Adam Engelhart

Soap: Lard and canola oil

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!

6 comments September 5th, 2006

Soap: Videos

Just two videos at this point: one of the mixed-oil soap in the blender, and one of it being poured into the trays.

Prior: A mixture, and walnut.

Next: Lard, canola oil, and PIRATES!

Add comment September 5th, 2006

Soap: A mixture, and walnut

I thought I was just going to make single-oil soaps, but coconut and olive oil soaps have interestingly complementary properties, so perhaps half-and-half . . .

50 g olive oil
50 g coconut oil
38 g water
16.2 g lye (the arithmetic mean of the numbers used in the last entry)

The mixed oil looked like this:

,

and the lye looked like this:

.

For completeness, the plain lye looked like this:

Earlier, Lauren asked whether you just dumped everything in the blender and turned it on–and yep, that’s about all there is to it. There are only a couple caveats:

• When you mix the lye into the water, it will heat up. Let it cool down a bit before you mix it into the oil. About 90 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit is good. This doesn’t matter too much, as long as you don’t dump it into the oil immediately after adding the lye.
• Add the lye solution to the oil, and not the other way around.
• The lye solution gives off nasty vapors. They don’t have a smell as such, just a stinging sensation. Have a window open, don’t lean over the lye solution, and you should be fine.
• You must wear goggles and look like an Intepid Soap Warrior from an anime cartoon, comme ça:
  

As for this soap, it was about halfway between the two oils, in the amount of time it took to thicken, the ease of pouring it into the tray, and in color and smell. As for the others, the olive-oil soap was a little bit stiffer, while the coconut-oil one was already quite hard.

When it was in the blender, it looked like this:

And, after I poured it, like this:

Well, so much for the first few classic soapmaking oils. Part of the fun here was going to be using really strange things, so let’s start with . . . walnut!

I just noticed that this can is labeled “ROASTED WALNUT OiL”. The funky capitalization makes me think of “BiL”, the fannish abbreviation for Minneapolitan folk-rockers Boiled in Lead. Anyway.

The can gives it a sort of wood-shop feel. Unsurprisingly, walnut oil has a nutty smell.

Walnut oil’s saponification value is a fairly standard 0.135:

100 g walnut oil
38 g water
13.5 g lye.

I was expecting the walnut oil to be darker in color, for some reason. Maybe it was the woodshop metaphor.

Joe and Jane came over shortly before I made the walnut oil soap. Once it was in the tray, we went out to dinner and to meet up with Robin, who was in town for a family reunion.

After I got back, I cracked off a bit of the coconut-oil soap that was hanging over the edge of the tray and washed my hands with it. It worked! I made soap! This is really cool!

The next day, the mustardy color of the olive-oil soap had abated somewhat, and it was a bit harder. Here’s a picture of the tray:

I took the soaps out of the ice-cube tray. The coconut-oil and coconut-olive soaps popped right out with a little persuasion. I didn’t pop the others out as much as I scooped them, with a knife.

The olive-oil soap was the consistency of soft peanut butter. The walnut-oil soap was harder, but not by much.

I spread these two out on a plate in hopes that I could dry them out a bit. (By the way, my drying rack is also made by Ingvar Kamprad Scientific Supply.)

I cleaned up shop and went on to to the next day’s soapmaking.

Prior: Olive and coconut oils.

Next: Videos.

1 comment September 5th, 2006

O. M. G.

Diesel Sweeties will be syndicated by United Features Syndicate beginning 8 January 2007. R., I shall drink to your health tonight!

Add comment September 5th, 2006

Three Ideas

The ends of BART cars are labeled “X” and “Y”, but I would rather they were labeled 3′ and 5′.

Rite Aid is a drug store, but I think it should be a liturgical supply shop.

I should move to Florida and start a tool shop called “Miami Vise.” (Apparently, a purveyor of fly-fishing equipment has beaten me to this one.)

Add comment September 4th, 2006

Soap: Olive and Coconut Oils

I decided to start with olive oil, because I had a bunch of it, it was relatively cheap (especially for the lower grades–you get no benefit from extra-virgin in soap; I just used it because I had it around), and it makes a classic soap.

You’ll frequently see people advertising “Castile” soap. This comes from the days when Castilian soapmakers had a lot more olive oil than they did tallow (the standard soapmaking fat in those days), and figured out that they could make some very mild, high-quality soap with it. These days, people add all sorts of other stuff, but all castile soaps are based on olive oil.

Olive oil’s saponification number is 0.134, so the recipe will be:

100 g olive oil
38 g water
13.4 g lye.

My scale only reads down to 1 gram precision, so I stuck with 13 grams to avoid having too much lye in the soap. I measured out ingredients in a beaker from Ingvar Kamprad Scientific Supply.

After a few minutes, I decided to call it. It looked a little thicker, and that’s about all you can hope for with 100% olive.

I poured it into the ice-cube tray I had waiting. The soap was the color of mustard, which shouldn’t have been all that surprising, but the resemblance was striking.

My next victim was the anti-olive oil: coconut.

Here’s a picture of the end of the jar, showing the crystals:

And yes, it was much harder. It was almost a slurry when I poured it out of the blender, and I didn’t run it for nearly as long. Oh, ingredients:

100 g coconut oil
38 g water
19 g lye (saponification number 0.190)
Here’s what the liquid coconut oil looked like after I stuck it in the microwave for a while:

And here’s the final product. The olive-oil soap was a little darker, but not quite as dark as it looks in this picture. The coconut-oil soap looks like it’s at least firm in this shot, and it is. It sets up very hard, and very fast:

Prior: Background.
Next: Mixed oils, walnut, and more!

10 comments September 3rd, 2006

Soap: Background

There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. . . .
Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.

–Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England“

(You should actually read the whole poem, as it’s very good. I love how smoothly Bishop’s poetry reads–is that the sort of thing English majors say? In any event, I’m digressing before I start.)

Some time ago, a friend of mine pointed me towards Trader Joe’s Lavender Body Oil. I don’t remember exactly how I came to this thought, but I eventually decided it would be interesting to make soap from this oil, and possibly from others . . .

Eventually I accumulated quite a few “others”:

And so here we go! I’m going to make soap from all the oils in this picture. It’ll be an adventure; my approach will be much closer to Cockeyed.com Science Club than to Angewandte Chemie. (Frankly, I think Rob has much more fun than the Ang. Chem. guys, but don’t tell them that.)

First, some background. I’m going to radically oversimplify the science here, and will probably get some things wrong, but this is essentially what happens.

What we call “fat” is, chemically speaking, almost all triglycerides–molecules formed of a glycerine backbone with three fatty acids attached. If you add water and a base to fat, the fat undergoes a process called hydrolysis, where the glycerine separates out and the fatty acids bond with the base, giving fatty acid salts. This is called saponification. (Check out that last link; it’s from Molecule of the Day, which is made by a guy who actually knows this stuff, and gives a great overview of the saponification process.)

Anyway, saponification is extremely useful, especially for those fatty-acid salts we get out of them. Those salts have split personalities: one end is strongly attracted to water, and the other is strongly attracted to oil. (I’m oversimplifying, as I mentioned.) This means that these molecules are very good at lifting oils and other non-water-like things out of whatever they’re in and into the water, so you can wash them away. These bundles of molecules are called micelles. (Also MOTD, and also worth a look.)

The practical upshot of all this is 1) you can make soap if you add a base to a fat and 2) you can clean things with said soap. The only real gotcha here is that the best bases for making soap, like lye, are not terribly friendly to the skin, as anyone who has seen Fight Club can testify. (The first time I saw Fight Club, I was in an airplane flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway.)

So you need to know how much lye you need to react with whatever amount of oil you’re using. Fortunately, this is easy to find–it’s called the saponification number. There are all kinds of tables of these numbers on the Internet, as well as calculators for determining how much of all the ingredients you need. Also, this site explains all this with a cute story involving bunnies, wolves, border collies, and sheep.

Prior: A Conversation at Safeway Regarding Soap.
Next: olive oil, coconut oil, and a mixture.

2 comments September 2nd, 2006