Deer Tallow Soap

[vanslays]

I collected quite a bit of tallow from my buck this year. The idea was to make soap with it. Seems simple enough from what I’ve read. Just wondering what people’s experiences are making soap and using a 100% tallow soap regularly. Thanks!

[fishnguy]

100% tallow won’t get you much “cleansing” properties, among other things. I usually add some olive oil and coconut oil. You want to use some kind of soap calculator, like http://soapcalc.net/calc/soapcalcwp.asp, for example. That will tell you how much lye you need, water, etc for the amount of oils (fats) you want to use. You probably want to set water at 30% of oils and I don’t use any fragrances (used once but not a fan and fragrance oils are quite expensive; many smells will also “evaporate” with time). Set it to show weight vs the percentage for the ease of use. There you can also read about the basics and what certain numbers mean and what you want to achieve in terms of your final result.

You can also use other liquids instead of water. I have used tea, coffee, milk, and others. You can also add sugar for bubbles and salt for hardness, but not necessary at all, especially for your first time. I would suggest cooling the liquid before mixing in the lye because it is going to warm up significantly in the process. If using milk, for example, you want to freeze it to cubes and mix it in slowly adding the cubes as they melt; otherwise it will burn (colour changes are normal during the mixing of lye solution with the liquid of choice - milk will change to a very cool grapefruit orange for example before setting at something else). Ideally, you also want to mix the lye solution and oil mixture at roughly the same temperature.

It is a fairly simple process, but take precautions when working with lye.

[calgarychef]

I got a local gal to make me 10 bars of soap with ground charcoal added.
After a day of sweating in the kitchen and smelling like every kind of food smell you can imagine, the charcoal does a very decent job of eliminating “most” of these odours.

[vanslays]

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate the advice.

[vanslays]

Originally Posted by fishnguy

100% tallow won’t get you much “cleansing” properties, among other things. I usually add some olive oil and coconut oil. You want to use some kind of soap calculator, like http://soapcalc.net/calc/soapcalcwp.asp, for example. That will tell you how much lye you need, water, etc for the amount of oils (fats) you want to use. You probably want to set water at 30% of oils and I don’t use any fragrances (used once but not a fan and fragrance oils are quite expensive; many smells will also “evaporate” with time). Set it to show weight vs the percentage for the ease of use. There you can also read about the basics and what certain numbers mean and what you want to achieve in terms of your final result.

You can also use other liquids instead of water. I have used tea, coffee, milk, and others. You can also add sugar for bubbles and salt for hardness, but not necessary at all, especially for your first time. I would suggest cooling the liquid before mixing in the lye because it is going to warm up significantly in the process. If using milk, for example, you want to freeze it to cubes and mix it in slowly adding the cubes as they melt; otherwise it will burn (colour changes are normal during the mixing of lye solution with the liquid of choice - milk will change to a very cool grapefruit orange for example before setting at something else). Ideally, you also want to mix the lye solution and oil mixture at roughly the same temperature.

It is a fairly simple process, but take precautions when working with lye.

Thanks for this. Do you have a recipe you would be willing to share?

[fishnguy]

^ I won’t be home for another week, but will see what I have if I don’t forget when I am back (maybe bump the thread up next week if no other replies come up so I remember). I’ll check if I have anything saved on the laptop later today as well.

Edit: I also posted a few things in some thread here a while back, but don’t recall what that thread was. Maybe will try to dig it up later too.

[ZJHoban]

I thought the title was Deer Tallow SOUP lol.... I was very curious.

I havent made soap from it but am certainly interested.
I had thought to make chap stick out of it though. Rubbing some on my lips sure helped after a windy day outside.

Interested in this thread! Good one

[Brobee]

I detail my deer tallow soap making process at the 10:56 mark in my video project from a couple years ago:

https://youtu.be/rsAAfcpppIg

Had a lot of tallow from this years harvest and spent the holidays making our stash for 2023…great times!

Good luck,

Brobee

[horpensky]

My wife has been making soap with the deer tallow for the past few years. Also uses the online soap calculator mentioned above. I've test driven most of the ones she's produced and most have turned out pretty good, though less sudsy than I would normally like.

Some of her comments are:

- soapcalc.net gives you the saponification rates, but just plugging numbers in and crunching them doesn't mean your soap will turn out well. She recommends starting with a tried and true recipe (lots online) and experimenting from there.

- Don't do it if you think you're going to save money. But it can be fun to play with and makes for good DIY gifts.

- Some people notice the smell of the tallow in the finished soap and don't like it, but I never found it to be offensive.

[trooper]

We made deer tallow candles in coffee mugs. We mixed cinnamon essential oils in with the melted tallow and gave the mug candles to family as Christmas presents. They were a hit.

[jef612]

I can't speak to deer tallow - as I have never used that one
But bear fat - that makes some good soap. There isn't a better soap out there!

I added some of the other usuals, oilve oil, coconut oil, shea butter, etc but that soap will clean anything and does not dry out your skin.

I use it as a shampoo bar as well - works pretty damn good. Add scent if you like.

I used soap calc as well. I have a basic recipe like this:
Water - 323.18g
Lye - 120.28
Castor Oil - 42.52g
Rendered Bear Oil - 255.15g
Shea Butter - 17.10g
Olive Oil - 127.57g
Coconut Oil - 255.15g
Add one ounce of fragrance oil (30ml) if desired


All the weird oils, etc you can order off Amazon or perhaps find locally. I have not played around with this recipe very much - but I don't think I would either. Its damn near perfect IMO.

[vanslays]

Originally Posted by fishnguy

^ I won’t be home for another week, but will see what I have if I don’t forget when I am back (maybe bump the thread up next week if no other replies come up so I remember). I’ll check if I have anything saved on the laptop later today as well.

Edit: I also posted a few things in some thread here a while back, but don’t recall what that thread was. Maybe will try to dig it up later too.

Thanks everyone for the great tips on this thread. Fishnguy, did you happen to dig that recipe out?

[fishnguy]

^ No, sorry, forgot. I’ll try to do so tomorrow.

[The Fisherman Guy]

A friend of mine made some Deer Tallow Soap and gave us a bar for Christmas this year, it's great - simple ingredients and doesn't dry our hands out.

[fishnguy]

Here a few of the more than a few that I made, vanslays:





Those two, as you can see are very similar. I don’t remember what I was doing there (and there are no notes on the paper, which I usually write if there is something worth mentioning), but I wanted to post them both just to show that the results won’t be much different numbers wise (and in reality) if you play around a little bit with the fats. Likely, I was low on something or had excess of something that I wanted to use up, hence the variation in the recipe. Sesame oil is identical simply because that is the size of the bottles that I bought it in (funny enough, they were filled exactly the same to the last drop). A note here about the sesame oil: the soap will have a very distinct sesame smell, so I would not recommend using it if you are not a fan of the scent. If you look at the numbers, in terms of hardness, cleansing, etc, there is hardly any variation and both soaps felt exactly the same.



That one is pretty straight forward (notes below).



Same here, nothing at all special - mostly just to show the variation of the amounts of oils. Note that more deer tallow makes the soap harder and creamier.



That one is just to show you an “extreme” example of soap that mostly consists of olive oil and a bit of coconut oil, as far as fats go. Just look at those numbers and the difference from the other recipes.

These are some of the soaps that were made using the recipes above and some others:





I have idea but not entirely sure which one was the result of what recipe except for a couple there. This one is the most interesting:



This is one would be the darkest one in the “group photos” and is from the recipe where I said “notes below” (24.73% deer and coconut oil). The liquid used here was coffee with about 1.5 tea spoons of sugar added. The olive oil was also infused with coffee, which was probably unnecessary at all, but I had some coffee no one wanted to brew (simply plenty of coffee in olive oil heated at low temp in oven for a couple of hours).

The next darkest one is I am sure one of the sesame oil recipes.

I cannot say with certainty what the others were made from. It used to be all organized with a recipe attached, but… Lol. We are also in the process of selling the house, so things got moved around, etc. I can also say that the soaps in the photo are at least three years old plus. The coffee one, for example is about 4-5 years old. The white one is probably the oldest and likely was made from mostly deer tallow with some olive and coconut oils added, but I can’t say for sure.

They are all great soaps, by the way, and everyone who got to use it was pretty impressed. And like I said, it is hard to make a really bad batch even if you play with quantities of oils. To note, all “fats” and “oils” are oils, just to make it clear.

I never use any colouring or scent oils because I do not care for it. As you can see, I don’t even care of trimming the bars “square” and whatnot. Scents will eventually disappear as well, some sooner, others later. The sesame oil soap, for example, which has a pretty strong scent now smells like all the other ones. Took a few years, but the fact remains, lol. The coffee soap has a very faint scent of coffee, but it goes away pretty quickly. I have used scent oils a few times in the beginning and neither of the scents lasted until the soap was used up (every batch I make lasts us for about a year, including the quantities I give away - I try to get as much fat off the animal as I can, unless it is a “brutal” pack out).

I will probably write a few more notes in the day or two, but this is it for now. One important thing to note is process and render your fat as soon as you can. Rendered fat will keep for a very long time in the freezer versus just chunks of “fresh” fat you cut off a deer.

I will be making some soap of my own in the next few weeks and I have plenty of fat. I was lazy last year and still have some fat from a mule deer my cousin shot and some from my whitetail. I also collected quite a bit of fat from an elk I harvested this December. I had never shot an elk this late and this fat before, so this would be the first time experimenting with elk fat. One thing is obvious and that is it definitely melts at lower temperature than fat of whitetail deer or so it appeared.







There is about 2.5 kilos of rendered fat there.

And no idea weight wise last year’s mule and whitetail deer fat (that I think I mixed together unless there is another “brick” somewhere in the freezer):

[vanslays]

Wow thanks so much for the great info! Looking forward to making some soap now. I’ll try and remember to repost when all is said and done. Again, thanks for the write up and photos!

[fishnguy]

Looking closer at the top two recipes above, I see I used fragrance in the first, which doesn't make much sense with sesame oil. I also see that the superfat is different in the two. So they are more different than appeared at the quick glance. Again, though, it doesn’t make sense using fragrance with sesame oil, so something is off there (it would not have much effect in terms of end result, scent aside).

A few more notes. I render fat the following way. Of course cut all the large meat chunks off and pick off all, if there are any, substantial chunks of hair and other things it may have picked up when field dressing and whatnot. I don’t care about little things that much as they will get sorted out at the first “melt”. I mean I clean it, but do not particularly get obsessed over it if there is a hair here or there that I didn’t notice or chose to ignore. Then run it through a grinder with coarse plate (1/4”). Large chunks will get you stuck (my fat is usually frozen or nearly so when I grind it because it all goes into the freezer piece by piece untill the whole animal is processed), depending on your grinder, so cut them into thinner/smaller pieces. You will figure it out as you go. The grounded fat goes into the pot and then, after adding about half an inch of water (you don’t really need much, just to get it going and get the fat to start melting, as well for the rubbish to sink to while cooling), the pot goes on the stove and gets covered with a lid. When the water starts boiling, the heat is reduced a bit and the process continues until all the fat had melted. I let it get to boiling to make sure it all melts, some people do not as it looses something whatever (don’t remember what, it is questionable, and it is fine by me if it does, lol). The process is not really that long when the fat had been run through a grinder. Big chunks will take significantly longer. The elk fat pictured above took about 10-15 minutes? (Edit: I am maybe a little low on time here, but definitely less than half an hour). Deer takes a few minutes longer. You will see that the remaining pieces are basically meat and other tissue with all fat dissolved. I then strain it through a fine strainer like this:



I let it then gradually cool down until the fat solidifies completely (throw the container in the fridge or outside when cool enough to speed up the process). Once that happens, take the fat out, scrape the bottom of it if there is any significant amount of rubbish on it, put it back in a clean pot, add a bit of water and melt it again. Here, when it all turns liquid and gets to close to or boiling, I let it simmer while starting to slowly strain it using a ladle through the same strainer with a quality (Bounty brand?) paper towel in it:



It is a bit slow process but, in my opinion, absolutely worth it. Replace the paper towel if it gets dirty. The reason I let it simmer while doing it is because you want the fat to be really hot for it to go through the paper towel fairly quickly. Takes a bit of time, but nothing extraordinary, really. Let the fat solidify again, take it out and check the bottom - it’ll most likely be clean as everything else. The rendering process is complete at this point. Break it to chunks you want or freeze the whole thing in one piece. I usually break it to 3-4 chunks that I am going to use one at a time, more or less (borrow more from other chunks if needed).


Now to soap prep. You will need kitchen scales because you are going to weigh every ingredient as it all goes by weight not volume, including liquids. You will need some containers, utensils for mixing, etc. Cool or freeze the required amount of water (or other liquid you choose to use) as indicated in your recipe. As mentioned before, lye will warm it up significantly when it dissolves. I am not going to go over details here as you probably read them elsewhere.

There are two ways to go about making your soap. One way is what Brobee did in his video he provided above: prepare your basic soap, melt it all over again, add the oil, fragrance, colour, if used and let it cure. Another way to make it is to add the additional oil to the first batch, what is called superfat, pour it to forms, wrap it or do what whatever it is you choose to do for it to cool dow gradually over the next day or two, cut it to pieces you wamt your soap to be in and leave them to cure for about a month. Some people “bake” it at very low temps in the oven to replace the curing period, but I am never in any rush and just let it sit as long as needed.

This superfat is what you indicate in the recipe. As you can see mine is usually set at 5%, meaning I usually go via the second of the two ways described above. If you decide to add fragrance, you probably want to go with method one because that will keep your scent significantly longer than method two.

This is about all I wanted to mention, I think. When I decide to do my batch(es) of soap, I will try to “document” the steps in more detail and outline them here. Don’t count it on it though because it may not happen, lol.

Good luck and definitely let us know how it works out. The process is really easy and the soap is pretty great, not something you can buy in the store.

You can also make excellent hand cream/salve from the deer fat. It is quite amazing for your hands in the cold dry weather.