Make Your Own Soap

There are loads of websites telling you how to make soap, hundreds of blog posts that start with massive preambles before getting down to brass tacks of how to do it. So lets do this a different way. I'm going to start with how I make soap, then I'm going to move on to why, and THEN I'm going to talk about whats actually happening.

Ok, tell me how to make soap.

For ingredients you're going to need oils (fats), lye (sodium hydroxide), water (rain water is ideal), and if you want to add some scent you'll be wanting a few drops of some essential oils (be sparing!), and perhaps dried herbs or spices. And if you really must colour it, use a crayon (take the paper off first, obviously). 

For protective equipment (AND I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOU MAKING SOAP WITHOUT PPE) you want some safety goggles and rubber gloves. You might also consider a face visor if you think you're likely to be a messy worker.

And for equipment to work with, you need a huge stainless steel pan (I use my stock pot). I mean huge. No messing about with a little one, unless you want a disastrous boil over, potentially a kitchen fire and, at very least, a god awful mess. And you need some polypropylene jugs, and the most accurate scale you have - a digital scale working down to the gram is good. You need to stir the mixture as you make it - those rubber spatulas, the silicone ones, are ideal. But get a couple, they'll get hot as you work and swapping them is good. Lastly, you need something to pack the soap into while it sets - I use silicone molds.

Firstly, weigh everything out. My basic recipe is as follows:

400g Sunflower oil (ordinary cooking stuff)

400g Olive Oil (get the cheaper extra virgin stuff)

400g Coconut Oil (again, get the cheap stuff from a Chinese supermarket)

400ml rain water 

180g sodium hydroxide

20 drops of essential oils, spices (optional)

Firstly, mix up your oils and get any other dry ingdredients ready. I often use a mix of nutmeg oil, cinnamon oil, a little pine oil, tea tree, and a hand full of coarsely ground allspice grains. Once these are ready, put them aside.

Now don your safety glasses and marigolds, and slowly pour the sodium hydroxide into the water, then stir it with one of your spatulas until it is dissolved. I've handled some of the nastiest chemicals you can imagine and some biological hazards you really don't even want to imagine, but most often its the every day chemicals that people have accidents with. Sodium hydroxide is one of them, it WILL blind you if you get it in your eyes. So don't. If it gets on your skin wash it off, and keep washing it. 

Put the oil in the big pan, and start warming it up. Use your spatula to get the last of the oil out of what you weighed it in too. And when its warming, pour your sodium hydroxide solution into it and start stirring while you continue heating, being sure you get down to the bottom of the pan and keep the soap from sticking. Very soon, you get something like this...

It'll boil up and terrify you, but keep it on a heat and keep it stirring. If your spatula gets too hot, put it in a plastic jug to cool down and get your other one. Keep stirring, and soon it'll look like apple sauce. At that point, keep stirring...

Keep going. Heat it more gently if you like, but keep going. It'll start looking like mashed potato...

And now? Keep going, it'll start getting really thick and just at the bottom, where its hottest, it'll start to look a bit dry. Its done... 

Now get it off the heat and beat in the other ingredients. This is going to be hard work. But whether thats a crumbled up crayon, spices, oils, whatever it is, beat it until its combined and then start plopping it out into your mold. For this I use the two spatulas, and occasionally I risk pushing it down into the molds with the rubber gloves...

And thats it. Let it cool just enough so you can handle it, pop it out of the molds and put it on a plastic boards to cool. When its cool and hard, its ready to use. 

You're kidding me, its that easy?

Yes. The whole process takes about, oh, I dunno, half an hour or so, maybe three quarters, until you can put the kettle on and wait for it to cool. But easy? You might find it hot, stressful, worrying, if you spill it you've got problems. But yes, its as simple and easy as that.

But why? You can buy soap...

Ok then don't. No skin off my nose. I make soap because its easy, quite fun, I can get just the soap I want with control over whats in it. Quite a rewarding thing to do. I've also always found all the kinds of soap you can buy just leave me itchy all over, this soap doesn't. 

Whats actually happening then?

The chemistry of this is simple enough. You're taking a fat, chemically breaking it up, into fatty acids, and making the salt of that. The process is called saponification, and its quite fascinating when you read up about it.

Can I change the recipe or use other fats?

Yes, you can. You'll want to hunt down the saponification value of the oils you want to use though, otherwise you'll end up making something potentially very dangerous. The internet is full of sites that will give you those values, it won't take you long. But if you're going down that route, find some more in-depth reading first. This is a primer for doing your first batch, not a guide to all forms of soap making.

Is there a safer, lower stress way?

Yes. The process I've described above is hot processing. There is also a method called cold process with is easier and safer, but can take weeks of waiting. There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, but you do need to be able to put something aside somewhere safe and forget about it. Lots of advice about how to do that online, and its a common beginners way in. Maybe start here.

Operation Infinite Yeast - Growing Your Own Yeast

There are lots of ways to make bread, and to be honest none of them are hard. But they all come down to one thing - making a dough that when cooked doesn't become so heavy and stodgy you don't want to eat it. The way we're most used to is to use yeast, and of course thats the bread you're most used to buying. 

In normal times I would suggest buying dried yeast to keep in the cupboard in an airtight container for whenever you want to make bread. Its what I've done for years, but apparently now that everyone has been panic buying you just can't buy yeast. So, you're looking at your last little bit of dry yeast and you're wondering what you're going to do to make bread going forward? Well, you've got lots of options, but if you want something most like a loaf of bread that comes down to four techniques. Soda bread, where you use baking soda to raise the bread, saved dough (as covered excellently by Kate here) so you cultivate yeast in the dough and save some over for the next loaf each time, sourdough which is the use of wild yeast and bacteria cultivated from the flour itself, and lastly you can maintain your own yeast culture. 

Basically yeast is a microorganism, its a fungus but a single celled fungus, unlike the molds and mushrooms you're familiar with. And if you give it the right conditions it will grow, and you'll get more of it. But you need to make sure that its got enough of a run up what you're going to grow it in to make sure that what you get is actually your yeast, and not something else.

So, in a few steps, here's how to make your own yeast culture.

1. Seed Culture

This is a bit of a technical term, sorry for that. But in most practical applications of microbiology one of the most important things to do when trying to use microbes to convert any one natural material in to anything else (here its 'flour' into 'more yeast and bread') is to make sure you've got the right microbe growing very, very fast to ensure it outcompetes everything else. If you don't do that here you'll end up with a sourdough rather than a yeast culture, which is delicious but slower to bake with.

So here I recommend making up a seed culture. Get a clean jar and pour in about 100-150ml of water, and stir in a teaspoon of malt extract, half a teaspoon of yeast extract (marmite) and about a dessertspoon of sugar. Cover it, and let it cool to blood temperature. When its cooled, add in some of your dried yeast, a little will do, and stir it again. Again leave it loosely covered and leave it somewhere warm. 

By morning, it will be cloudy, and probably very, very fizzy. Don't shake it, but stir it very gently or there is a very good chance it'll end up all over your kitchen counter top. And this is your 'seed' or 'starter' culture. Its a big, liquid mass of very fast growing yeast cells, and they're ready to out-compete everything in your flour.

2. First Flour Ferment

To 3 dessertspoons of bread flour, add 2 dessertspoons of your starter culture, in another clean jar. Stir it, cover lightly. Later in the day, when its good and fizzy again and you can see air bubbles appearing, add another 2 dessertspoons of water, and 3 more dessertspoons of flour. And by bed time it will be like the jar of fast growing yeast to the right.

So the fast growing yeast you put in this morning has been making enzymes like something called amylase all day. The job of that enzyme is to turn the starch in your flour into smaller carbohydrates (sugars) that it can eat. Bread flour also contains a lot of gluten, which is a protein, and the yeast uses both of these and all of the trace nutrients in the flour to grow and make more yeast. Actively growing yeast generates gas, which you can see as bubbles, and bubbles make noise which you'll hear if you click on the video on the right.

And this is almost ready to use, but probably not yet, because its almost certainly nearly bed time. You can bake your first loaf with this tomorrow afternoon. Put your jar of yeast culture in the fridge overnight.

3. Wake Your Yeast Up

Its not literally asleep, but it has slowed down over night. If you take this and mix it in to your bread dough its just going to sit there and sulk. To make this work you really want your yeast to be growing very fast, and very actively. At this point I add in half a teaspoon of sugar, 3 dessertspoons of flour, 2 of water, mix it in and cover it loosely and, crucially, leave it somewhere warm. Behind the telly, on a warm window ledge, wherever you have. In a few hours you'll be ready to make bread.

4. Make Bread, and Save Your Yeast!

I use most of my yeast culture up on a loaf, saving about a dessertspoon full, and to that I add another dessertspoon of flour, a little less of water, and I let it grow. When it fizzing again and forming air bubbles it goes back into the fridge until I need it again.

As long as you don't kill it, you've got yeast forever. Feed it up to the same volume you started with before putting it in the fridge, and be sure to wake it up in the morning with a fresh feed before using it, and it'll just work.

As for the bread, well, the worlds your oyster. Its basically a live yeast so you make the dough up any way you like - this was one of my standard malted wholegrains, but it'll work for anything you'd use a bread yeast for. 

And thats it - if you can master this then congratulations, you're a yeast farmer. Good luck, and happy baking.

Composting in a Crisis - Make Your Own Compost Heap

Here in Cambridge collection of our compost bins has now suspended for the next month and a half, to allow council workers to concentrate on making sure the recyclables and black bins get emptied. And while thats an inconvenience, I think we're all agreed that this is very much an example of a first world problem in the face of a whole world crisis and therefore an acceptable loss. Pandemic management or green waste collection? Its not a difficult call is it?

But then what are we all going to do with all the stuff that we normally get collected? Well, I think I need to split this into multiple posts. The first, this one, is about composting. Then I'm going to talk about making your own stock and perhaps frugal cooking. But first, compost.

The internet is awash with guidance on making compost and my gosh do they make it look complicated! It really isn't. It can be, or it can not. I'm going to talk about my garden heap, the allotment heap, and describe how to make your own.

Garden Composter Bin - With Worms!

This is my garden composter.

This is what it currently looks like inside:

And this is what comes out from the bottom of it:

Literally, if you order a composter bin like that, put it on the soil in a corner of the garden (shady is best), and keep putting compostable material in it, thats what you get. And if you scavenge a handfull of tiger worms from someone has them, or order some online, it will go like the clappers. The access port at the bottom lets you extract compost at the bottom while you keep adding matter at the top. As you keep putting more in the worms move in to eat it, leaving completed compost beneath them. Honestly, its as simple as that, its like magic. This compost is fine for most of my potting for vegetables for the allotment, and it works tremendously well as soil conditioner. The white bits, the shelly bits, are bits of egg shell, a side effect of eating a lot of eggs from our own hens.

If you can't get tiger worms, don't worry, it'll still work. Its just slower.

What can I put in a garden worm bin?

Well more or less anything that will rot down. Avoid meat because it attracts rats, avoid fish because its going to stink, and avoid too much citrus and whole layers of onion skins because its too acidic. Other than that - fruit peel and cores, vegetable peel, teabags, used ground coffee, weeds from the garden, egg shells, grass clippings... It all goes in. Its a great idea that if you put in lots of one kind of thing, especially something green, to also add plenty of handfulls of scrunched up newspaper (or that brown packing paper from Amazon, old printer paper, torn up carboard, etc.). Compost nerds will tell you its about C and N balance, but don't let that scare you. They're just saying if there's lots of one thing and not enough of another it goes wrong.

What SHOULD I put in any garden composter?

Urine. Pee on it. Pee on it. Every. Single. Day. Not only are you not then flushing away gallons of water, you're adding rapidly degradable nitrogen sources that give a massive boost to the bacteria and fungi that make your compost. You're also adding the smell of human urine and somewhat putting off foxes, mice and rats. Don't be precious - get out there and if you're a chap you know how this is done, if you're a lady use a jug or a bucket. 

And paper. Newspaper, cardboard, packing paper... All of that is handy in a home compost mix. Not loads, not masses, but every few weeks some scrunched up paper is a good idea because your home scraps are a bit rich, a bit high in nitrogen. 

And if you can get a scoop of well rotting stuff from someone elses compost to start things off, that helps too. It isn't essential but it starts the process off a bit faster.

What if I can't afford a bin?

Compsting just works. A pile of decaying matter under a bush with an old rug on top works. Can you scavenge a few planks or bits of door to make a crude square with an open front? Use that, and put a sheet of black plastic or old carpet on top. Pee on it every day, don't drown it in grass clippings with nothing else mixed in, and it will work. Just remember to cover it over, do it on earth rather than paving, and it will work.

What if I need a bigger heap?

On my allotment I've got three pallets nailed together to make an open square, a pile of decaying matter, and a sheet of plastic on top. Many shopkeepers can give you old pallets if you ask nicely, and you are NOT going to need to go bigger than this.

I want to compost but I live in a flat. What do I do?

I applaud your enthusiasm. Essentially you can still use a vermicompost (worm compost) system. This advice here is very good.

What about meat, bone and things?

Hardcore, eh? Well again, I applaud you. Now we're talking about anaerobic digestion and this is not for the feint hearted. I would advise that the first thing you should do is cook the bones and scraps of meat for stock, but if you want to then compost it then the search term you're looking for is bokashi composting. Remember though that however you do anaerobic composting you end up with something that isn't yet compost, its going to need to be added back to a normal compost heap or even buried to make use of it. As stated - this is hardcore stuff.