just thought maybe I’d pique your interest.
