HOW TO MAKE GOAT MILK SOAP

Goat milk & honey is an age old combination known for its deeply nourishing and skin moisturising benefits. Goat milk soap will form a rich creamy lather and is said to be of particular benefit for those with dry/sensitive skin.

So what could be better than making your own goat milk & honey soap from pure, natural ingredients?

In this post we will only be dealing with the particulars of making a milk soap.I will cover only the steps that set the process of making this soap apart from other, more basic recipes.

As always, I recommend that you refresh your knowledge of the information presented in the introductory tutorial, SOAP MAKING 101, before you start working on this one.

Here is a recipe I formulated for my own use, but you could virtually make goat milk soap from any other recipe as well.

What's different about making goat milk soap is that we substitute the water with milk, so the caustic soda crystals need to be dissolved in goat milk instead of water .

We will first have to freeze the milk before adding the caustic soda to it in order to control the overheating caustic lye solution.

When the lye solution reaches very high temperatures (as it usually does) it will burn the milk and give it an unpleasant ammonia-like smell and a dark colour. This doesn't ruin the soap but it does affect its colour and the unpleasant smell does tend to linger on for a while.

All the general soap making steps are the same as described in the Soap Making 101 tutorial.

freeze

remove

slightly melted

blend

The day before making the soap, measure and freeze your milk in ice cube trays.

At the time of making your soap remove the milk ice cubes and weigh them again to make sure the quantity is accurate.

Let the cubes sit for a few minutes until they start softening slightly and at this stage blend them into a slush.

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Measure your caustic soda and add it to your milk slush. Stir very thoroughly until the caustic soda has completely dissolved. Put aside and leave to cool.

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Because the oil blend contains beeswax, it will have to be heated to a higher temperature, until the beeswax has completely melted and homogenized with the oils.

Once the wax has melted, place the pot aside and leave to cool.

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When both the lye solution and the oils have reached the temperature of around 30 C it's time to add one to the other and blend.

Pour your cooled milk lye solution into the oil blend and blend with a hand held stick blender until you reach trace.

Once trace has been reached you can add your additional ingredients (see recipe at top), stir them in and pour the soap in your molds as usual.

NOTE 1: For this particular recipe we want to work at the lowest temperatures possible because it has been my experience that soaps that contain sugar, honey, beeswax and/or certain essential oils like cinnamon and clove tend to overheat after mixing. This list is by no means complete and each soap maker discovers new ingredients that react differently in combination with others as they continually practice their craft.

Overheating may result in the soap mixture splitting (the oils partially separate from the lye), sometimes it may foam up and "climb out" of the pot and then it immediately seizes into a hard blob.

If your soap mixture splits you need to be ready to act fast and whisk everything together vigurously until it's recombined and quickly pouring it in your mold before it seizes.

NOTE 2: You may notice the oil blend turning cloudy as it cools, this is due to the beeswax that has evenly spread throughout the oils and is starting to solidify once again.

For this particular recipe it's fine to use the oil blend as is (cloudy) because we're anyway expecting a sudden temperature increase once we blend it with the lye and this will ensure remelting of the wax and proper contact with the lye but for other recipes we would usually gently reheat the oil blend until translucent.