The thing with beef tallow is that it turns waxy immediately it’s removed from the flame.
Wax, as we know it, it hard.
And that’s exactly what we are looking for when we want to make bar soap.
Combine hardness with good foaming, and you have a superb soap bar that can serve you for ages.
And that’s what we shall be talking about here.
But you might be asking…
Beef fat, and soap…how do those two go together?
Stay with me…
BEEF TALLOW
So we render beef tallow from beef fat.
Right after that, we purify it by boiling it with salt water, thereby reducing the stink.
Now we have our tallow, and we want soap out of it.
How do we go about that?
First things first…have a list of what you need to start making soap.
Beef tallow, coconut oil, sodium hydroxide, weighing scale, immersion blender, mixing stick, stove, stainless steel container, a couple of other containers for mixing, soap mold among others.
In my case, I used soapcalc.net for ingredient calculations. I melted a mixture of 400g of tallow and 100g of coconut oil in a sufuria and allowed it to cool to about 60 Celcius.
In the meantime, I weighed about 74g of sodium hydroxide and added it to 111g of water as I mixed.
Remember that sodium hydroxide (also called lye) is added to water and NOT the other way round.
Once the lye mixture was ready, I poured it into the melted oils and started mixing them thoroughly using an immersion blender.
The mixing went on until the consistency became porridge-like.
After this, I poured it into a soap mould and allowed it to solidify while cooling.
After 24hrs, the soap bar was removed from the mold and cut into pieces.
The soap pieces can then be allowed to cure over a period of 4 weeks to allow full saponification to take place.
Once the 4 weeks are over, the soap could be packaged for sale or used.
IN CONCLUSION
Soap making is a good use for beef tallow.
This is because the fats present in animals mirror our own body fats making it a good soap for those who have sensitive skins.
This way, golden beef tallow goes a long way to show its goldeness.
