Our First Attempt at Making Soap

We've wanted to make soap for the longest time.  One time I actually started making lye from firewood ashes and it was almost done, but the dog knocked over the lye and spilled it.  The soap-making project went on hold for several years.  However, we began accumulating everything you need over the years.  We had soap molds and lye.  We had plenty of tallow that we rendered when we butchered calves.  We had coconut oil and olive oil.  We have two goats in milk, so we have all the milk we need.  A couple of weeks ago, Tricia went to the store and bought measuring cups, spoons, and an immersion blender that will be dedicated to soap-making and we set this weekend to get things started.

First we froze the goat milk in ice cube trays.  For this recipe we'll use 4 ounces.

It is very important when handling lye that you use safety glasses and gloves.  She measured out 1/4 of a cup + 2 Tablespoons of lye.

Tricia poured the lye into 4 ounces of distilled water.

She stirred it up real good so that the lye crystals dissolve.  On the far left of this photograph, you'll see a quart-sized mason jar that contains the fat we're using to make the soap.  It is being warmed, so it is in a liquid state.  It is a total of 3 cups of fat (oil), which was 1 1/2 cups beef tallow (11 ounces), 3/4 cup coconut oil (5 1/2 ounces), and 3/4 cups olive oil (5 1/2 ounces). 

A chemical reaction occurs that is pretty intense.  The lye heats up the water.  It got above 200 degrees Fahrenheit for a bit.

When the temperature cooled to 90 degrees, we poured 4 ounces of the frozen goat milk into the lye/distilled water solution, bringing the total liquid to 8 ounces.  If you don't wait for it to cool, it will burn the milk and turn it brown.

Then, putting the immersion blender into the cooled lye solution jar, you slowly pour the warmed fat (oil) in while blending.

The consistency of the soap will be like that of pudding, where it holds its shape a bit.  We used a spatula to spoon it out into a soap mold that we coated with Vaseline petroleum jelly.

If we learned anything that we could do differently, next time we'll try adding a little bit more liquid as the soap was a little too thick (1/4 to 1/2 cups more liquid).

Using the spatula, we smoothed out the soap in the mold.  We'll show you in a minute why we want to add a little more liquid.

We covered with plastic wrap and you could feel the soap heat back up.  We let it sit for 48 hours.

After 48 hours, we removed from the mold.  You can see that the soap block has imperfections.  It is not pretty, but it will have to do for our first attempt.  We're thinking that if the soap used more liquid, it would flow better and fill in the voids.  Tricia marked off 1 inch increments in the 10 inch block of soap.

I first tried to cut it with dental floss, but quickly realized that it was easier and more precise to just use a knife.

At last we have 10 bars of homemade goat milk soap. 

We'll put these away for 4 to 6 weeks, turning them from time to time and allow them to cure.  Then we'll use our homemade bars of soap!  Now that we've proven to ourselves that we can do this, we're going to try to make a soap recipe using goat milk, oatmeal, honey and aloe.