Milk Soap
April 24, 2008
When Anne Watson decided to write a book on milk soaping, I was lucky enough to be chosen to help with the research along with quite a few other people. Anne made up batches of soap using everything from milk to yogurt and sour cream, then sent out bars for us to evaluate. For several months my bathroom looked like a soap factory. It still does actually. We both learned that apparently you could make soap out of anything that comes from a cow. I spent most of my time working on the chocolate soap, as I've discussed in the great chocolate search.
Anne went in every other direction. If it comes from a cow or goat she probably made a batch with it. Some of them, like yogurt and sour cream, made it into recipes for the book. For the most part she turned out tan and brown bars of soap. But we both learned that not only is white milk soap possible, it is fairly easy to accomplish. The first trick is to use oils that make a white base soap. Among them are coconut oil, shea oil and butter, cocoa butter, and olive oil A refined. I favor a combination using cocoa butter and/or shea oil or butter. Anne created a recipe for the book based on coconut and sunflower oils. Both make beautiful white milk soaps. And both recipes are in the book.
The second trick is to keep everything as cold as possible. For Anne that is freezing the milk into ice cubes then adding the lye to it. I favor pre-measuring the milk in a plastic zip lock bag then freezing it. Broken into little pieces it will melt nicely when confronted with lye. After at least ½ hour in the freezer and a sojourn of 4 or more hours in the fridge, our white soaps were coming out beautifully. I have also learned that while you can get ash with milk soap, putting plastic on the top of the soap to prevent that doesn't affect the color.
One other important thing that we learned is that it can be really tricky to know when your lye is completely dissolved. Sometimes you can tell by the color. If your milk is all melted and the mixture has turned yellow you are probably ok. Otherwise it is a good idea to stir for a while. I like to go for at least 3 or 4 minutes. But I guess I am a slow learner. A couple of days ago I make a batch of milk soap (I am now into colorants and milk soaps, a very interesting avenue for research). I thought everything was ok, but when I took the soap out of the fridge it had lye crystals on the surface of one bar. So I tossed the batch. Lesson relearned, make sure you stir the lye mixture long enough. The color of the soap, BTW, was a lovely golden yellow. This from a mica. I will be posting the recipe later.
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