Saturday: Up at 6 with a breakfast of sausage, eggs, grapefruit, coffee and toast, exercise and head out the door: mulch, weed, collect eggs, find old eggs, feed pigs, repair fencing, burn brush, salt cure ham, make lye soap, use liquid manure, move gravel pile, go to a party, find kitten in middle of intersection, Cindy finds home for kitten, return home, find bucket of garden scraps for the pigs left by kind neighbors (thank you Melanie and Sara) and bags of fresh produce, turn in to bed and another Saturday is done.
Instructions for making the lye soap: We have been making this soap for the past two years.
5 pounds 7 oz. lard (rendered from fat back)
12 oz. lye
22 fl. oz. ice cold water
Peppermint extract
In our quest to use the whole hog it was inevitable that soap making would work its way onto the agenda. Perhaps we have cheated by not converting wood ash into lye? Instead we use commercially prepared granulated lye. The process is fairly straightforward. What follows are basic directions. See the link at the bottom if you want to try this yourself.
1. Wear goggles and use rubber gloves (lye is quite caustic).
2. Pour your cold water into a plastic bucket.
3. Stir in your lye and stir with a wooden spoon. The solution immediately heats up. My directions told me to cover the bucket until it reaches a temperature of 85 degrees. My solution hit 85 in 30 seconds. Maybe my ice cold water was not ice cold enough?
4. Meanwhile melt 5 pounds and 7 oz. of lard. I was a bit short and only had 5 pounds. So, I modified the amounts required on water and lye. The quantities need to be precise.
5. When the lard reaches a temperature of 95 degrees begin stirring in the lye water. Then stir in the peppermint.
6. Stir until it reaches the consistency of pudding.
7. Pour into your soap mold. Mine was a wooden crate that originally held the complete Inspector Morse DVD set. I placed wooden dividers to create individual bars.
8. It takes about 2 weeks to fully cure.
The big question is whether you used the formula accurately to create soap? Or, did you goof and create a convenient way to remove skin? To date we have been pleased with the results. Use the following directions when making your soap. http://www.ehow.com/how_4695940_lye-soap-lard.html