Making Soap With Milk
Many people soap with water as their liquid but some choose to use other liquids such as tea or milk. Tea can be treated exactly like water, no extra precautions or steps are needed in soaping it. Milk on the other hand, which can be coconut milk, goats milk, cows milk and even sour milk does need some extra care. First of all always place the lye into the liquid no matter what type of liquid is used.
As for soaping with milk its pretty surprising and can go very very wrong. First you will need to choose the type of milk you want to soap with. Unbelievably my favorite is sour milk. When milk goes out of date it goes into a jug at the back of my fridge. I collect the milk continuously, which sounds disgusting, and it smells horrible but when soaped the lactic acid turns into sodium lactate-which makes an incredible bar of soap!
Soaping with milk can be tricky because as the lye is added to the liquid it heats up, it can get very hot and it can burn the milk. I measure out the amount of sour milk needed for my batch and pour it into a zip lock bag and then place it into the freezer laying flat to get it frozen quickly. I let it get solid before cracking it into pieces and placing them into my mixing pitcher and slowly add in my lye, stirring and moving the chunks of frozen milk around. The milk will turn yellowish to orange in color and smell like ammonia.
This scent will pass once its soaped. Once the lye and milk mixture is cooled you will notice it has 'lumps' of milk protein in it. You can do nothing and your soap will have a speckled look, or you can stick blend the lumps out. Now add the lye and milk mixture to your oils as usual. You may note an unpleasant smell, but once the soap is cured this will fade. In my experience the scent left over is very light and pleasing, well worth the initial displeasing smell.
The preceding article, "Making Soap With Milk" written by Shelley Fluegge, was added on May 2, 2009 and has been viewed 2122 times.