Misc Soap Making- Fresh Goat Milk vs Canned Evaporated

GenErik

Veteran Member
I'm new to soap making.

We made a double batch using 12 oz. Canned Evaporated Goats Milk, 100 oz. Olive Oil, 20.6 oz Water & 12.82 oz. Food Grade Lye, Lavender Essential Oil and absolutely love it !

When I mentioned it to a friend they gave me some fresh Goats milk which I poured into ice cube trays and froze. My question is how much fresh Goats Milk do I use- the same 12 oz ? or since it was fresh and not evaporated a different amount ?

Also, does anyone have a source for bulk olive oil- we bought the large 2 pack at Costco which makes 2 double batches, but wonder if there is someplace cheaper/better ?

Genny
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
This isn't to answer supply question in OP, but I am wondering if any TB members have made soap using only what can be produced on the homestead, rather than purchasing anything?

Considering what's been posted in the thread about surviving during a grand solar minimum, I'd think it might be a good skill to learn.
 

GenErik

Veteran Member
This isn't to answer supply question in OP, but I am wondering if any TB members have made soap using only what can be produced on the homestead, rather than purchasing anything?

Considering what's been posted in the thread about surviving during a grand solar minimum, I'd think it might be a good skill to learn.

You're right. In the past we just stocked up on soap when it was on sale.

We truly prefer our homemade, that's why I was hoping someone could answer my question/s.

Genny
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
Have you made soap with your own home-produced lye and oil of some sort, as well as a scent also produced at home?

During a severe solar minimum, one won't be able to buy olive oil, food grade lye, etc.

This is what I was asking.
 

GenErik

Veteran Member
Have you made soap with your own home-produced lye and oil of some sort, as well as a scent also produced at home?

During a severe solar minimum, one won't be able to buy olive oil, food grade lye, etc.

This is what I was asking.

No, we haven't. We just got into soapmaking. We would like to make enough to last us several years.

We live in the city limits of a small town that doesn't allow burning (wood ash to make lye), livestock (for lard). We do grow mint/spearmint for scent.

Out plan is to move, hopefully this year (to MO), where we will be able to be more self sufficient.
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
Too bad you can't do that now, but I hope you can make such a move eventually.

If I were healthy and a lot younger, I would be doing the same sort of thing.
 

Wildwood

Veteran Member
You definitely could use more milk but you will need to reduce the water by the same amount you increase the milk. 50/50 would be a great balance of milk and water...16.3 ounces of each would work.

In a SHTF situation, food would need to be pretty plentiful for me sacrifice precious fats for soap making. I make soap for a living and consider my soaping oils preps. In other words, the food grade oils I use will immediately become food preps. I have hundreds of bars of soap in stock at any given time. That would have to last. The oils I use that are not food grade would become a base for salves and ointments. My essential oils would become medicinal supplies.
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
In a SHTF situation, we'd probably all be using lard or tallow to make soap. We'd be cooking with lard, too.

Assuming we had them.

I agree cooking oil would be precious and if there are no animals to provide it, I can only think of sunflower seed and peanuts to even crudely press any oils from. And if it's too cold to grow peanuts, it would just be the sunflower seeds. I'm sure there must be other fairly common seeds one could press, but I don't know of any.
 

Wildwood

Veteran Member
BTW you won't save much buying olive oil in bulk unless you can get it without having to pay shipping. I buy in bulk and the shipping is horrible unless you can get enough to make a pallet and have it shipped freight.
 

summerthyme

Administrator
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Pumpkin seeds (the hulless type are best, but can be trickier to grow) run about 40% oil. I always wanted to get one of those neat little oilseed presses, but could never justify spending the money. I suspect if I really wanted/needed to press vegetable oil, my son's could cobble something up using a hydraulic press with some sort of a heat source that would work, and in large enough quantities to make sense (the biggest drawback I can see with the tabletop oilseed presses)

But we'd be going back to lard soap... wait, I never stopped! I've made many, many pounds of it over the decades, and the longer it ages, the better it becomes... any objectionable odor (which shouldn't be a problem in the first place as l9ng as you use fresh lard) vanishes, and it becomes milder with age. I usually let it air out and dry for 3-6 months, then seal it up for storage, as leaving it unwrapped over long periods of time dries it eventually into a rock hard lump.

I recently found a 2 1/2 gallon plastic ice cream tub (Schwanns company used to sell ice cream in 6 quart and 10 quart tubs which were really heavy, durable plastic. We haven't bought anything from them in at least 25 years, and we still have half a dozen of them around!) tucked away in a corner of the basement, under a work bench. It was full... I just didn't know of what! I cautiously opened it, and discovered it was full of homemade soft soap... had to be 20 years old! It's currently in the barn milkhouse, where we're using it for cleaning various items too unwieldy to wash in the kitchen sink. It smells wonderful (it was unscented) and works amazingly well. Oh... when we had our house fire back in 1980, we tried *everything* to remove the smoke stains and odor from everything from clothing to hardwoid furniture. The ONLY thing that worked was homemade soft soap!

It's easy to add fragrance in a very low tech way by simply sealing the bars with fragrant plant materials... lilac blossoms work really well, as does lemon balm leaves, peppermint leaves, or pretty much anything you can find which appeals to you.

The scent isn't as long lasting as using essential oils, but it does work, and you'd only use that technique for special "toiket" soaps. Most essential oils, even if you had stocked some, or has enough plant material to distill some, would be far too valuable as medicine to use for aesthetics. Although I always try to keep quite a bit of tea tree oil around, as adding 1 ounce of it to 1# of soap is a very useful preventative for jock itch, ringworm, female fungal infections (external) and athletes foot. We keep a bar in the shower at all times.

Hogs, especially the older breeds (which were valued as "lard hogs" for precisely that reason) can produce a LOT of lard. My son butchered 7 pastured young hogs last fall (supplemented with corn, pumpkins and garden waste) and ended upnwith over 300# of lard! Lard is a valuable (and tasty, if properly rendered and stored) cooking fat, but few families are going to need more than 100# in a year, especially if they have a dairy cow or two for butter, and butcher a few dozen old laying hens for soup and stew... you get a LOT of chicken fat off a few old hens. Schmaltz (the Jewish term for chicken fat) may be the tastiest fat ever for making dumplings, biscuits and other savory pastries. It's also excellent for frying, sauteeing vegetables, and almost any non-sweet type baking use. It does tend to bee too soft to make good flaky pie crust or layered pastries, but lard or butter- or a combination of the two- are the best for those anyway.

Anyone with the ability to raise livestock shouldn't lack for fat in their diet or for soap. If you're going to have to rely on your gardens for most of your food, it will be trickier. Still, raising pumpkins (probably in a waste area, to avoid using too much garden space), using the flesh for food (or animal feed... they also make excellent deer food, and would be a great way to lure deer or wild hogs within arrow range of a blind or stand) and the seeds to press for oil might work.

Setting snares for raccoons and woodchucks to protect your garden crops, or simply lying in wait with a .22 or good pellet gun would give you some fat (both those tend to be quite fatty, especially in fall) , and it would probably be better in soap than soup... "wild" fat often can be pretty gamey.

I'm sorry I don't have an answer to the OP... I've never used milk to make soap.

Summerthyme
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
Summerthyme, I meant to ask about pumpkin seeds. Good to know. If I could just find a surefire way to get rid of the damned vine borers, I'd have a source of oil as well as good winter food for my chickens. The only thing I've ever come up with was to build a screen house that was totally bug proof and then hand pollinate the squash or pumpkins I was growing. A 10' x 20' would be plenty big for my needs. I don't think I'd be up to a project like that any more, though.

The chickens LOVE the seeds in an old smashed pumpkin, so if the seeds were pressed, I imagine they'd also go for the stuff that's left over. I'm sure there's a name for it but I've never heard one.
 

summerthyme

Administrator
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It would probably just be something like "pumpkin seed meal"... same basic idea as soybean meal or cottonseed meal. We don't have vine borer problems, but striped cucumber beetles are our nemesis. They dont usually kill off pumpkin vines (which they do by spreading disease) ,but i have a terrible time getting cucumbers or melons for long.

The big gray squash bugs are even worse in some ways, but I usually can find their egg clusters early and wipe out most of the potential population. Chickens won't eat them!

What about putting a pile of diatomaceous earth around the main stem of the plant? I know it's re0commended that you cover the various runners with dirt in several places as they develop, which allows them to root... if a borer bores into the main stem, you are left with several "daughter plants" for lack of a better way to put it, which survive because they have their own root system.

I need to look into the borer life cycle... it seems there should be some time/place where they're more vulnerable.

Summerthyme
 

LC

Veteran Member
Martin house, I'll drift just a bit to suggest that you raise butternut or other moschota squash. They are much less susceptible to borers. Also plant as late as possible to avoid some of them. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has a good selection.
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
Actually, I gave up trying to grow pumpkins and squash. Solutions to the bug and borer problem contradict each other.

I was growing my vines on cattle panel arches and it was wonderful. (You'd be surprised how tough the stems are and it was really cool to see those mid-sixed pumpkins or squash hanging down unsupported.) Trellising the vines made it super easy to find both bugs and egg masses. I learned to not be squeamish and just pinched any bugs between thumb and forefinger. If they were a "newlywed pair" I'd pinch the bigger female first, as she was likely already fertilized and they tend to let go and drop to the ground instantly when disturbed. They are hard to find once they hit the dirt.

This worked great until the vine borers moved in. On a trellis you can't cover nodes in the vines with dirt to grow extra roots. and I was afraid the borers would just find those new places and lay their eggs there. When vines are growing on the ground, it's hard to find the squash bugs.

My next try was to grow butternut squash (always my preferred, anyway) in my greenhouse much later in the season, but it didn't do well there. I only got a few little five inch long squashes.

My last solution was to give up. Should squash and pumpkin become vital, I will have to build that squash house after all. I think I might even have enough materials around to do it.
 

LC

Veteran Member
M, sorry moschata don't work for you. Borers won't let me raise maxima. For those #&# squash bugs, I pick as long as possible and then use (s)Devin. (I hate auto correct). Only thing of that sort I use. It's me or them. Lol
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
I would like to apologize to GenErik for derailing this thread by talking about lard and oil and pumpkin seed and growing squash and pumpkins and their bug problems.

I don't know any way to fix it. If anyone else can, please do so.
 

GenErik

Veteran Member
I would like to apologize to GenErik for derailing this thread by talking about lard and oil and pumpkin seed and growing squash and pumpkins and their bug problems.

I don't know any way to fix it. If anyone else can, please do so.

No problem, I always learn something if the thread goes off a little ;)
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
I got to thinking about bulk purchases and this occurred to me...how about checking restaurant supply places for bulk olive oil? It wouldn't be like you'd have to buy a 55 gallon drum of the stuff, but maybe it's available in larger amounts than what you get at Costco.
 
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summerthyme

Administrator
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I don't think it's a problem... if anyone DOES have information on the question in the OP, they'll bring it back on track in a hurry.

If GenErik wishes, I can pull the posts out and start a new thread (since I was certainly a prime contributor to the original thread drift!).

Summerthyme
 

Martinhouse

Deceased
Thanks, Summerthyme.

It's nice that GenErik doesn't mind our side-tracking, but it would be good to have our information separately, probably in the Gardening forum, although the stuff about making one's own oil might be more for Homesteading. I can accept whatever you, as a moderator, decide.
 

GenErik

Veteran Member
I don't think it's a problem... if anyone DOES have information on the question in the OP, they'll bring it back on track in a hurry.

If GenErik wishes, I can pull the posts out and start a new thread (since I was certainly a prime contributor to the original thread drift!).

Summerthyme

I'm fine with the posts staying here. As stated, I often learn a lot from a little off track posts :spns:
 
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