There are so many reasons why goat milk soap is great to make at home. Good for all skin types, goat’s milk soap is ESPECIALLY good for sensitive skin, as well as any kind of skin condition like eczema or psoriasis where it’s critical that you retain your skin’s natural lipid barrier. Goat’s milk soap is the king (in our opinion) of the bar soaps for these reasons. It can even be used as, “baby soap,” if you have little ones, it is just SO gentle, non-toxic, with no harsh chemicals.
Goat’s milk soap is full of lactic acid, one of the best alpha hydroxy acids that gently exfoliates dead skin cells naturally, while cleansing your skin with a creamy, non-chemical lather. Now what doesn’t sound more intoxicatingly addicting than that?!?
Yes, we are addicted to our own soaps! I mean C’mon!!! Cleopatra bathed in milk for a reason. This was the main reason other than having goats that we wanted to make our own luxury goat milk soap. You just can’t beat its decadent, spa-like feel!
BUT… we are an off-griding family, and as most people understand the off grid situation, you may not always have the best power when you need to make your soap. Whether because you just need to make another batch and there have been multiple cloudy, rainy winter days, or you are making some for your business, the SOAP must go on!
The Stick Blender Problem
During my extensive research on this topic, everything I’ve read online so far has seemed to confirm that you really can’t make goat’s milk soap off grid during low electricity days. You need a corded-stick blender and the electricity that comes with melting your oils and using that blender in order to achieve the perfection of saponification.
We’ve gotten around this now by simply using alternate heat sources to melt the oils/butters, as well as a great battery-powdered stick blender for when we need it.
Now-a-days we’ve figured out our solar-energy system and actually have so much power we haven’t had this problem.
But if you’re still in those beginning stages, save yourself time and use a battery-powdered stick blender like this one. Yes, it’s more expensive than the regular ones, but life without the cord (and ease) is worth it!
If you have the right intentions, I’m here to say that as an off-grid homesteader, you absolutely CAN make your goat’s milk soap without electricity!
All it takes is some tricks and tips that I’m here to teach you along the way… because I’ve lived it, and this is my life at this moment.
Making Good Soap Off Grid
To start off, you need all the supplies you’d regularly use when handling caustic chemicals such as Lye (Sodium Hydroxide). Gloves, long-sleeves, and pants, closed-toe shoes… all those PPE (personal protective equipment as we’d say in Science Labs) are needed, as well as making sure you’re away from kids, pets, and in a well-ventilated area.
You cannot make soap without lye, it is the KEY ingredient that causes those oils and butters to chemically transform into something that actually cleanses your skin, body, and hair in a process called Saponification. Without lye, your, “soap,” would just be an oily mess! So suit up and get on to soaping!
It’s also good to have all your materials such as measuring glasses, spoons, bowls, etc. be purely dedicated to making soaps and other products, keeping them separate from the ones you use for food and in your regular kitchen.
Since we’re a small business, this extra step is just following good manufacturing procedures, but it’s also common sense to keep down any risk of cross contamination, or at the very least, keeping you from getting the fragrance oils into your foods! Who wants to taste a soap perfume in their rice?!? YUCK!
Warning!
The recipe below was ran through professional soaper, Anne Marie’s website’s Lye Calculator found here. If you want to add another kind of oil or butter, make sure you run it through the Lye Calculator first, or you could risk harm and damage to your skin.
Materials List
- Measuring glass (1 cup at least)
- 2 Large glass or Stainless Steal metal bowls or buckets (NEVER use aluminum as it causes a terrible reaction with lye)
- Metal or wooden spoon for stirring
- Metal whisk, non-aluminum (or stick blender if you have the electricity)
- Kitchen digital scale (for soap you measure everything in weight, not by volume)
- Digital Infrared thermometer
- Lantern (if using for heat source) or Wood Stove (heat source)
Simple Off Grid Goat’s Milk Soap Recipe
Ingredients
- 17.33 oz Sweet Almond Oil
- 17.33 oz Castor Oil
- 17.33 oz Palm Oil (sustainably sourced, we love Bulk Apothecary’s 7 lbs for $20)
- 16 oz Room Temperature Water OR if you’d like, Frozen Goat Milk (freeze the night before)
- 6.5 oz Lye (labeled Sodium Hydroxide)
- 3-5 Tbs of White Sugar (speeds up trace)
- 3-5 Tbs of Sodium Lactate (for harder soap and gets to trace quicker)
- 3-5 Tbs of Beeswax (Optional since it melts down at 175℉, so you’ll need a great heat source)
- 3-5 Tbs of Honey (if not using Beeswax – will speed up trace like the Sugar does)
- 5 oz Fragrance oil (Optional – definitely not necessary 😃)
This recipe makes 5 pounds of Regular Soap or Goat Milk Soap (depending on what liquid you choose) at a 5% superfat level – making it creamy and delightful, instead of a harsh cleanser (the lower fatting level means it’s more like a detergent with higher lye %).
It fills about two 2.5 lb silicone loaf molds and makes 14 bars of soap, plus 2 sample sizes – I LOVE my pink trays – use them all the time and they hold up great to both extreme heat and extreme cold temps!
Method – Part 1
First, measure out the Sweet Almond oil and Castor oil and pour into a bowl together.
Then measure out your Palm oil and melt it down over a heat source, or if you’re using glass, melt it down in the microwave.
Let your oils sit to the side waiting until your lye solution is ready.
Method – Part 2
After the oils are all blended and melted together, you’re ready for the Second Part – Making your Lye Solution!
If you decided to make Goat Milk Soap, take your frozen goat’s milk out and let it sit in a stainless steel bucket or glass bowl (again, never use plastic or tin) – this bucket will be used for making your lye solution.
You don’t have to use goat’s milk, you can use water to make this A LOT easier. You can even use any kind of milk like coconut milk or even breast milk (seems to be the new trend these days). Anytime you use milk, however, you have to make sure your lye doesn’t scorch it. I’ll explain more below.
I carefully measure out my lye, and slowly start to mix it into the frozen milk. Always add your lye to the solution, never add a liquid solution to your lye, in order to be safe from caustic burns.
Also, when making goat’s milk soap off grid or on grid (or any kind of milk soap), it’s CRUCIAL to add your lye as slowly as possible. Adding it too quickly results in scorched milk that has a horrible smell that won’t go away once mixed.
Usually when making goat’s milk soap, you’d want to start with frozen milk broken into pieces. This gives you more time and even a lighter color result than if you start with cold milk that wasn’t frozen.
But if you’re off grid and don’t have a freezer at the moment (we’ve been there!) you can still achieve a beautiful, white goat’s milk soap by just adding that lye extremely slowly.
15 to 30 minutes of slowly stirring it in depending on how much you stir in at a time, I’ve found. This process is a lot faster if you have your milk frozen the night before though.
If you are starting out with frozen goat milk, this process will go a lot faster, but you’ll need to blend longer if not using a stick blender.
Keep Your Lye Solution at a Lower Temperature
Another trick I’ve found when experimenting with making soap off grid, is to keep your lye solution temperature as low as possible.
You can achieve this by checking your temperature frequently in between adding your little bits of lye and stirring it in, making sure it stays between 50-90℉.
Lye makes your solution rise in temperature, but as you stir it in for awhile, it will also cool back down. I tend to use this method more in the winter, when our solar panels aren’t getting enough sun during long stretches of grey, cloudy days, so getting it to come back down to temp isn’t a problem.
When it’s summer-time, off griders typically have tons of solar energy to work with, and this method isn’t necessary… you can stick blend for hours in the summer!
Professional soapers speed up their process by mixing their lye in faster, and then popping their bowl of lye solution into the freezer if they see it go up in temperature too fast (past 80℉). But since we are talking about making soap off grid here, and off-grid people are usually into the more slower, peaceful life, there’s no need to go too fast, and then have to wait it out after you pop it into the freezer. Just go slow and keep checking your temperature with a battery powered thermometer.
Again, I like to keep mine between 50’F and 90’F, which is fairly easy to do since this is an off grid winter method typically.
Oil Phase Secrets
After your lye solution is completely mixed in, you will want to add it to your melted oils.
One of the BEST kept secrets I’ve found to get your off grid soap to mix better without a stick blender, is to use more Castor Oil in your recipe!
Castor Oil, because it is high in ricinoleic acid, accelerates trace a lot – so much so that professional soapers actually warn against using too much of it because it’s so fast-acting!
But when you’re off grid, and without a stick blender to speed things up, you need every bit of help getting your soap to trace that you can take. And despite the warnings that Castor Oil can make your soap, “rubbery,” it is one of our favorite ingredients, in fact, we typically add double the castor oil regular recipes call for, into our normal soap recipes, just because we believe in its healing benefits so deeply, and it makes large, soapy bubbles!
And we’ve never had a, “rubbery,” bar. It does take a week or two longer to cure, though, but we’ve also managed to speed that up by putting our off grid, battery-powered fan on it for a couple of days. This allows it to cure within the average 4-6 weeks easier.
A warning for my fellow Off Griders who don’t want to buy the battery-powered stick blender and try to use Olive oil – everyone warns against using Olive Oil because apparently adding too much, or even just the normal amount found in a cold process recipe, can make beating your soap with a whisk take HOURS and HOURS!
You may actually never get there. It’s that bad.
This is why so many articles on the internet say you can’t make cold process soap without a stick blender, it’s the Olive Oil in their recipes (and they haven’t figured out a way around that like we have here).
So avoid Olive Oil when you can’t use your stick blender, and just use more Castor Oil and hard oils like Palm or Shea Butter if you have access to a heat source to melt it down enough. OR feel free to simply use our off-grid, no electricity tested recipe above.
Firm/hard oils and butters like coconut butter, palm oil, shea butter or cocoa butter all tend to speed up trace and are great if you can find a way to melt them down.
A wood stove is GREAT for this, but I’ve still achieved good results with keeping my regular Castor Oil blended with Sweet Almond and coconut butter (which is much easier to melt than the harder ones). I included Palm oil because it’s the most cost effective, while also making great, hard and long-lasting soap – but you can use the luxury butters if you’d like!
Honey and Beeswax both also are great at accelerating trace also, although I’ve found they go very fast and you’d need to get it into the mold ASAP. And beeswax definitely needs a very hot heat source to fully melt of course.
A Heat Source Also Helps to Speed Up Trace
After mixing your lye solution into your melted oils, you will want to put your bowl/container next to a heat source. Again, don’t put it ON the heat source, or you’ll be making a hot process soap – which again, is not wrong, it just produces a very different texture and finished look. Just put it next to a moderate heat source. I used my lantern for this, but I could have used our Mr Buddy indoor propane heater just as well. Just 10 degrees of difference can accelerate your trace enough for this method.
Whether you use a lantern, propane heater, or a wood stove/oven, just make sure it’s not getting too hot to where it cooks, unless you’re prepared to go full-blown hot process, which again, is totally great for off grid, but doesn’t produce the smooth, elegant type of soap that is cold process soap.
In fact, hot process soaping is basically what our ancestors did for ages when making traditional soap.
Since they didn’t have stick blenders, they used heat to speed up that saponification process by cooking their soap much like we do when professional soapers cook it in a crockpot to either rebatch a soap that went wrong, or make what’s called hot process soap.
For thousands of years, people usually used wood ash, which when mixed with boiling water, would created a type of lye solution, cleansing similar to our Black Noir charcoal bar.
How ironic that we’ve come full circle in ancients using ash and us modern people being fascinated with charcoal bars and how deeply they clean into our pores, right?! The history of soaping throughout the ages always fascinates me!
Certain Fragrance Oils Speed Up Trace
After you’ve added your lye solution to the blended oils, and set it next to a heat source, you’re ready to add a fragrance oil if you’d like. And this is where I found yet another trick!
Simply be specific about which fragrance oil you use. You can dramatically speed up your time to get to trace by simply making note of which fragrance oils or essential oils will help get you there faster (or in the soaping world, this means to “accelerate,”).
There are some fragrance oils I have added that literally get me to trace in about a minute when stick blending! This means less time you have to beat with your whisk before pouring into your mold, and since there are many fragrances to choose from, your off grid soap will smell amazing also! It’s a win-win!
Fragrances that Accelerate Trace:
- Ylang Ylang (a serene, surreal and transformative scent)
- Cinnamon
- Clove
- Vanilla
- Most Florals
They all smell WONDERFUL! So if you have access to a fragrance oil like one of these, your soap will be easier to make, and it will smell amazing – WIN – WIN!
Normally, soap recipes tend to add the fragrance in once you’ve arrived at trace, but when you’re off grid and wanting to speed things up due to less electricity, or no electricity, it’s OK to add them right after your lye solution and oils have been combined. It will speed up the process to get to trace.
The reason people tend to wait until they get to trace is because with stick blending, adding the fragrance oil too soon can make your soap, “seize,” which means it hardens too fast and gets really hard to transfer it to the molds.
With a stick blender, adding the fast-acting fragrance oils tend to cause professional soapers anxiety, as they have to work extra fast to get that soap into a mold before it’s too hard to work with.
But the nice thing with being off grid and doing this method is that you it isn’t as fast as with a stick blender, so while it DOES speed up trace, you also have the extra time if you’re using a whisk to work through blending that trace and peacefully pour it into your mold.
You even have time to decorate and make patterns… I found this method peaceful and serene, perfect for our slow-living homestead.
Sugar Baby… Sugar
This is optional of course, but I also found when researching how to make off grid soaping easier without a stick blender, that a key ingredient you can add during that whisking phase when you’re trying to get to trace, is simply table sugar!
According to Ashely Green from the Ultimate Guide to Soaping, sugar, “has the power to accelerate trace, accelerate the overall reaction rate, accelerate the transition to gel phase, increase the rate of lather formation (after your soap is cured), positively change the lather texture, increase the lifespan of bubbles, and increase the durability of bubbles.”
How incredible is that!?! With so many benefits from just one skin-loving ingredient, we will definitely be trying this out the next time we make our off grid, no-electricity soaps!
According to her expertise, sugar should be added anywhere from 0.5-5% of the total oil weight for you recipe. And keep in mind that certain ingredients are technically already a sugar, like goat milk, cow milk, coconut milk, honey, molasses, fruit juices, and more basic carbohydrates.
When using all of these things combined (and counting my goat’s milk as my sugar!), I found it only took me 20-30 minutes of whisking, and only a few minutes with the battery-powered mixer, to get my soap to that gorgeous, thick and creamy, luscious trace!
That is a far cry from having to mix for, “hours and hours,” like most will warn you. It’s just not that dramatic 🤗
So making off grid soap without electricity is totally doable! You just need the right recipe, and a handful of tricks and tips to speed up the saponification process.
Let us know how your own off grid soaping goes! We’d love hear any feedback or if you’ve found yet another way to make it faster and easier!
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