Tallow Soap
Well, here we have it, the soap I made from the tallow I rendered. Scented with may chang and palmarosa, colored with red oxide.
Easy-peasy.
The first adventure in tallow-making was successful–but not as successful as it could have been. Out of two pounds of beef fat, I only got 10 oz or so of tallow. There was a lot of unrendered fat, even after 4 hours of simmering on the stove. So of course, I’ve got another batch going right now. Only this time, I’m doing it in the crockpot, and I’m probably going to re-render after the first pour. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, it’s a combo of pig and beef fat. I went to a different Safeway this time, and the butcher threw all the scraps into a single bag. The SAP values are not the same, but they’re close enough that I’m not going to worry about it. Plus, I use a high enough lye discount that the recipes should be fairly forgiving.
I was expecting rendering to be smelly and gross, but it smells like you’re cooking beef stew.