Deer Tallow Soap Recipe

One of the areas we've been able to go green is in our body soap. Each fall I hunt deer and in the process of butchering them, harvest a good amount of deer fat. We decided to render the tallow, first thinking we'd use it for cooking. The cooking thing never really happened, despite it being good, grass-fed tallow, so we decided to shift the tallow into soap.

This is where things got a bit harder. We had a hard time finding a recipe we liked for a deer tallow soap. You don't want to use 100% tallow, because though it will give you a hard soap, it won't the other ideal cleansing properties. We eventually settled on the recipe we have here. It uses 50% deer tallow and 25% each canola and coconut oils.

This is our 3rd year using this recipe and we're really pleased with it. It suds nicely, is appropriately hard, and feels good on the skin. Here's the basic recipe.

16oz (454gm) Deer Tallow (can substitute beef tallow and it will actually improve the qualities of the soap)
8oz (227gm) Canola Oil
8oz (227gm) Coconut Oil
12.16oz (345gm) Water
4.59oz (127gm) Lye - NaOH
Optional Fragrance - varies on the variety, but 1 - 1.5oz fragrance oil seems to be correct.
Colorant as desired

I'll let others describe cold process making. This recipe is perfect for filling a parchment paper-lined standard bread pan. We divided this batch into two different pans because we wanted to try adding colors and fragrance oils. This is the first year we've used fragrance oil and colorants. The soap is perfectly fine without scent or color, but I'll admit it looks cooler this way :)

Tiny House Infographic

Here's an infographic I put together based off Andrew Morrison's TEDx Talk. Look at the graphic, but definitely watch the talk!

Our path to the simplified life

After settling on a destination, the next step on a journey is deciding how you're going to get there. Sometimes the way someone decides to get somewhere defines almost as much of their journey as the destination itself does. Two groups may both tour Ireland and see the same sites, but if one group travels with a large travel agency-organized tour bus they'll have a very different experience than a group that undergoes a wandering backpacking trip.

The path we've chosen involves a combination of several things: homesteading, a small farm, gardening, raising our own animals, food preservation, minimalism. Most of these things are totally new to us, though we're slowly working on integrating them into our lives. We have a 220+ square foot garden, my wife can's quite a bit during the growing seasons, we're raising meat rabbits, and I hunt for our red meat every fall. Still, we're very much urbanites and have a long way to go to getting our family where we hope to go.

Fortunately, it's a path we'll get to travel together.