Homemade Bar Dish Soap, a Zero Waste Kitchen Project

Hi, my name is Katie from the Blockhart's Content Farmhouse. And today, what I'm going to show you how to do is how to make a solid bar of dish soap. We are going to make 12 bars that look just like this, and they are a solid bar that lasts a really long time that you can use to clean your dishes instead of a liquid dish washing soap. So this is not a substitute for something that goes in the dishwasher. This is for hand washing to keep by the sink. And it is a great money saver because they are really inexpensive to make just pennies a bar. They clean really well and they save you from having to buy lots of big, bulky, expensive liquid dish soap. This is a super easy soap recipe. Great for beginners. And if you are a beginner, just to go over a few basic safety tips. You always want to wear gloves and eye protection whenever you are making soap. I don't always wear gloves, which is a really bad habit. If you're new to soap making, be aware that if you got soap batter or lye on your skin, it does burn pretty badly. So you really want to wear gloves, even if you are not a beginner. You want to always have your skin covered. So for this recipe, we don't need many ingredients. We're going to use coconut oil, which is a very cleansing and hard oil in soap making. It's going to be about 94% of this bar. We're also going to use just a tiny bit of castor oil. That is going to help us get really good lather with this soap. But the percentage is going to stay low, which means the soap is going to be mostly cleansing and it's going to be a really hard bar. So you can see how hard this is, how well it took the mold when we poured it in. And that's because of the high percentage of coconut oil. We're also going to keep the super fat at one percent. So when you make soap, you combine lye and oils and there's a chemical reaction. The two combine and they form soap. And now when the lye and oils meet, you can have all of the oils turn to soap and that will be a zero percent super fat, which means there's no oils left over. The lye has transformed every single last molecule of those into soap. That would be very unusual for most soaps that are used on the skin. They are anywhere between a five and eight percent super fat, meaning that between five and eight percent of the oils do not get transformed into soap. They stay as oils mixed throughout the bar to help moisturize your skin. Since this is not a body bar, this is a bar for dishes. Our super fat is only one percent, which means if you were to use this on your skin, it would be very harsh and very drying, similar to washing your body with dish soap, not something you would want to do. So it's perfectly safe to use on your hands, but it is going to dry your skin out a little bit the same way any dish soap would. If you want more information about creating a soap recipe and maybe learning how to create your own soap recipe, I'm going to link to you in my description. I have an ebook you can download that explains the properties of different oils and how to create your own recipe. So we are doing coconut oil, castor oil, lye, water, and then I wanted to, I wanted a fragrance for this. And I chose to use essential oils for this just because it was going to get on my dishes and could come into contact with food. Theoretically, I didn't want to use an artificial fragrance oil. I use orange oil for this. What I like to use is 10X orange, which unlike most essential oils, which don't hold their fragrance very well in soap, the 10X orange oil is very concentrated and it will hold its fragrance really well. So these have a really nice fresh orange scent. We're going to begin by measuring out our lye and our water into separate containers. Um, so for this recipe, we were doing 5.41 ounces of lye. And we are doing anywhere between eight and 11 ounces of water. Remember in soap making, the amount of water is your one flexible ingredient. Everything else has to be precise. So once we've measured them out, you have to combine them. You always add the lye to the water, not the other way around. The best way to remember this is the saying snow floats on the lake. So the lye goes into the water. You stir it until it dissolves and the chemical reaction between those two is going to cause this lye water to shoot up really high in temperature. Um, it's also going to give off fumes. So you can do this outside, you can do this near a window, or you can just be really careful. It has to then cool down. So you want to put this in a safe place where no one can accidentally drink it. No one can knock it over. No one can mess with it. You might want to label your cup poison just to be absolutely clear what this is. If someone drinks it, it is extremely dangerous and possibly fatal. If it gets in someone's eyes and splashes on them, it will burn their skin and can cause blindness. This is a really important stage at which you really need to be careful. While your lye water is cooling, you want to melt and heat your oils to 140 degrees. So we're only using two oils. This is really easy. Um, you should technically weigh these into separate containers and then combine them. But I always just weigh them straight into the pot. We're doing 29 ounces of coconut oil and one ounce of castor oil. So you melt until the coconut oil is melted, tick, check the temperature. And when it's 140, you set your oil aside to cool. So now we have two components that are cooling separately. We want to wait until they're about 110 degrees. They should be warm, but not hot. And this is when we're going to combine them. So when you combine your oils and your water, you need to have your eye protection on because you can splash since we're going to be blending them and you want to have gloves on. So I'm going to pour the lye water right into the oils, blend with a stick blender. And what we are looking for is something called trace. This is going to happen quickly since we're using a lot of solid oils with the coconut oil, it comes to trace really quickly. And what trace means is when you drag your stick blender through your solution, you're going to see a little bit of trail behind you. That's why it's called trace because the batter will leave a trace throughout. So once you've achieved trace, you can go ahead and blend your oil or your fragrance in and just do it by hand. I chose to do about a tablespoon of essential oils for this. A lot of this is personal preference, just how strongly you want your soap scented. And if you don't want any fragrance, you can just totally leave it out. Um, and once we have done that, we right away have to pour this into the mold because it will start setting up really quickly and start to solidify. So, um, I got these molds from Amazon. They're a silicone mold. And with this recipe, you can use a soap mold that has a lot of detail because there's so much coconut oil. It's going to take the mold really well. It's going to release from the mold really well. And you're going to see a lot of details. So it's totally fine to do a more intricate mold for that. Um, and then they are going to cure for 24 hours. So I like to let them cure for another two to three weeks. And that just gives them a little bit of extra time to dry out and they last longer, the dryer they are. So, um, this is a super simple project. If you want to keep these soaps next to your sink for washing dishes, I would recommend that you've got a little, um, it's called a soap saver and it helps keep the soap elevated above your soap dish. And that will keep it dry and it will help it last longer. Um, but again, this is really pennies per bar to make. It saves a lot of money and it's a great project for a beginner. So all the supplies that I've used in this project, I'm going to go ahead and link in my description box below. And I'll also put a link to the recipe on my blog. So if you want to, you can print it out and work off that. So if you have any questions about this project or about soap making in general, please just leave me a comment and I will do my best to answer you. Thank you for watching.