Soapmaking

The earliest record of a soap recipe was found in Babylon and dates back to around 2800 BCE. The city of Aleppo in Syria became a hub of commercial soap production, a practice that carries on today. The ancient soap makers used a method of making lye using the ashes of certain trees, then sluicing water through those ashes, collecting the water (and resulting sodium hydroxide or soda ash) and checking if it was strong enough by floating an egg in the water. Then, after rendering animal fats, or extracting oils from their chosen plants, they added the two together, stirring the mixture over a large vat to allow the reaction to take place and evaporate away any excess water.

Today, much more accurate methods have been developed to make sure the lye is the right strength and the correct amount of oil is added to neutralize all the lye. I use a modern method called Cold-Process in order to make a safe effective bar of soap. Here follows my step-by step process.

Ingredients

Water, salt, sugar, clay, oils, lye, and fragrance.

Equipment

Scale, Pots, measuring cups, spoons, stick blender, heat source, thermometer, mold.

1st step: making the Lye-water

Distilled water with salt and sugar which helps with hardness and suds.

Lye

Adding the lye to the water

Wating for the lye to dissolve - it is HOT and can be fumy so needs to be done in a well-ventilated area.

Step 2: measuring out the oils

All hard oils need to be melted, so into the pot on onto the burner it goes.

Step 3: coming to temperature

The melted oils got hot so now I wait until it comes down to about 100-120 deg.

The lye water has already been waiting a bit. Still longer to wait.

Step 4: mix oil and lye water together.

I also added the clay to the oil at this point.

I use the stick blender to make sure all the lye molecules meet all the oil molecules so the reaction can take place. I'll add the fragrance at this point as well.

I know it's good when it becomes the consistency of pudding.

Step 5: molding the soap

It's pretty thick when pouring into the mold.

Once in the mold, I tap it down, smooth it out, and put it in a nice warm place to continue hardening up.

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