Soap Queen

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Lard & Loofah Cold Process Soap Tutorial

Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

This Lard and Loofah Soap Recipe contains lard to give the soap a creamy lather. The light yellow color comes from natural carrot puree.

Lard and tallow are popular soapmaking ingredients. Tallow is the rendered fat of animals, and usually refers to fat from cows and sheep. Lard refers to pig fat. Lard and tallow give soap firmness and contribute to a stable lather. Because of these properties, both tallow and lard are common substitutes for palm oil.

Lard and tallow can be purchased from the store, or you can render your own at home. Rendering your own tallow is a great way to reduce, reuse and recycle. In the spirit of Earth Day this Friday, I saved bacon grease from an epic Bramble Berry staff lunch cooking extravaganza to use in this palm-free recipe. First, the bacon grease needed to be cleaned up to reduce the smell and remove any bacon bits. Click here to see the process. I also used leftover yogurt containers as the molds in this recipe. I love the cute little shape! Click here for more ideas on using recyclables for soap molds.

This Lard and Loofah Soap Recipe contains lard to give the soap a creamy lather. The light yellow color comes from natural carrot puree.

Once the bacon grease was cleaned up, I used it at 30% of my total recipe. I generally recommend using lard and tallow at 50% or less in your cold process recipes. If you’re looking for more tallow recipes, check out this guest post by Eric Vought for tallow laundry soap. I added shredded loofah to the bottom layer of these bars for exfoliation. The top layer contains carrot puree, which gives the soap a soft yellow color and additional creaminess. For more information on using purees in cold process soap, click here.

This Lard and Loofah Soap Recipe contains lard to give the soap a creamy lather. The light yellow color comes from natural carrot puree.

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How to Prepare Bacon Grease for Soapmaking

Filed Under: Tips & Tricks

Learn how to reuse bacon grease to make cold process soap!
Hypothetically, you can make cold process soap with just about any oil or fat. This includes animal fats. The most common animal fats are lard and tallow. Lard is rendered pig fat, while tallow is rendered fat from meat other than pork such as cow, lamb or goat. Tallow and lard are excellent for soapmaking. Both contribute to the firmness of the bar and a stable lather. Lard and tallow are commonly used as palm oil substitutes. If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of tallow in soapmaking, check out the Understanding Tallow for Soaping guest post.

Lard and tallow can be purchased at the store ready to use. Or, you can render your own at home. The basic idea of rendering lard and tallow involves “cooking” the fat along with water. Then, the entire mixture is placed into a container to cool. The fat will rise to the top of the container, while the water will fall to the bottom. This process helps remove any particles within the oil. The process may vary slightly depending on what form the fat is in. For example. if you got your tallow from a butcher, you most likely have chunks of fat and meat that will need to be strained. Our local sister store, Otion, rendered tallow from a local butcher in the Crock-Pot (shown below); click here to see how they did it. They used the rendered tallow to make Mahogany Tallow Soap. This is a topic we’ve touched on before here and here.

Learn how to reuse bacon grease to make soap!Otion Soap Bar recently rendered chunks of tallow in the Crock-Pot for soapmaking, click here to see the process. 

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