Making soap at home

Fiona and Hugh Osborne make their own soap from leaf fat to use every part of the animal

When it comes to rearing animals we like to use “everything but the squeak”. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some worthy goal, we simply can’t afford to be wasteful. Having said that, it’s amazing how often it’s possible to produce items from “waste” that are eco-friendly, money saving and higher quality than shop bought. Soap is a great example. Next time you are in the supermarket, take a look at the ingredients of the soap for sale. We’re prepared to bet that you can’t find any that isn’t made using palm oil. Using oil for soap that is made by clearing rain forest then transporting the oil around the globe seems ludicrous to us, especially when, in our opinion, far better soap can be made from animal fats.

MAKING LARD

Our friend Martha raises rare breed pigs (incredible high welfare pork, look online for The Decent Company). Martha tells us that many of her customers buying half a pig don’t want the leaf fat (dense fat from around the kidneys of a pig). We suspect much of this is because so few people render lard these days, but it’s simple to render leaf fat into snowy white lard that makes epic roast potatoes, incredible pastry and the best soap ever!

When we render lard all we do is to chop the leaf fat into small pieces and melt it very gently in a pan. Any bits of pork attached to the fat won’t melt so we filter the lard through a sieve and then through some muslin to get rid of them. When we learned about this we were scared the lard would cool and clog the cloth, but it doesn’t cool quickly enough for that to be a problem.