Title: Reclaiming Cooking Grease
Categories: Soap *
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Beef and pork fats should be stored seperately to ensure and acceptable tallow content. Lard alone does not produce sufficiently hard soap. When enough reclaimed cooking fat has been collected, it must be "washed" by adding an equal amount of water and bringing to a boil. Remove from the heat and add one-quarter as much cold water to the mixture. This will cause the dirt, lean meat, salt, and impurities in the fat to precipitate. As it cools, teh fat will form a layer on top of the water and impure ingredients. When the fat has hardened, scrape the impurities from the bottom of the cake and repeat if necessary.

To further improve reclaimed fats for soapmaking, they can be boiled for 10 minutes in twice the quantity of water to which 1 tb of salt has been added.

Reclaimed grease may contain unpleasant odors which can taint the finished soap. Potatoes cooked in the grease will absorb most of the smells. This should be done before "washing" the fat. Tallow which is rancid or smells a little "off" can also be sweetened by heating it with a lemon or vinegar solution. Two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar dissolved in 1/2 cup water and boiled with 1 cup fat will improve its character for soapmaking.

Although all of the above methods can be used to improve the discolored, odorous fat, nothing will bring them to the standard of fresh, clean tallow, properly rendered.

Tallow soap alone is very hard soap which will not lather as well as commercial face soaps. To produce a finer soap, vegetable oils must be added. By themselves, these oils do not generally produce a good hard soap, but in combination with tallow, both are enhanced.

Tallow: To produce clean, white odorless soap, the fats must be fresh or fresh frozen. Once all specks of meat and blood are trimmed, the fat is cut into small chunks, and melted slowly over low heat. The flaccid morsels shrivel to crisp cracklings, which surface in a fused lump in the light amber oil. Strain the fat through layers of cheesecloth or a sieve. Each pound of untrimmed beef fat yields at least one cup of strained rendered tallow. Pork fat may yield up to twice as much. The cooled hardened tallow can be stored in appropriate measures for soap batches. It can be frozen, but, if well-strained, will stay sweet at cool temperatures for several weeks. Do not store fat where it can absorb strong odors such as onion.

Source: "The Art of Soapmaking" by Merilyn Mohr

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