How to Make Tallow Soap (Step-by-Step Beginner Recipe)

In this little tub is one of the best but also one of the most underrated soap ingredients for making handmade soap from scratch and it is beef tallow, also known as beef drippings or beef fat. It is definitely not vegetarian, it is most certainly not vegan, but if you get it from a local source it can be really sustainable. Of course you're supporting local business and if you have your own cattle you could use the fat, render it down and make some really local handmade soap. It also creates a really hard bar with stable conditioning creamy lather and if you use just a little bit of two extra oils it creates a fantastic bar of soap with fluffy lather and it is just fantastic and that's what I'm going to show you how to make today. We're going to be making tallow soap using the cold process method and I'll be taking you through it step by step. I'm going to show you how to make a simple tallow soap recipe that uses beef tallow along with a touch of coconut oil and castor oil. It uses the cold process method and yields two pounds or 908 grams and fills two of these cavity soap molds perfectly yielding about 12 bars of soap. The full recipe is listed in the video text description including a link to where you can size the recipe and print it out. The recipe includes 46 grams of castor oil to improve the stability of the lather and 46 grams of coconut oil to create a bubbly bar of soap. You will also need 816 grams of beef tallow. You could use another type of tallow such as sheep or deer but you'll need to use a little less lye. More details on this are on lovelygreens.com. To create the lye solution for this recipe you'll need 124 grams of sodium hydroxide also called lye and 240 grams of distilled or deionized water. Although optional I'm also using a floral blend of essential oils for natural scent. I'm using two teaspoons each of clary sage lavender and geranium essential oils. All of the ingredients are measured out and I have my soap making station laid out here in the kitchen. The oils are in a pan on the stove. They're not turned on just yet. The lye and the distilled water are here by the sink and I have the window cracked in preparation for making soap and to release the fumes and the steam. I also have all my tools out and I have my molds ready as well. I'm going to be using two silicon molds. This one is going to be a lot easier for beginners to use. It's a cavity mold which means that you can pour the soap in pop the bars out at your discretion so you could do it tomorrow you could do it a week from now it's no problem at all super super easy you don't have to cut the soap. If you use a slab mold or you use a loaf mold you will need to cut the soap and tallow soap like other soap recipes that are high in solid oils so hard oils like coconut oil and tallow they can be very brittle and hard to cut if you wait too long. I'm also wearing my onion goggles. I tend to wear these for soap making to protect my eyes. You should also wear goggles. The ordinary chemistry goggles are perfectly fine. Gloves as well. These are nitrile gloves but you could use the ordinary rubber washing up gloves that you would use when you're washing dishes for example. I'm also wearing an apron protecting my skin wherever it is exposed and I go through all the safety measures when making soap from scratch cold process hot process as well as setting up your soap making station everything about ingredients everything you really need to know to start making handmade soap quickly including step-by-step recipes in the natural soap making for beginners online course and if you would like to enroll in that and get started making lots of different types of soap recipes quickly I'll leave a link down in the video text description and on the screen. The first step is making the lye solution so I'm going to set this jug of distilled water in the sink and then I'm going to take the lye crystals and just dump them straight in and because I'm working by a window the fumes from this should go out that way stir this together really well don't dawdle with this either because if you just leave it sitting without stirring it can form a crust at the bottom of the jug so you stir it all together probably about 10-20 seconds and then we're going to just let this sit in the sink without any water in it at first because we don't want the lye solution getting too cold. While the lye solution is cooling we're going to melt these oils and all the solid oils and a little bit of castor oil are together and it will take some time for this to melt down and to help it use your spatula or a knife or both to continuously move the tallow around and to break it up and that increases the surface area and helps it to melt a little bit quicker. I've been stirring and breaking up the tallow for I guess 10 minutes or so there are just a couple of floaters left in here but the rest of it is fully melted I've also been scraping the sides of the pan and now it's time to transfer this over to the potholder and I'll carry on stirring until all of the pieces of tallow are completely melted. Let's take a temperature reading it's 130 Fahrenheit so we want to get this down to about 115 so I'm going to carry on stirring and I'm going to go check the lye solution as well. All while the oils have been melting the lye solution has been sitting over here in the sink cooling without any additional water in the sink like I usually do and the reason for that is that we're going to want the lye solution to be actually a little bit warmer than the oils. I'm going to aim for about 120 Fahrenheit and we do that to stop it from re-solidifying the tallow when we add it in. Let's see what it's at right now so it's 130 so it's very similar to the oils. I've also started warming up the essential oils so I've just set them into a bowl poured some hot water in the bowl and that brings up their temperature so that when I add them later they're not going to cause the tallow to re-solidify. Right we are right on the money the oils are 115 and the lye solution is just under the target temperature so it's time to mix. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to lean my immersion blender in the pan here and I have a stainless steel sieve and I tend to do this especially if I have colorants but any time is a good idea to strain the lye solution just make sure there's no little bits in it. Undissolved lye and also pouring it against the immersion blender here stops air bubbles from making their way in so good soap making practices. I'm just going to set this aside now. Tallow soap has a tendency to trace quickly and so we're just going to use the immersion blender very cautiously just a few pulses to get it started and until I start seeing that emulsion forming and then I'm going to swap over to using just the spatula. I think that's probably enough and I'm just going to scrape this off and carry on with a spatula and this way if it starts to come together quickly you can control it a bit better. With an immersion blender it really just speeds everything up. I've been stirring about a minute and I think this is a very light emulsion so it's not separating into oil and the lye solution on my spatula and this is a good time to add the essential oil which is warmed and ready to go back here so I'm just going to drizzle it in and stir at the same time. That's good I've not seen any signs of the tallow solidifying which is what we wanted to avoid. After about five or six more minutes of stirring we're now at a very light trace so I can start to see that little drizzle mark when I drizzle it back into the pan so that trail of soap batter on the top. So it is now time to pour this into the molds. I'm going to start with the cavity molds so that I can fill them up perfectly. There's the first one in it is thickening up as I pour. Really good consistency and although the soap batter looks quite yellow it will solidify and cool to a very pale color practically white. The cavity molds are filled and now for the slab mold. This recipe is a double batch of my tallow soap recipe and it could fit perfectly two of the cavity molds if you wanted to or two of these slab molds. The last thing that I'm going to do at this point is give these bars a little bit of texture and I'm just using an old skewer. I reuse these many times over for soap making and just going to give it a little bit of a swirl both in the cavity molds and in the slab mold and I think this just makes it look more handmade and beautiful slightly imperfect and completely different from anything that is produced in a factory and there are many ways to create soap topper decorations. I have a piece over on my website a guest piece from Muddy Mint and her book if you want to check out some more ideas for decorating the tops of your bars. I'm going to leave the soap here in the silicon molds right here on the kitchen counter and in the case of the slab mold I have to be a lot more mindful than the cavity mold. Now if you cut tallow soap too early or too late it can crumble or it can shatter or shard off and so I'm going to come back to this slab mold in about four hours and I'm going to check to see if the consistency is right. So we're looking for the consistency of refrigerator cold cheddar cheese firm you can push on it a little bit but it doesn't leave a dent and at that point I can cut it into bars. It should take four to six hours for me to start seeing that but it can take up to 12. It's been 24 hours since I made the tallow soap and part of that batch is still in this silicon mold and I will link to this down in the video description if you want to get one of these two. Now I'm going to take these out right now but if I wanted to I could wait until tomorrow, the next day, next week to pop these out and start curing them. So there's a lot of time very very low stress. Last night four hours after I made the tallow soap I cut up that slab. Initially I used a piece of wire to cut it down the middle and then I trimmed up the edges using my actual soap cutter which is also a wire and it's now ready to cure and after I pop these guys out of the mold as well they'll be curing for the exact same amount of time which is a little bit longer than most soap recipes. It's six to eight weeks for tallow soap. It is a little bit of an extra weight in order to be able to enjoy your homemade tallow soap but it is worth it and this recipe creates really lovely pure white bars with good lather and these are perfect for naturally coloring if you're into that as well. I have left the full recipe as well as links to some of the ingredients and equipment down in the video text description so definitely go check that out and if you are at the beginning of your soap making journey you might want to also consider enrolling in my natural soap making for beginners online course and that will get you started fast and in it I take you through all the basics of cold process soap making, small batches from your kitchen, step-by-step recipes. It really is easy. Definitely check that out. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope this has helped you to learn how to make tallow soap and I will see you in the next video. Bye for now.