Simple beef tallow soap recipes (2024)

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When a friend taught me to make soap, she just taught me to follow a simple recipe using tallow, olive oil and coconut oil, with the cold process method. We have been using that soap in the bath and in a soap shaker for doing the dishes, and its surprising how fast we use it, so it was time to make some more. I rendered the rest of the tallow in the slow cooker again and read a book about soap making, so that I could figure out my own recipe this time.

It helps to have a basic understanding of the soap making process before you start. To make a soap, fat or oil is reacted with caustic, this forms the solid soap, glycerine, and if any of the starting ingredients are in excess, they will also remain in the final product (so if you have too much caustic, there will be some caustic in the final soap, and if you have too much fat, there will be some fat in the final soap - this is called superfat). In this post I am only talking about cold process soap making, which involves mixing the oil/fat and caustic when they are a similar temperature and does not require any cooking.

I read about the properties of all the different fats and oil that I could use for different purposes. If you are interested in soap making, I recommend that you research all the fats and oils that are available to you and figure out which to use for different applications. I prefer to use a mixture of fats and oils that are relatively cheap and easy for me to buy, as well as being suitable for the type of soap I want to make. This is what I found out about the fats and oils that I wanted to use:

Tallow - hard and longlasting soaps, good cleaning qualities, creamy lather, might retain animal smell (I haven't noticed this in my tallow soap so far)

Olive oil - hard and longlasting soaps, need long curing time and may take longer to reach "trace", minimal lather, good cleaning qualities

Coconut oil - hard soap, good lather, soap may dissolve easily if high in coconut oil (never use more than 30%)

To calculate the amount of caustic you need, you first work out the amount of each fat or oil you will use in grams. Each fat or oil has a "saponification value", which tells you how much caustic (in grams) you need for each gram of fat or oil. For example, beef tallow has a saponification value of 0.140, which means you need 0.140 grams of caustic for every gram of beef tallow in the recipe.

Here's how to work it out for an example recipe of 250g olive oil, 250g coconut oil and 500g tallow

Fat/oil Amount Sap value Caustic amount Total caustic (0% superfat)
Olive oil 250g 0.134 33.5
Coconut oil 250g 0.192 48
Beef tallow 500g 0.140 70

250g olive oil
750g tallow
2% superfat
136g caustic
300-330g water
eucalyptus essential oil

Now I'm curious, what type of fat and oil do you like to use in your handmade soaps and why?