Adam Engelhart

Soap: Lard and canola oil

September 5th, 2006

We haven’t made an animal-fat soap yet. Let’s try lard.

When the Black Table kids made soap, they started from bacon, and rendered the fat themselves, but cautioned readers that the procedure "smell[s] like a short-order cook after a triple shift." It is uncertain whether bacon bits have the same problem. Anyway, I decided to skip the whole bacon thing and use lard.

If you want to get lard in San Francisco, you have three options:

• Safeway or another supermarket (BORING!)
• A Mexican grocery store (the Spanish word is "manteca,") (Better, but not quite as cool as–)
• The PIRATE STORE! ARRRRRRRR!

There are many piratical uses for lard, which is why 826 Valencia carries it! I scooped this out of the lard vat there:

I melted the lard in my microwave. There were some impurities in it:

While these are probably valued among pirates, I removed them. This probably shows my middle-class suburban bourgeois sensibilities, but unidentified lumps of stuff in a substance which is supposed to make me clean doesn’t really fit in my world-view. If you want to make a postmodern soap, you could use unfiltered lard and make some kind of deconstructionist argument about how the very "cleansing of the cleaner" before it is made cheapens the transformative aspect of this folk-art undertaking. If you’ve actually read Derrida, feel free to comment with further contributions to postmodern critical soap theory.

Anyway. Fortunately, I know about filtration from experience. And I had all the appropriate apparatus to hand:

The lard had a faintly musty odor. Perhaps it had absorbed some of the smell of the wooden lard vat.

It took surprisingly long for the lard to strain through the coffee filters. I think it might have been freezing on the filter paper, slowing things down.

Finally, my wait was rewarded with clean lard:

The finished lard soap looked like this:

Next up: canola oil.

Canola oil is one of the newer additions to the human cupboard, but it comes from a long-domesticated plant: rapeseed. It was originally grown for lamp oil, and was used as a lubricant for steam equipment in the Industrial Revolution. Navies required a great deal of rapeseed oil for this purpose during World War II. Canadian farmers started growing it then, but they needed to find other uses for it when the war ended.

The problem with regular rapeseed oil is that it contains erucic acid, which is believed to cause cancer. Also, it has a lot of glucosinolates, strong-tasting compounds that make the oil unsuitable for either animal or human food.

Through selective breeding, Canadian crop scientists developed strains of rapeseed that were low in both erucic acid and glucosinolates. They called it canola, from CANada Oil, Low Acid. (Note the country-of-origin information on the label above.)

While I usually disapprove of coining new words for old or only marginally-new things, I really can’t hold it against the makers of canola oil. How would you like to be responsible for selling thousands and thousands of bottles of cooking oil, all of which are prominently labeled "RAPE"? "Hey, I’ve got a lot of ‘Nonconsensual and Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Oil’ up ins; ya wanna buy any of it?" Doesn’t work.

Incidentally, the plant’s name comes from the Latin word for turnip, rapum. The turnip, rapeseed, rutabaga, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and mustard plants are all members of the genus Brassica. There’s also an interesting story behind the genetics of the plants, but this is already getting pretty far afield.

I used 150 g of canola oil, because I wanted to see how a larger batch would turn out, and because I had a whole liter of the stuff, which was even cheaper than low-end olive oil.

Canola oil’s saponification factor is 0.134:

150 g canola oil
57 g water
20.1 g lye.

Mustard is the extrovert of genus Brassica. Most of its other members are rather bland, and canola oil carries on the tradition. It’s almost eerily scentless–it smells slightly oily, but that’s it.

Nothing too spectacular happened, but it did get harder than I was expecting it to. Having learned from my early olive-oil experiment, I ran the blender for a longer time. The soapmaking term for when the blend thickens is "trace," because the stirring spoon would leave traces in its path in the soap vat. Soaps without solid fats of some kind (tallow, lard, palm oil, coconut oil, or the like) take a long time to trace. Using a blender instead of a spoon makes things much faster, as does adding a bit of solid fat. Actually, now that I think about that, it also could be the case that I didn’t wash out all the lard from the prior batch. Oh, well.

The lard soap was already starting to set up a bit. This is pretty consistent with what I know of lard soap; it makes a fairly hard bar. I tried to get video of me pouring the canola oil soap into the tray, but it didn’t come out too well–pouring soap glop, steadying the tray, and trying to keep the soap glop in the tray and off your body doesn’t make for the best cinematography. Maybe I can bug Joe into coming over and helping out.

Prior: Videos.

Next: peanut oil, grapeseed oil, and trouble! And maybe flax, too!

Entry Filed under: Soap