This year has definitely turned into the ‘year of the goat’ on the farm. Even with only a single doe in milk this season, the presence of a milking doe in the barn has been a rather life-altering event.

Twice a day milking had to be factored into our daily chore routine, along with maintaining twice-daily milking records, milk processing, and storage.  I’m loving every minute of it.

Having access to fresh goat’s milk on the farm has also opened up a wonderful window of opportunity for embarking on new adventures.

The obvious thing to do when one has a glut of goat’s milk is to make cheese, and we do, but more recently we’ve also started making cold process goat’s milk soaps!

So far we’ve made two batches of 100% goat’s milk soap. Some soapers like to use at least some water in their goat’s milk soaps, and perhaps we’ll try that down the road, but honestly, I’m something of a purist, and wanted to try crafting some all-milk soaps.  Besides, I’d been told that 100% milk soaps can be highly temperamental, and I love a good challenge!

The first batch I made was a Lavender and Calendula soap. As there were particular ingredients I wanted to use, I formulated the recipe myself, using some helpful tools online [1, 2]. I’ll get more into how to formulate soap recipes in a future post though. This post is just a general overview of our goat’s milk soap making endeavors thus far.

Once I had formulated a recipe, the next step of course was sourcing the additional ingredients we’d need to make our soap, including various carrier oils, butters, and essential oils.  My hands take a beating on the farm, and my skin, even on a good day, tends to be desert-dry, so I wanted to make a soap that would be both gentle, and moisturizing.

I planned to use a lavender essential oil in the soap, but while I was waiting for the bulk of my soaping ingredients to arrive, I also infused some organic olive oil with dried Provence lavender flowers.

I then measured, and froze the amount of milk I would need for the recipe in advance.

Why freeze the milk?  Milk soaps are notorious for turning various shades of beige, brown, or orange, primarily due to the reaction of the milk sugars when combined with sodium hydroxide. Adding lye to milk, or water for that matter, causes an exothermic reaction, where significant heat may be liberated.  If this heat is not controlled, the milk can scorch, and that causes the milk to change color. To slow down this reaction, and control how much heat is produced during this reaction, most milk soapers prefer to work with their milk in a frozen, or semi-frozen state.

So, with the milk frozen, and ready to go, and the rest of the ingredients to hand, it was finally time to make our first goat’s milk soap!

Soap Making is a Science, Not Just an Art!

If you’re new to soap making, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having a quality, dependable scale to weigh your ingredients! If I learned nothing else after taking four years of college chemistry courses, it’s that accuracy in measurement is critical to the success of any experiment, especially if you want to be able to repeat your results!  Although minor inaccuracies in soap making likely won’t cause too much excitement in the kitchen, they can affect the quality of the final product.  It’s also helpful to keep good notes for each soap batch, to help with duplicating successes, or to avoid repeating mistakes.

I originally formulated my recipes in ounces, but when I ran the recipe through a lye calculator, I converted the entire recipe to grams. My scale weighs in 1 gram increments.  Many digital scales only weigh in 2 or 5 gram increments, so consider that when shopping for a scale for soap making.

Making Soap 

There are two primary steps to making milk soap. The first step is to weigh out all of the oils and butters into a stainless steel pan, and then set those over a low heat on the stove to melt, stirring occasionally.

The first recipe I made was Lavender and Calendula, and used olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil*, palm kernel oil flake*, rice bran oil, avocado oil, castor oil, sweet almond oil, shea butter, cocoa butter, and beeswax.

I started by thoroughly melting the coconut, and palm oils separately. Palm and coconut oils are solid at room temperature, and it’s especially important that the palm oil is completely melted, and well mixed, before incorporating it into a recipe. Otherwise you may find excess steric acids in the palm oil that will precipitate out in the soap. Not necessarily a problem, chemically speaking, but it can result in ugly soap.

With those oils melted, and measured, it was time to weigh out the remaining oils and butters.

My recipes use beeswax, as we have some that we melted down last year with our solar beeswax melter. The beeswax improves the hardness of the bar, and durability, however, there is a downside to incorporating beeswax into your recipes. Beeswax has a very high melting temperature relative to most other oils or butters used in soap making.

As such, if using beeswax in soap, any soap, I highly recommend melting the beeswax separately, either in a double boiler, or the microwave, and then pouring the liquid beeswax into the pot with the rest of the melted oils once they are up to temperature.

Working With Milk and Lye – It’s Not as Scary as You Think

Just don’t forget the goggles, and gloves!

If you’re new to soap making, your biggest fear may be working with sodium hydroxide (lye), and it certainly deserves respect.  I once had a job where I had to work with 12N hydrochloric acid almost every day.  That’s nasty stuff!  Sodium hydroxide, although at the opposite end of the pH spectrum, is also pretty nasty stuff.  However, in all the time I was working with the 12N HCL, I never once splashed myself with it.  Yes, sodium hydroxide can be dangerous, just use common sense.  Keep your work-space organized, wear closed toed shoes, goggles, chemical resistant gloves, and long sleeves.  Keep all pets, and children, out of the soap making zone, and just go slow.  Don’t rush when working with lye, soap making should be fun, not a chore.

While the oils are melting, the second step is to carefully weigh out the lye, and then very VERY very slowly add the lye to the frozen milk.  Personally, I prefer working with flaked lye, rather than beads, as it has less tendency to scatter across the work surface.

I then place the frozen milk in a stainless steel bowl, and set the bowl in an ice bath.  I recommend keeping an extra container of ice nearby, as you may need to add more to the ice bath as the lye solution heats up.

I keep an instant read thermometer handy, and keep a very close eye on the milk temperature as the lye is slowly incorporated. I start by adding just one to two tablespoons of lye to the milk at a time, and mix it thoroughly before adding more.

See the flakes of lye on the sides of the bowl in the picture above?  Be sure to scrape all that lye back into the milk, and mix it thoroughly.

There is a fine line between keeping the milk and lye solution cool enough to maintain a pale colored milk soap bar, but allowing the mixture to heat up enough that the lye fully dissolves. Some of this is up to the judgement of the soap maker, and how dark you want your soap.

However, generally speaking you want your oils, and your lye/milk solution, to be no more than 10-15 degrees (F) apart in temperature when they’re combined, otherwise the soap solution may seize, or not trace as expected.

The Results

I promised on Facebook last week that I’d “come clean” about our milk soap making thus far. It’s fair to say that no soap maker makes perfect soap every time. If they say they do, they’re probably lye-ing (pun intended). So, as part of coming clean, here I’m going to show you what happens if you keep the goat’s milk and lye mixture too cool.

It’s clear the lye did not completely dissolve. It wasn’t obvious in the milk and lye solution while it was being mixed, in part because the milk and lye solution is opaque.  However, the granules were visible near the surface of some of the bars within 48 hours of unmolding the soap.  Clearly I either didn’t stir enough, or allow the mixture to get warm enough, or both.  This thick crust on the surface of the soap is definitely lye crystal, not just a light dusting of soda ash.

A little pH paper showed the crystals were very basic.

These crystals are still caustic, and trust me, you don’t really want this in, or on, your soap.

Also, notice how deformed part of this bar is? As soon as I added the Lavender essential oil to the soap solution in this batch, it started to seize. I was able to pour the mixture into the first few molds, but by the time I got to the last molds, I was spooning a mixture the consistency of a thick banana pudding. As a result, a lot of air was trapped in the mix. Not a problem, chemically speaking, but aesthetically really ugly.

Despite the lye crust issue with the first batch, after a few weeks of curing I did test the soap for lather, and this soap lathered very well.  I was happy with the recipe overall, I just needed to work on my lye-mixing technique.

I may try rebatching part of this botched batch[4], just to see how well this milk soap rebatches.

That’s alright though, that’s what experimentation is for. After a few adjustments, the second batch, I’m happy to say, is turning out MUCH better.

Making More Soap – With a Few Adjustments

When I made our most recent Orange and Calendula soap last week, I started out by mixing the lye with the frozen milk, in the ice bath, as before. Even in the ice bath, the mixture reached 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the lye was mixed with the milk though, I removed the mixture from the ice bath, and continued to stir, as I allowed the mixture come up closer to 80 degrees. This time the lye appeared to dissolve more completely, so lesson learned. Keep the lye and milk cool, but not TOO cold.

I also added the essential oils to the cooled oil mixture immediately before adding the milk and lye solution. This allowed me to better control how much the soap traced before pouring it into the mold. There can be some cost, in the form of loss of fragrance, when essential or fragrance oils are added early, so I added a little more orange essential oil to this batch to compensate for that.

With the oils and butters melted, and the milk and lye solution prepared, it was time to combine the mixtures to make soap!

Before mixing, I rechecked the temperature of both solutions. If the oils are too warm, the pan can be set in an ice bath (I use the sink), to help cool them down more quickly.

Just be careful not to splash water into the pot of oils, and stir occasionally to prevent components, like beeswax, from precipitating out on the chilled edges of the pan.

I do like to keep my soap making cool, so the oils and lye solution were approximately 80 degrees when they were combined.

The second soap batch combined beautifully. Like most modern soap makers I use a stick blender to mix the solution, being careful to tilt the stick blender in the solution before turning it on to release any air trapped underneath it. This prevents unwanted bubbles in the finished soap.

Once I barely reached a medium trace, I poured half of the mixture into the first silicone molds.

To the remaining half of the soap mixture I added some dried calendula petals, just for their decorative effect, before pouring that mixture into the molds.

Is It Soap Yet?

Not quite. By the time the soap is in the mold, some of the fats have saponified, but it’s not quite soap. With these first two batches of soap I chose not to allow the soap to gel.

When a soap goes through gel phase, the soap in the molds continues to produce heat, sometimes quite a lot of it! For these soaps I was more interested to see how pale I could keep this milk soap in color. As the milk in the soap will darken in the presence of more heat, one way to maintain a lighter color in milk soap is to use small light-weight molds, not heavy, insulated wooden molds.  Another method is to freeze the soap immediately after it’s poured. You don’t have to, it’s a personal choice. Freezing slows the saponification process, but also prevents the milk proteins and sugars from scorching and turning dark in color.

I know that some soapers swear by freezing their milk soaps, others would never consider freezing them.  I intend, for my own comparison purposes, to allow half of the next batch I make to go through gel phase though.  I’ll be interested to see the difference in the color and texture of the soap, using the same recipe.

For these batches, as soon as the soap was poured into the silicone molds, the molds were covered in plastic wrap, and immediately placed in the freezer.

I unmolded the first batch (Lavender and Calendula) after just 24 hours.

The molds are small, but if I was using a larger mold, I’d leave it in the freezer longer (large molds may require up to a week before they can be unmolded).

The second batch, the Orange and Calendula, I left in the freezer for a full 48 hours. As the mixture wasn’t as thick when I poured this batch, I decided to wait a little longer before unmolding it.

What I love about these silicone molds is they are so easy to work with. The soap, especially when frozen, just pops right out, perfectly, every time!

Of course, even now, it’s still not soap!!! Well it is, but it still needs to cure for a few weeks before using it.

In the meantime, I’m loving how the second batch has turned out so far.  The calendula-infused olive oil I used, and the orange essential oil, made these bars a gorgeous pale buttery yellow color.  It really does look like butter, it just won’ t taste very good on toast!

If I like how the bars cure out in a few weeks, I promise I’ll post a recipe!

So now that I’ve ironed out a few minor wrinkles in my milk-soap making method, I’m already planning to make our next batch this weekend.  This time I’m thinking of trying a white tea and ginger fragrance oil.

Do you make milk soaps? If so, do you make 100% milk soap, or do you use water in your recipe as well?  Do you freeze your soap, or do you allow it to gel?  Does the color of the bar matter to you, or just the quality of ingredients used? Have you ever rebatched a milk soap?  Did it work?  Perhaps the most important question, how long before you ran out of space to cure your soap?!

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[1] Soaping Oil/Butter Properties – Nature’s Garden.  A very handy reference chart on the general qualities of oils and butters commonly used in soap making.

[2] SoapCalc – Any recipe, whether found in a book, or online, should be run through a lye calculator.  This one is quite comprehensive, and will allow you convert your recipes into grams.

[3] Sustainable Palm Oil: Rainforest Savior or Fig Leaf?  An article outlining some of the issues surrounding the cultivation and use of palm oil, even RSPO certified sustainable palm oil.  There is a lot of controversy about using palm oil in cosmetics making (or food products for that matter).  Even though palm oil is an excellent base oil for soap, and has some wonderful properties, its production, even ‘sustainably harvested’ palm oil production, can be detrimental to the environment, and to sensitive wildlife habitats.  As such, once our existing supply of palm oil, and palm kernel oil flake, is exhausted, our soaps will be palm free. 

[4] Clean The World  Soap makers, don’t throw away your botched batches of soap!  If you don’t want to rebatch the soap yourself, consider donating it.  Clean the World can rebatch, and redistribute the soap to those in need.

Check out our Soap Making board on Pinterest!