Homemade Soap
How can I take a bunch of oil and turn it into something that not only mixes with water, but also cleans? Honestly that was what puzzled me. I stumbled across a blog post on survival blog that planted the seed of starting this business. I had one major aspect of beginning - a lot of olive oil and no way to sell it.
I make all of my soaps with three very basic ingredients; oil, lye, and water. Lye is mostly referred to as sodium hydroxide on product labels, as the word "lye" tends to scare people. We all know what oil and water are, but lye is a different story. Lye was first discovered about 2800 years ago, by pouring water over wood ash and collecting the water. It produces a alkaline solution which neutralizes the fatty acids from the oils. In the prehistoric days soap had a much different appearance and texture. But with modern procedures we are able to get 99% lye. Lye is some scary stuff, and you have to be careful anytime you are working with it. Within my bars of soap I leave a 7% superfat, what that means is once the lye has reacted with the oils 7% is remaining oil is left in a bar of soap. So when you wash your body with the natural soaps it doesn't dry you out and leave your skin chalky.
What I do is well efficiency. That is how my brain works. I figure that time is money and in order to keep my homemade natural soaps affordable is to make a lot of it, and fast. I usally make 384 bars of soap in one setting, which takes me about 3-4 hours start to finish. That includes my time waiting for the lye to cool and oil to heat up. Not to mention the never ending washing of buckets and pots. Plus cutting and laying out on racks to cool.
Please feel free to visit my site or email me with any questions about different aspects of soap making. I will end up doing a periscope and youtube video of me making soap soon. It is a lot for me to type our, sometimes its just better to watch and listen to me narrate through the process.
0 comments:
Post a Comment