Getting the Proportions Right for Tallow-Based Homemade Soap

Reader Contribution by Sarah Hart Morgan
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Photo by Sarah Hart Morgan

I love this time of year. The garden is reaching its summer end and you have to start getting creative on how you can use up your surplus so nothing goes to waste. A friend of my husband’s recently butchered a few head of cattle and asked if I wanted some of the beef fat for soap-making. There was no way I was going to pass up the free fat, and after two days of rendering, it was time to get to work on the soap.

My apothecary cabinet was getting pretty full and I needed to make room for new infusions, so I decided this would be a “clean out the fridge” type of soap. I had a bumper crop of tomatoes this summer, too. After canning every red tomato from my garden, I still had a ton of green tomatoes on the vines that I knew more than likely weren’t going to turn this season. I picked all that I could before the frost got hold of them, made salsa verde, and gave even more away to friends. I had made a very successful bar of soap years ago using my heirloom tomatoes and decided to try a batch using the juice of the green tomatoes as the liquid in this batch of soap.

Juicing the Tomatoes

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