Good Clean Fun: Basic Soap

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Issue 46

The Food Issue

Make a meal to die for
Make wine crate cabinets
Learn to screen print

Good Clean Fun: Basic Soap

Suds Up Your Own Soap

by Justin Godar

Photos by Jennifer Hale

**Be careful with the lye!**

There are as many recipes for soap as there are for cake. This blend of olive oil, water, and lye is a cupboard classic. It’s also the variety most amenable to being cast. After a few days of slow cooling, the castile brick can be grated, melted down, and mixed with scents and grains, then poured into molds (a process called milling). The best place to try a first batch is in a utility sink or a bathtub. Here’s the dirt on how to make it.

Read this first: You’ll find lye with the drain cleaners at hardware stores. Use only pure lye (with no aluminum additives). The most common brand name is Red Devil. Lye is really nasty stuff (remember that scene in Fight Club?) so handle with care: Wear gloves, goggles, and a dust mask when you’re measuring and stirring lye. If you spill some on exposed skin, apply vinegar or lemon juice to prevent a nasty chemical burn.

Your Basic Soap:

In separate containers, weigh out 46 ounces of olive oil and 16 ounces of room-temperature water.
Don safety equipment and clothing that covers as much skin as possible and then weigh out 6 ounces of lye.
Very slowly pour and stir the lye into the water in the pitcher. Pop out of the room for a few minutes-the vapors can be potent! The mixture should reach around 200 degrees on its own.
Allow it to cool to the target temperature of 100 to 105 degrees.
If you’re using a shoebox as a mold, line it with 2 layers of plastic wrap taped to the sides, and grease it with shortening.
Heat the lye and oil to about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. A safe way to do this is to set the pitcher in a sink filled partway with water at the target temperature. As the water cools, drain the sink and add more hot water as needed.
When you’ve reached the target temperature, strap on the safety equipment again and very slowly pour and mix the lye into the oils in a thin but steady stream. Use a spoon to mix well without splashing (see fig. a).
Continue to stir briskly until the mixture shows trails-the pudding-like brew should drip off a spoon into the mix and stay visible for several seconds (see fig. b). This can take 20 to 60 minutes. If you’ve stirred for longer than that, either you haven’t been stirring fast enough or you’ve erred in temperature or quantities. Abandon hope after 75 minutes.
Stir in additives now, unless you plan on milling the soap later. (Note: The soap is still caustic and many additives won’t do well under such harsh conditions.)
Pour the mix into your mold. Lay a piece of plastic wrap on top. Wrap the box or mold in blankets and tuck it away in a warm corner for a day or two. Check on it twice daily. If the mix has separated, stir until uniform.
When the soap is as hard as jack cheese, put on your gloves and remove the soap from the mold. Cut it into bar-size pieces. If bars are what you’re after, set the pieces on plain brown paper to cure for a few weeks. If you want to cast the soap in a custom shape, follow the milling instructions on the next page.

If stirring by hand for an hour isn’t your idea of fun, use an immersion blender, the long-stem variety with the tiny propeller at the bottom. (You don’t want this stuff splashing.) This will give you trails in no time and save your wrists from months of physical therapy.