Anybody else out there render down their fat to make tallow soaps? We did about 4 pounds of soap a couple years ago and it lasted until this summer. About to do another 2.5 pounds this week. Should be ready for use by mid January.
I've never studied soap making but interested. Can you buy scents to add to it ?The recipe we use comes from "Simple and Natural Soap Making" by Jan Berry (pg 37). It's pretty standard "Lye soap" recipe that just uses water, tallow, and Lye. We use essential oils for scents but you can make unscented just as easily. There are plenty of other recipes online. Thesage.com has some recipes (though very few I found call for tallow) and a lye calculator. The lye calculator calculates the amount of water and Lye you need for a given quantity of fat and allows you to mix different fats in single recipe. It also gives you a good range for different variations of the same basic recipe by changing amount of Lye, which I like a lot. I don't think they have any recipes for pure tallow soap but anything with "lard" you can substitute tallow for the lard. Other fats (Olive oil, caster oil, coconut oil, etc.) can really change the texture, bubbliness, etc of a soap and are often considered "softer" on the skin. They can also help you make more soap if you don't have as much tallow.
We (Mrs and I) really like the pure tallow soap, but my oldest kid (28) likes mixing in other oils for a different feel.
For molds, you can make simple molds from wood and some wax paper or you can buy fancy silicone molds used for soap or candy/chocolate making. We have a combination of both. A "loaf" mold should be cut before it fully cures (hardens), though. A cutting wire (think piano wire strung between a frame similar to a large egg slicer) cuts well. A muffin pan will also make a suitable mold (if you don't mind circular/conical soaps) though some people worry about mixing the "raw" soap with anything used for cooking food due to the lye.
EDIT: Forgot to mention.. render your tallow a few times to really get all the impurities out. I do it in a crock pot with a lot of water and add some salt to help pull out the impurities and separate the fat more "cleanly". Our tallow starts off almost white to a pale "cream" color when it's ready for soap making. The picture below shows a block that came out of our crock pot and the color still looks a bit yellow. We've found it loses some color over time but it's not particularly relevant. I will say it can sometimes really stink when rendering. A lot of the "homesteading" or "natural" websites tell you to do it outside. I've never felt the need and we use the same crockpot we cook in to render our tallow. (It's just cooking the fat out of the meat which is all we do when we cook food anyway.) This block is about an inch thick and weighs 31 1/2 ounces. That makes just about 2 pounds of soap (pretty close to 1:1 tallow to soap weight.)
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Yes, pretty much any "essential oil" can be added for scents. Basically, you add them in when you've reached "trace" (the point where the soap is fully mixed and ready for putting in the mold.)I've never studied soap making but interested. Can you buy scents to add to it ?