Oof, nowadays recipes call for adding the lye to the fat, rather than the fat to the lye. The lye will react with the fat to produce heat, and it’s much better to ramp up the ratio of lye to fat rather than introducing a small amount of fat to the lye. It doesn’t mention curing the soap, either, which both hardens the soap and allows the reaction to complete. It makes the soap last a lot longer and helps avoid getting burnt by untracked lye. I wonder if the weaker ash-based lye solution is safer overall than commercially available pure lye.
The fact that the recipe mentions "beating down" the soap leads me to believe that it is describing what people nowadays call the "hot process". You keep cooking the soap until it is fully saponified and it does not require further curing.
> I wonder if the weaker ash-based lye solution is safer overall than commercially available pure lye.
My understanding is that yes, it will be safer purely because it's a weaker lye solution. It'll be more likely to completely react, and even if it doesn't it will be more dilute and less likely to cause skin problems or burning. But it'll be slower, and less reliable to get the right concentrations to make the same soap over and over.
I wonder if they can (or are already in the process of) "uprating" to the kind of market Japanese Washi paper currently enjoys. It is not only a product, but kind of an art, too.
Yeah, I've switched over almost entirely, to Aleppo soap or olive oil soaps from Greece (which seem to not have the laurel oil present in Aleppo soap), and am very happy. Skin feels a lot less taut and dry than it used to, to give an unscientific opinion.
Out of curiosity, what do you pay for it? At the moment I can get rough cut Aleppo soap for about €1.10 here in Germany. I've heard it's dirt cheap in Syria.
I'm not sure tbh, Aramex typically charges inbound shipments around $9 per 500 grams. However I must note that I'm not getting the best price. If I take a short trip to villages I can buy in bulk which is way, way cheaper. And these soap bars last very long.
Where do you buy yours? And what brand/maker can u recommend? I’ve tried amazon, and the one I found that was actually Aleppo soap seems to have gone out of business since, and in true amazon fashion, the bar I got from them was manufactured 2 years before I got it...
A friend gave me some home-made soap, and she told me to let it dry a few days before storing it. This means there is some excess water from the fat-lye mixture, or is this a different recipe?
If you have too much lye in it, it will be ridiculously "effective", as its caustic basic property will hurt your skin. Too much tallow, and you essentially just smear fat on yourself.
No real reason why this, blended well to a reasonable pH level, would not be as effective as what we have today.
This is a legitimate cold processed soap recipe, just like you’d buy at a fancy store or farmers market. Unfortunately most “soap” you buy in stores is actually a detergent bar, which is much stronger.
Probably not as good, but still somewhat effective. There seems to be an entire niche of artisanal soap makers out there at every farmers market/craft fare hawking their olive/palm/whatever soaps that smell of tobacco and cedarwood sea foam.... from what I’ve used of them, they work, just not as well/completely.
Generally, I think artisanal soapmakers buy lye flakes rather than making it from ash. Fundamentally, you need lye, water, and fat (or oil). Usually I think vegetable oils are used, rather than animal fat.
You can get beef suet quite cheaply at a butcher; I think I paid $2/lb or less. This is easily rendered into beautiful white tallow, which in turn makes a lovely soap. You can mix in some olive or coconut oil if you like, but there's no technical reason you can't use pure animal fat to make soap.
It may reduce your potential customers a bit, especially at a particularly crunchy farmer's market, but the soap will be fine :)
Proctor & Gamble was founded in Cincinnati near the slaughterhouses where tallow was readily available. William Proctor made candles and James Gamble made soap. https://news.pg.com/blog/procter-meets-gamble
Most soaps use tallow (beef fat) as it's the cheapest and most plentiful fat, due to the beef industry making a lot of it. But vegetable oil-based is the more "attractive" soap; it's generally modified to be softer on the skin and causes less harsh reactions than tallow, and of course there's vegan soap.
We make soap at home, from vegetable oils, lard and other fats. Just basic cold-process stuff, erring ever so slightly on the side of over-fatted soap.
It works great, it cleans well and I haven't had any issues with dry skin since we started using it.
The only real downside is that we get a bit of soap scum in the shower, but it's manageable.
