Soap making is a great “self-reliance” skill that enables a person provide something for themselves that they would otherwise have to depend on a store to get.
Homemade Soap and Emergency Preparedness
Making soap is one of those old skills that used to be really common and now is nearly unheard of. If soap makers are ever again needed, learning it would give you a valuable skill that could help your family and community.
However, for prepping purposes I prefer keeping a stock of ‘pre-made’ ready-to-use soap or even store bought soap rather than prepping ‘soap making supplies’ (click here for Five Great Soaps to Prep). While I always have a good supply on hand, soap making fats and oils do not store well, so it is difficult to keep them for longer than a few years.
The only exception I make to this is lye, I stock plenty of lye as it consumes time and fuel to make. I am not aware of a shelf-life on lye, and have personally used lye that was nearly 20 years old. The store bought version is inexpensive, and has many uses – this makes it very easy for me to prep.
Soap Making Facts
Soap is actually a salt (source). It’s the result of a chemical reaction between fat (an acid) and lye (sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or potassium hydroxide (KOH) a base. Lye is also commercially sold as a plumbing solvent for clogged drains and is also used to preserve food like in the Norwegian dish lutefisk. Lye is not a scary man-made chemical, it occurs in nature and with a little knowledge can be handled very safely.
Soap cannot be made without lye. It is possible to create a cleansing substance without lye, but it will not be soap. Sodium hydroxide is often used to make solid soap while potassium hydroxide is usually used to make softer soaps and liquid soap. For this article we will be using sodium hydroxide (NaOH) for a harder bar of soap.
The amount of lye needed to react with the fats and oils will vary depending on the chemical makeup of the fats and oils you are using. This is why it is important to use an established soap recipes or a lye calculator, when you make soap. A cup of olive oil may not need as much lye as the same amount of a different type of oil, so if you swap oils on the recipe you may end up with too much or too little lye. Too much lye means the soap will be caustic (capable of burning, corroding, or destroying living tissue) too little lye means the soap will contain too much fat, which will go rancid in time.
Cold Processed Soap vs Hot Processed Soap
Cold-processed soap still requires some heat but not much. This soap making process requires exact measurements of lye and fat amounts and computing their ratio, using saponification charts or a lye calculator. With cold processed soap, the bulk of the saponification happens after the combined oil and lye solution is poured into molds, usually over a period of two to six weeks. Because of this, cold processed soap still contains glycerine which is generally considered good for human skin.
Hot-processed soaps are created by encouraging the saponification reaction by adding heat to speed up the reaction. Unlike cold-processed soap, in hot-processed soap, the oils are completely saponified by the end of the handling period. Therefore hot processed soap is ready to use right away. In the “fully boiled hot-process” technique the glycerine and most of the impurities in the fat, lye, and water (which gives cold pressed soap its color) are completely cooked out of the soap and drained off as a liquid to be repurposed, leaving a pure hard white bar.
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