Tufted Titmouse
Member
I'm 99% sure this was a disaster, since it my first ever batch of any kind of soap, I guess there is a tiny chance it's okay. Not that I would want to bathe with it or even touch it with a 10 foot pole.
I’d read so many descriptions on the net about pure lard soap being a pure white color and that sounded nice.
For my recipe, I thought I'd "keep it simple". So I used only 3 ingredients: rendered lard (nice and white and hard) from a friend's farm, pure lye crystals (yes it was real lye, I checked) from Ace Hardware and clean, clear water from our stream (we live in rural West Virginia). I checked the pH of the water, it was 6.5.
I used soapcalc and it gave me these figures:
Lard: 160 oz
Lye: 21.46 oz
Water: 60.8 oz
I used a digital kitchen scale and was very careful to measure accurately.
I used a modern soapmaking book from the library for the method. It said to heat the lard to 140 degrees, prepare the lye solution, then mix the two together with a stick blender until trace. Well, within only a few minutes, the mixture was an ugly, smelly pot full of what looked almost exactly like canned pureed pumpkin. “Heavy trace” was putting it mildly. This stuff was dark-orange, thick and nasty-looking and smelled like a barnyard. We mixed for another 5 or 8 minutes, then just shrugged sadly and poured it into the log molds we’d made earlier.
That was yesterday. Today the soap has lightened only to the colour of maybe light-brown sugar. It still smells like a barn. I don’t even want to go near it much less cut it into bars.
What happened? I'm so discouraged, not to mention kicking myself for making such a large batch and using up nearly half our lard supply. :cry: Now of course, I realize that I should have just made a small batch at first. I guess I just thought with soapcalc and these pure ingredients and following the instructions carefully that I'd surely have all these pretty pure-white bars and the end... :cry:
I’d read so many descriptions on the net about pure lard soap being a pure white color and that sounded nice.
For my recipe, I thought I'd "keep it simple". So I used only 3 ingredients: rendered lard (nice and white and hard) from a friend's farm, pure lye crystals (yes it was real lye, I checked) from Ace Hardware and clean, clear water from our stream (we live in rural West Virginia). I checked the pH of the water, it was 6.5.
I used soapcalc and it gave me these figures:
Lard: 160 oz
Lye: 21.46 oz
Water: 60.8 oz
I used a digital kitchen scale and was very careful to measure accurately.
I used a modern soapmaking book from the library for the method. It said to heat the lard to 140 degrees, prepare the lye solution, then mix the two together with a stick blender until trace. Well, within only a few minutes, the mixture was an ugly, smelly pot full of what looked almost exactly like canned pureed pumpkin. “Heavy trace” was putting it mildly. This stuff was dark-orange, thick and nasty-looking and smelled like a barnyard. We mixed for another 5 or 8 minutes, then just shrugged sadly and poured it into the log molds we’d made earlier.
That was yesterday. Today the soap has lightened only to the colour of maybe light-brown sugar. It still smells like a barn. I don’t even want to go near it much less cut it into bars.
What happened? I'm so discouraged, not to mention kicking myself for making such a large batch and using up nearly half our lard supply. :cry: Now of course, I realize that I should have just made a small batch at first. I guess I just thought with soapcalc and these pure ingredients and following the instructions carefully that I'd surely have all these pretty pure-white bars and the end... :cry: