Easy Tallow Soap That Works for Everything!
Have you ever wanted to make your own soap bar but thought it might be too intimidating? In this post I will walk you through step by step how I make my own basic soap bar that is perfect for beginners so you can feel confident moving forward in your soap journey.
If you are more of a visual learner, I have made a video walking you through these exact steps. If you love the idea of a tallow based soap, but aren’t ready to commit or want to see how a bar feels before buying your own ingredients, I do sell soaps and tallow whips. Click below to learn more!
This post is all about how to make a tallow soap bar.
Ingredients You Need to Make Tallow Soap
- Rendered Tallow (10 oz or 283 Grams) To learn how to make your own tallow, click HERE.
- Olive Oil (10 oz or 283 Grams)
- Coconut Oil (10 oz or 283 Grams)
- Castor Oil (6oz or 170 Grams)
- Sodium Hydroxide (Lye) -(5.11 Oz or 145 Grams)
- Filtered Water OR Frozen Goats Milk- Not Powdered (13.68 oz or 388 Grams)
New to working with tallow?
Materials You Need
Instructions to Make Your Tallow Soap Bar
1. To begin, gather all of your oils and start weighing them out into your big, heat safe bowl. Make sure you zero out the scale in between oils. When you are first starting out, it may make sense to weigh the oils separately and then pour them into your large bowl.
So you don’t have to go back up and look, the ingredients are 10oz (283 grams) of olive oil, tallow, coconut oil and 6oz (170 grams) of castor oil.
2. Place the oils on top of a double boiler- which means a pan filled halfway up with water that is boiling with the bowl on top.
3. While the oils are melting on the stove, measure out the water on the kitchen scale (13.68 oz or 388 grams)
4. Clean the water off of the counter (if you spilled any) to make sure the lye doesn’t have a chance to interact with water.
5. This is the big one. You need to wear eye protection and gloves as well as a long sleeve shirt to cover your arms. You do not want the lye to have any possibility of hitting your skin.
6. When you are ready to make the lye water, go outside where it is well ventilated. It releases a lot of fumes so you want to take it outside.
7. When you are ready to combine the lye and water, make sure your eyesore is on, gloves and a long sleeve are on and that there are no children or animals that could come close and get hurt.
8. Mix the lye into the water very slowly. Never mix the water into the lye. Make sure you are stirring constantly and that you are using a heat safe bowl. Plastic will melt and glass could shatter. I like to use a metal bowl. Stir until it is all combined. The mixture will be cloudy.
8. Leave it outside until you are ready for the next step (and the bowl is warm, not hot) to the touch.
9. When the bowls are safe to handle (while still wearing all safety gear) carefully carry the lye water inside. It should have stopped fuming by now so it should be ok to take inside. If you are worried about it, feel free to do the next steps outside.
10. We are going to be combining the lye and oils together to make our soap batter!
11. Place your immersion blender in the oils and start to blend while slowly streaming in the lye water. Make sure you are not lifting the immersion blender or you may get splashed.
12. Keep blending until you reach “trace” which is the consistency of pudding. Once you reach this, you can choose to use 2 Tbsp of essential oils (I will warn you ahead of time, the smell doesn’t last extremely long on the outside of the bar but the inside will retain some of the smell.) The essential oils will cause the batter to thicken slightly so blend another 30 seconds to 1 minute and then pour it into a loaf mold.
13. Flatten the top of the batter and then you can do fancy swoops on the top, or keep it flat. I have chosen to swoop the batter into the middle from both sides (you can see better in the video down below) and when you are happy with it all, set it aside to saponify (cool down and combine) for 24-48 hours.
14. Remove the soap from the mold and slice it up wth a wavy or straight cutting tool. You can use a knife if you want here but I do prefer the look of a special soap cutter. Allow the bars to cure in a cool dark room for at least 4 weeks and they will be ready to use!! Enjoy!
Please note this is not official guidance and you should ALWAYS do your own research before you follow a recipe you find online. Always ensure you are running recipes you find through a soap calculator to ensure they are safe for use. Happy soaping!!
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Prefer to watch me make a soap bar first? Check it out below!
This post was all about how to make tallow soap from scratch.
Hi, I used your recipe. First time, beautiful white soap. The second & third times, the soap turned out more pale green/grey – like the colour of dirty dishwater! Any advice? The only thing that might have been different is perhaps the room where I let the soap batter sit in the mould overnight before cutting, was maybe a tad cooler?
Hello! Thank you for the comment 🙂 So a few things I could think of. What kind of mixing bowl did you use for your lye water and batter? Secondly, is the bar the greenish/ grey throughout or just on the top?