I’ve made lots of homemade soap, but rendering your own bacon fat is a SUPER mess. It’s much easier to buy lard. I’m not a big fan of 100% lard soaps. I find olive oil to be a much better majority fat in the soap. I have used about 75% olive oil and 25% lard with great success – it creates a bar that is gentle on skin and lathers well (my friends love it).
Also, the recipe in your link isn’t very ‘trustworthy.’ It’s pretty dangerous to create soap using volume measurements (tablespoons, cups) for the lye and fat. Mainly because you can get lye in many different forms – flakes, granules, etc. You can end up with unreacted lye in your soap, which will make your skin itchy, or too little lye, which will make the soap really greasy (and the bar will never harden).
If you’d like, I can send you an email with better instructions…
Thanks for the offer! I talked it over with the Snook (aka Chemistry Man) and he seemed to think it was pretty dodgy too. I just liked the idea of it. Oh well…
2 responses
I’ve made lots of homemade soap, but rendering your own bacon fat is a SUPER mess. It’s much easier to buy lard. I’m not a big fan of 100% lard soaps. I find olive oil to be a much better majority fat in the soap. I have used about 75% olive oil and 25% lard with great success – it creates a bar that is gentle on skin and lathers well (my friends love it).
Also, the recipe in your link isn’t very ‘trustworthy.’ It’s pretty dangerous to create soap using volume measurements (tablespoons, cups) for the lye and fat. Mainly because you can get lye in many different forms – flakes, granules, etc. You can end up with unreacted lye in your soap, which will make your skin itchy, or too little lye, which will make the soap really greasy (and the bar will never harden).
If you’d like, I can send you an email with better instructions…
Thanks for the offer! I talked it over with the Snook (aka Chemistry Man) and he seemed to think it was pretty dodgy too. I just liked the idea of it. Oh well…