Buying a Soap-Making Kit

We have lye and have rendered our own tallow and have our own goat milk and dried herbs and everything else we need to make homemade soap, but sometimes when we start something new, I need to get kick-started with something easy to give me the confidence.  I saw that they had a soap making bundle at Cultures For Health.  I purchased the bundle that makes Rosemary-Peppermint soap.  That seemed like an interesting combination.

The bundle, pictured below, contained instructions, a soap mold, glycerine soap base, rosemary essential oil, and organic dried peppermint.  No, the box of Popeye's chicken was not an ingredient in the soap.  So let's make some soap.  I'll give a short review at the bottom.

Cultures for Health Soap Making Bundle

The first thing you do is cut up the glycerine soap base into one-inch squares.  This helps the soap base to melt quickly.  The glycerine is soft and cuts easily.  Benjamin helped to cut up the glycerine.

Cutting up soap

In a double boiler (two pots nested together with water in the bottom one), we melted the glycerine soap base.  In no time at all it melted into a smooth consistency.

We dropped 40 drops of Rosemary essential oil into the melted glycerine soap base and stirred.

Then we added two tablespoons of dried peppermint and stirred.

Once it was all mixed up, it was pretty much done.  This almost looks like an alfredo sauce  or something that you would pour over some linguine or bowtie pasta. but trust me, you wouldn't want to do that!

Tricia carefully poured the soap into the soap molds and was able to do so without spilling it.

The recipe actually made a little bit more that the four molds contained in the kit. Fortunately we had some extras that I had purchased at Hobby Lobby and so we poured the excess into that mold, yielding 5 bars of homemade Rosemary-Peppermint Soap.

The soap dried quickly (~2 hours) and it didn't take much effort to pop the soap out of the mold.  The soap smelled great!  It looked great, too.

In summary, the soap making bundle was EASY.  I mean it was so very easy a child could do this. This would be a good project for a family with young children to do or perhaps a grandma & grandpa with the grandkids.  It would be a good craft project for a Mother's Day gift.  If someone said a dirty word and required "getting their mouth washed out with soap," I figure that Rosemary-Peppermint soap would be better tasting than Ivory!

We like doing business with Cultures for Health, but I found that from an economical standpoint, the soap-making bundle was a little pricey.  The total cost before shipping was $30.99 or $6.20 per bar. That is just a little too much for my liking.  To be fair, however, we still have most of the bottle of Rosemary Essential Oil and most of the bag of dried organic peppermint.  The peppermint will come in handy for making tea this winter.  Not to mention the fact that the soap molds are re-usable. Considering that, you could probably knock a buck or a buck fifty maybe off the unit cost.

We had a good time making the soap.  It smells great and we can't wait to use it. Probably the best part about it is that we now have the confidence and are now motivated to make our own soap. Standby - hopefully in the next few weeks we'll embark upon mixing lye and tallow to make some old-fashioned lye soap.

Our first attempt at making Kombucha

We like to try a lot of new things around here.  I've been hearing for years about kombucha and have wanted to try brewing it for a while.  We were standing on the banks of the Atchafalaya River outside of Melville at our friend's home, when she said, "Hey, I just brewed a batch of kombucha.  Wanna try some?"  She brought out three cups of kombucha tea and we enjoyed it immensely and I knew immediately that we just HAD to try our hand at making some ourselves.  I can't tell you how good this stuff is.

Kombucha is a fizzy beverage made by fermenting tea using a SCOBY.  SCOBY is an acronym that stands for Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast.  According to Wikipedia, people think that the word kombucha came from a Japanese beverage made from kelp or kombu.  The actual kombucha tea is different and both the Japanese and Chinese translate it literally to "Red Tea Mushroom." Historians believe kombucha originated in China before moving to Russian and eventually Europe.

Regardless, it is a delicious effervescent beverage.  There are many reasons to drink it for health.  It provides detoxifying enzymes and acids that help your liver.  It is made with a living colony of bacteria and yeast, so it is a probiotic that helps in digestion.  There are many other healthy reasons to drink it.  There's also the taste. It is delicious!

So we ordered a SCOBY from Azure Standard, a Co-Op that we belong to and it arrived in the box below.  I like the fact that the label said Kombucha Brewing Made Easy.  I'm always a little concerned when we try something new and I don't want to mess it up.  The fact that it is easy is a big plus in my book.

Kombucha Starter Kit Arrives

The kit came with the SCOBY floating in the starter liquid, some oolong tea, organic evaporated cane juice sugar, and detailed instructions.

The Unpackaging

Get a gallon of filtered water boiling on the stove top.

Then put the oolong tea in the boiling water and allow to steep for 20 minutes.

Then pour the cup of sugar into the tea and allow to dissolve.

Allow the tea to fully cool.  Once room temperature, pour the tea into a clean gallon jar.  Up to this point, we just made regular tea that you might enjoy on the back porch on a nice day.  Now, we're gonna throw a twist to it.  Add the SCOBY and starter liquid in the bag into the gallon jar full of tea.

Pouring in the SCOBY or Mother

The SCOBY is also called the mother because it produces new colonies.  It is not pretty.  In fact, I think Tricia and Benjamin said it looks like a jellyfish floating in the tea. I'll admit, it is not very appetizing at this point and I'm wondering if this is going to be drinkable.  

"Waiter, there's a jellyfish in my iced tea!"

Fortunately, we don't drink it now.  You cover it with a paper towel or cloth and put a rubber band around it so that bugs, dust, critters don't get into it.  It is alive and needs to "breathe."  

Now you wait...

Now we put it aside, away from sunlight and in an area where the temperature is 75 degrees. We found a spot in our utility room on top of a cabinet that met that criteria.  We placed it up there and allowed it to ferment for 10 days.  The longer you leave it, the more "tangy" it gets.

We watched the youtube video below to help us learn how to make it.  Again, I wanted to be very careful our first time to do this.  The video is by Cultures for Health and they have all sorts of starters and supplies to help you get started making kombucha, kefir, cheese, yogurt, etc.  If you're interested, click the arrow to watch a good instructional video:

This will be a two-part series.  In the next installment, we'll show you what we did after the tea fermented for 10 days.  Hint: We flavored it with an interesting blend of flavor enhancements.