Final Soap Making Session

As we get closer to moving to New Zealand and out of our rental property we are in the process of using things up.  Because we will be moving in with family we are running down things like cleaning supplies and food.
We are able to take food with us when we move with in with family but we still don't want to overload them or leave them with things they will not use.
I still had a whole lot of tallow left (about 4 kg) in the freezer and because we cannot take tallow to NZ and we were not likely to use it up cooking (we do not use vegetable oil we use tallow instead) I used it all up making soap.
I posted back here the recipe I use which uses 1.5 kg of tallow to make the amount of soap shown in the photo below.  I made 2 batches that were pure tallow and as I did not have quite enough for a third batch I used 250 gm coconut oil and 250 gm olive oil to top up the 1 kg of tallow I had left.  To make sure I had my ratios right which is very important as different oils have different properties when it comes to making soap so I checked the ratios of each oil in this soap calculator.

I was also able to use up most of my essential oils making 1 batch with sandalwood, 1 batch with ylang ylang and 1 batch with patchouli.
As you can imagine that I now have a lot of soap curing but the good news is it will all be cured before the international movers come and pack everything so each batch will be packed into a shoe box and be sent off to NZ with our belongings.
It will probably keep us in soap for a long time to come but that is ok as we will not be rearing a cow for beef straight away and then once we do rear one it obviously needs more than a year to grow before we butcher it.
For us rendering the fat from an animal we have raised and butchered just makes sense as we pay for the entire weight of the animal including the fat so why just throw it away when we can save ourselves the cost of buying soap for the next few years and it uses up what would otherwise just be a waste product.
Tallow also makes a wonderful soap that is very gentle on your skin.  You should be able to get your local butcher to bag up fresh fat scraps for you that you can render down and turn into soap and even if you had to pay for it (some butchers might give it away) I am sure it would be really cheap.

My friend Liz recently posted about making tallow soap on the blog Lovely Greens so if you want a bit more info pop over and have a read.

What kind of soap do you make?