How to make easy homestead soap for beginners using tallow 🧼 (start to finish, with recipe)

Hi everyone, welcome back to Grounded Haven Homestead. My name is Michelle and today I'm going to be teaching you how to make a really easy beginner homestead soap. The reason I'm calling this a homestead soap is because part of the recipe uses beef tallow and I actually rendered out this tallow myself from some beef fat that we got from a local farm that does grass-fed beef. And here's a look at that tallow. It's white and creamy and this is just a really beautiful ingredient to use for soap. Tallow is very similar to the makeup of our own skin's oil so it absorbs really nicely and it makes for a really nourishing soap. And it's also an ingredient that you can source for a pretty affordable price by just buying beef fat from a farmer and rendering it out or they might already have it rendered. And you're also able to use a part of the animal that is almost like a byproduct or maybe even if you raise your own beef or you order a whole cow or half a cow or whatever it is and you get some of this beef fat and you don't know what to do with it, this is a good use for that tallow. So before we go into the soap making, let's go over the supplies that you'll need. First you will need a soap mold. I have one here and this mold holds about 3 pounds of soap so the recipe that I'm using today will fit this amount of soap but you don't need a specific mold. You can get a mold like this off of Amazon but you don't need a specific mold. You can also just use a Tupperware or a cardboard box, just line it with like parchment paper and it might not look as nice but it's still going to work and it's still going to be soap. Then you are going to need an immersion blender. For this immersion blender and basically everything else for this soap, you don't want to use something that you use for food. So all of my supplies are just for making soap and I do not use it for food preparation at all. You just don't want any cross contamination. So I have this immersion blender, it's not like an expensive brand but it still works well. I also have some bowls, measuring cups, a rubber spatula is nice and then also a spoon if you want to make like a swoopy top on top of your soap. Another thing that's really helpful is a laser thermometer. When you're soaping you want your oils and your lye water to be at a similar temperature and this thing shoots out a red laser and just tells you what temperature things are and it's really handy. I actually use this all the time just like in the kitchen too so if you don't have this in your house, it's just a great tool to have all around and it will help you with your soap making as well. One tool that I forgot to mention that is pretty important to have is a digital scale so that you can weigh out all of your ingredients. So that's pretty much the equipment, you don't really need too much. Let's go over the ingredients I guess you would call them and this recipe is going to use three different oils and fats. My normal recipe for soap that I sell has five different oils and fats in, they're not necessarily these ones but I wanted to pare it down and make it very beginner friendly and I am also just using the things that are most accessible. So we have our beef tallow of course and if you can't get beef tallow or you don't want to render it out yourself, you can also use lard. That's fat that's rendered from pork and it's also very similar to tallow. You might have to recalculate your recipe to make sure you have the right ratio of fat to lye and I'll kind of talk about that more a little bit later but I'm going to be using tallow today. We're also going to be using coconut oil. This doesn't have to be extra virgin coconut oil, you can use refined coconut oil. This is actually refined coconut oil, I just put it in this container because I buy mine in like a giant five gallon bucket so I just put it in this container. And then the third oil we're going to be using is olive oil and again this one doesn't have to be extra virgin so I just get the refined stuff because you're not consuming this so it doesn't have to be like the highest quality. Refined is going to be just fine and it's going to save you money. If you don't want to go out and get refined oils just for making soap, you can go ahead and use the extra virgin, it's just going to end up costing you a little bit more per bar of soap. So I've pared down this recipe to those three oils. We're going to be doing 35% tallow, 35% olive oil, and 30% coconut oil. If you want you can completely take out the coconut oil and make it even simpler and just do 50% olive oil and 50% beef tallow but you are going to have to recalculate the recipe a little bit and make sure you have the right amount of lye. So that's the next ingredient we're going to need. Sodium hydroxide also known as lye and I just get this off of Amazon. And with lye you want to be very very careful because this is a caustic ingredient. It can burn your skin if you get it on yourself so whenever you're dealing with this, make sure you don't have any pets or children around and make sure you wear eye protection. So I will always wear safety goggles when I'm dealing with lye and it's also nice to have a mask because the lye can release some fumes as well. And you also want to make sure you have long sleeves, long pants, and foot protection and then some gloves. You can use these rubber cleaning gloves. They're really nice especially if you're a beginner because they're really tall and extra thick. So I use these sometimes and sometimes I also just use like latex gloves. So you just want to make sure everything is protected and be very careful. So those are all the basics pretty much you need for making soap. There are of course endless possibilities of things you can add to soap. You can add clays and botanical powders to change the colors and to add different properties to your soap. You can also add essential oils and fragrance oils and I do a bunch of the more complicated stuff for the soap that I sell but today I'm just going to be making a very very simple soap so we're not going to do any colorants, no fragrances, or essential oils. We're just going to keep it simple but as an option if you want you can add stuff to the top of your soap because that's a really easy thing to do if you're a beginner. It makes your soap look a little bit nicer and fancier and it doesn't mess with the composition of your actual soap so you don't have to calculate anything. You can just sprinkle some flower petals on top to make it look a little nicer. And these are things you don't even necessarily have to buy you can maybe just even grow them in your own garden. So I have a few things here that are homegrown. The first thing I have are these bachelors buttons also known as cornflowers and they have this beautiful blue color. These ones do turn a little bit brown where they touch the soap but wherever they don't touch the soap it will stay blue and it's really pretty. Another thing I like to use are calendula petals. I have some here and these have a really nice bright yellow and orange color and these keep their color really well when dried. I also have some jasmine buds here. These are not homegrown but I think I actually got this in a tea section or something like that so you don't even have to get it from a special retailer. You can either grow it or maybe find it in a store near you. Two other things are rose buds and lavender and those are really common ingredients and things that you might have in your garden that you can include as well. So those are just a few options but you can be creative and see what you have. Just be aware that some flowers do discolor when they come in contact with soap. So like the bachelor's buttons they might turn brown or they might not keep their color as well. So I think that pretty much covers the basics of your supplies and ingredients. So let me talk about your recipe. I will be leaving the recipe that I am using in the description box along with exact amounts and this will yield again 3 pounds of soap but if you need to change that quantity for any reason, you probably want to just use a lye calculator to make sure you have the right amounts of everything. I'll leave the one that I use down below. You can change it if you have a different percentage of oils or fats or again if you need to change the quantity and that's a really helpful tool. Now we can move on to the actual making of the soap and the first thing you're going to have to do is mix your lye water solution and I usually do this a few hours beforehand and I'll show you that process right now. To make our lye water solution, it is simply lye and distilled water or you can use tap water if you want to. I usually use distilled water just because it can give you a clearer product and if you have a lot of minerals in your tap water, that could hinder the lathering a little bit but if you're just getting started and you don't have distilled water, tap water is fine. So I'm weighing out my water first in this container and then I realized this was way too small to mix anything in so I just moved it to a bigger container and you can see I'm just using plastic containers here. Whatever recycled container you have, just again making sure that it is either a number two or number five plastic and it should be safe and the lye should not be able to eat through it and since now I am working with lye, I am going to put on my safety gear so I have my gloves, my goggles, and my long sleeves on and then I'm going to measure out my lye into a separate container. You don't want to do this in the same container just in case you pour out a little bit extra by accident. So now I'm going to mix them together and for this part, I like to wear a mask just for any of the fumes that get developed while the lye solution is getting mixed up. Once we have our mask and all our safety gear on, it's time to pour the lye into the water and you always want to do it that way and not do it the other way around and pour your water into the lye because this can create almost like an explosion and you don't want this to splash up everywhere so just slowly pour the lye in and then I like to use just like a big wooden popsicle stick to stir this around and make sure that lye is dissolved in the water. When the lye hits the water, a chemical reaction will take place and this will get really hot and release some fumes so you just want to be really mindful of that and again, you don't want to get this on your skin because this can burn your skin. So just to show you immediately after mixing, it is already at 150 degrees and I'm just going to show this to you again one more time because I am making two batches of soap that day so I just mixed both of my lye water solutions at the same time. So I'll show this to you again because this second container I'm going to be using will be clear so you'll be able to see it a little bit better. So again, I am first measuring out my lye and then I have my water in a separate container and this container that I'm using for this one is glass so that's another option if you don't want to use plastic. Glass will be safe to use to mix this in as well. So I've got my water in my glass ready and I'm going to start slowly pouring in the lye into here and you can see the mouth of my jar is not that wide so I'm kind of getting lye particles on the table. I'm going to wipe that down afterwards but just be a little bit better than me and probably use something a little bit wider so that you can actually get those particles in there without them dropping everywhere. But anyway, now I'm just going to mix this and you can see how it's kind of like cloudy when you first mix it and the lye crystals tend to kind of like stick at the bottom so you really want to make sure that you mix it really well. There was one time I didn't mix well enough and the lye crystals at the bottom kind of formed like a hard cake down there so just make sure everything's dissolved and then in a little bit this should actually turn completely clear and you'll be able to see if there is any undissolved lye. So I'm going to take the temperature of this and this one got all the way to over 200 degrees so definitely very hot and I think this is because it's a greater mass of lye water solution so maybe it got a little bit hotter than the other one. So anyway, I'm just going to, before I do anything, wipe down my surface because as you saw there might be some lye particles that kind of get everywhere so I just like to make sure I wipe this down before I forget and so that I get all of the different areas that I may have dropped lye in and make sure everything is clean and safe. Then I'm going to put a lid on both of my solutions and just set that aside. As you saw it is very hot right now and too hot to work with so it's going to have to sit aside at room temperature for a few hours before we move on to the rest of the process. So it's been a few hours since I mixed up the lye and now I'm going to start melting down my oils to mix with the lye. So I have my soap mixing bowl here and I'm going to start with just the solid oils right now and that's going to be my tallow and my coconut oil. So I'm going to need 10.5 ounces of tallow. I have a video where I rendered out this tallow if you're curious about that process. I'll link that in the description box if you want to check that out. I've got my 10.5 ounces of tallow. Next I'm going to need 9 ounces of coconut oil. So I mentioned before that you can cut out the coconut oil if you want and just use the olive and tallow but I wouldn't go the other way around and do 50% coconut oil because although it is a nice ingredient to have as part of your recipe, I don't think it's a good idea to go more than about 35% because coconut oil does create a really nice lather but if you put too much it can be a little bit drying for the skin so that's why I cap it at 30-35%. There are my solid oils. I just like to microwave this in 30 second increments until everything is all melted and then we'll add in the olive oil after. So my solid oils are now melted. All I have to do now is add the olive oil and I'm going to need 10.5 ounces of that. And that is it. That's all of our oils. The next thing we're going to do is add in the lye water solution. So because we're now working with lye, I'm going to put on my safety gear. I'm going to put on my goggles and my gloves. You don't really need a mask for this part. That's more for mixing the lye with the water. One thing you should do right before you mix these two actually is measure the temperature and you want to make sure they're within 10 degrees of each other. An ideal range is anywhere from 80 degrees to 90 or 100. If it's a little warmer, it'll come up to trace a little quicker. So I have my lye water here and I'm just going to very carefully pour it into my oils. You don't want it to splash. Once I have that, I'm going to go in with my immersion blender. My immersion blender has a little bit of soap on it already because I just made another batch of soap right before this. And since I'm not selling this soap, I'm not worried about any leftover soap on there. But anyway, I'm just gonna attach that. I like to give it a few stirs without turning it on just to get everything kind of mixed in. And then I'm going to start doing bursts with the immersion blender on for a couple seconds at a time. And I intersperse it with just like hand mixing. You can see how immediate that just emulsifies and turns a more opaque color. Once it's emulsified, it's at this point that if you wanted to, you could go in and add essential oils or a fragrance oil. But since I'm not doing that today, I'm just going to keep on blending until we get to a light trace. As you blend, it gets thicker. And now we're going to start checking for trace. And this is when you lift up your immersion blender. And as it drips, it should leave kind of like a trail. You should see a little bit of texture. So we're very nearly there. Just a little bit more to go. Now you can see when I lift this up, it leaves a trail on the surface. So that means that we are ready to pour into our mold. One mistake that I think beginner soap makers make most often is blending too much and making the mixture too thick because the longer you blend, it's going to get thicker and thicker. And if you wait too long, you're not going to be able to pour it into the mold. So make sure you don't over blend. Just when you get to trace, just go ahead and immediately put that into your mold. Since we're not adding any fragrances or essential oils, sometimes that can accelerate the soap. But since we don't have that, it's a pretty simple process and you have a good amount of time to work with it. So that's pretty much it. You can just leave it at this. And this is going to have to set for one to two days. But if you want, you can go in and top it with some flowers, which I'm going to do now. This is a really nice, easy way to dress up your soap without adding any complexity to it as far as the process goes. So I think I'm going to do half bachelor's buttons and then half calendula petals so that you can see the difference at the end. And that immediately just transforms this soap into something so special and beautiful. And this would be a great thing to give as gifts. So the other half, I'm going to just use some calendula petals. I wouldn't suggest putting whole petals or flowers directly into your soap when you're mixing because this can make your soap really scratchy. You don't really want like whole pieces of anything in there. If it's ground up, that's probably fine. But also a lot of flowers don't keep their color within the soap. So just to be safe, unless you're positive that it's going to work out, I would just put the petals and all of your different bits and pieces on top of your soap. I think I'll do a little section where the blue and the orange kind of overlap because I think that's kind of pretty. So there is the finished soap. I'm going to let that sit for one to two days and then we can unmold it and cut it. It's been about 36 hours since I've poured this soap. You can see that it's hardened now and it has this wonderful creamy white color. And I'm just going to turn it out of this silicone mold. Look at that beautiful loaf of soap. We've got those pretty flower petals on top. The cornflowers actually didn't discolor too much, which is nice. You can see a lot of that blue color. Some of these will inevitably fall off, but that's okay. Some of them will stay. So now I'm just going to cut it into bars. I have this soap cutter, which is basically kind of just like a bench scraper, but you can also just use a regular kitchen knife if you don't have this. And a little tip for when you have toppings on your soap like this, if you cut it straight down like that, your cutter or your knife will probably catch onto some of those petals and create drag marks along your bars. So what I like to do is cut it on the side and that way you don't drag any of those flowers down. I also have this cutting device. I don't remember what this is called, but Erin made this for me and this fits in there. So I'm going to go ahead and just put that in. You can see that there's kind of like slits right here where I can put my cutter and that way I get really nice even bars and this will cut them into perfect one inch bars. But of course you can just freehand this. Your bars might be a little bit uneven, but they're still going to work just fine. And there we go. There's our finished bar of soap. Here's what it looks like on the insides. Really lovely and creamy. And then it's really pretty on the top from the petals that we put. So I'm going to go ahead and cut all of these. But unfortunately when you make soap like this, they're not ready to use right away. Usually I will let these cure for at least a month and what happens when you let your soap cure is that all of that excess moisture and water that's in your bar, it's going to evaporate out over time and then you're going to be left with a harder bar of soap that lasts a really long time. If you don't let your bars cure, they'll be really soft and they'll pretty much just melt away when you use them in the bath or the shower and you wouldn't want to waste all of that hard work to just have your soap be used up way too fast. When I set these aside to cure, I'm just going to place them on a wire rack. A wire rack is ideal because that allows for airflow even along the bottom edge. But if you don't have something that allows for airflow, you can also just flip your bars around every week or so. That way every edge of your soap has an opportunity to let some of that moisture out. So this is the beginning of where I mix those cornflowers and calendula petals and I really like that combo of the blue and orange. I think that's really pretty. And you can really see how these make really wonderful gifts. I think everyone loves homemade soap and it's pretty cool, especially if you grow your own flowers and put them on top, then you can say that those came from your garden too. And we absolutely love soap that has tallow or lard in it. I just find it to be so creamy and nourishing. A lot of the soaps that I sell, actually I don't use tallow or lard just because I like to keep them vegan and I wouldn't really want to go through like the rendering tallow process for huge batches of soap because it's a little bit time consuming and labor intensive. So really I just make this tallow or lard soap for us to use. So this is the soap we're usually using in our shower. So like I said, I'm going to set this aside for a month and I'll come back in a month and I will show you how this lathers up. It should lather really nicely. The tallow makes a really creamy lather and the coconut oil in there makes for a really nice lather as well. So I ended up with 10 bars of soap plus one little bonus half soap and I'm really happy with how these came out. So it's been a month now and our soap has finished curing. So I'm going to go and show you how it lathers up. The soap feels significantly different from when it started off a month ago. Immediately I can feel that it is just really, really hard. It's almost like sharp on the corner so you can always shave those down with a vegetable peeler if you want to but you can see how it just lathers up so beautifully. It's got a very creamy bubbly lather from those wonderful oils and the tallow that we used in there and it just feels so nice on your skin. So that is it. That is the whole process start to finish on how to make your own homemade soap. I hope you found this helpful especially if you are looking to make soap for the first time or if you're a beginner or if you watch this video and you decide it is just not for you. You don't want to do a fly and you don't want to wait a month for your soap to cure. You can always just purchase our soap that is available on our Etsy shop. I will leave the link in the description box down below. It's a great way to support our channel if you would like to and you get some lovely handmade soap in the process. But either way, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again in the next one.