Making Liquid Hand Soap in a Blender (Just Two Ingredients!)

Staying clean and killing germs seems to be on everyone's minds these days, and the number one way to do this is still good old soap. Our great-grandmothers knew how to make their own, and so can we (it's a lot easier now for us than it was for them!) Thanks to blenders, silicone molds, and slow cookers, soap making doesn't have to be an all-day, sweaty job, producing something that could burn your hands. It's a pretty simple process really, and with modern tools and ingredients we can be sure of a safe and effective product.

This is also the best way to know just what's in your soap - if you have chemical sensitivities, or just don't like all of the added colors and scents, making your own is a simple way to know exactly what's going on your family's skin. And if you're into essential oils, you can easily add them to your finished product to give it whatever scent or other properties you desire. I like to add some peppermint eo to mine in the winter, for that candy cane sort of scent (and also because it repels spiders and mice!). In the summer, I use rose geranium eo for its tick-repellant properties (there are a lot of lymes-carrying ticks where we live, and rose geranium is supposed to be one of the most potent natural tick repellants). But feel free to use whatever scents you like (rosemary for better memory? citrus for a cheerier mood?) Or use none at all! You're in total control!

Here's how I make my soap:

You'll need just two ingredients (well, three if you count water), olive oil (NOT extra virgin - for some reason this doesn't work well. You want the cheap stuff, or even pomace grade if you can get it) and lye (for bar soap, you want sodium hydroxide; for the liquid soap we're making here, potassium hydroxide works better).

A word about lye: yes, this stuff is used as drain cleaner. Before saponification (chemically bonding with oil and turning into soap) it is very caustic and can cause chemical burns on skin. In the quantities we're using here, and in the contained environment of the blender, it's usually not overly dangerous, but it's still smart to be cautious, and not to do this around children and pets. If you do spill some on your skin, the best thing to do is to wash it off with soap and water (NOT vinegar). Once your soap is made, there will be no lye left - it will all have turned into soap (that's why all soap recipes should include more oil than lye; that way all of the lye has enough oil available to turn into soap, with a little extra just in case. This is called "superfatting" in the soaping world).

If you're still scared of lye, think of it like this: hydrogen and oxygen are extremely flammable. We all learned in grade school that a fire can't burn without oxygen (that's why candle snuffers work). But if you chemically bond the two, you get water, which we use to put out fires. The properties are completely changed. It's the same with lye in soap. Finished soap won't burn you.

You  also want to make sure that your olive oil is pure olive oil, and not a blend with other oils. Each kind of oil or fat (fat is just oil that is solid at room temperature) has a different ratio for bonding with lye to make soap, so if you have different kinds of oils you need to adjust your recipe to account for this, or you could end up with soap that still contains unbonded lye and can burn your skin.

OK, now that we got all of the safety information out there, I can show you how easy (and safe!) it is to make your own soap.

Here's my recipe:
9.12 oz (258.55g) water
3.04 oz (86.18g) lye (potassium hydroxide)
16 oz (453.59 g) olive oil

It's very important to have an accurate scale (as I said above, you want to make sure you have more oil than lye in your soap). Measure out your ingredients carefully, and if in doubt, err on the side of more oil and water and less lye, just to be on the safe side. But better not to doubt!

1. Measure out your water into a glass jar you won't use for anything else (I just use an old salsa jar)

2. In a separate container, measure out your lye.

3. Pour the lye into the water (never the other way around, it could "volcano" and overflow the jar and burn your hands). I always step out onto the porch for this so that the toxic fumes that are created can dissipate.

4. Let the lye and water mixture sit for 5 minutes, until the mixture looks clear. You can stir it with a metal spoon to make sure everything blends well. Make sure to leave it somewhere where it's safe from children and pets. Also, be aware that this will get really hot! Never use plastic for this (it will melt, and bond with your lye to make something else) and be careful what you set it on.

5. Meanwhile, measure out your olive oil into your blender. Make sure everything is tight and working properly - you don't want it leaking! This is why I also put my blender in a pan; if it does leak, it will go into the pan and not all over the counter top. Lye is particularly hard on butcher block counter tops - ask me how I know!!!

6. When your lye is ready, bring it inside and pour the lye mixture into the olive oil (you might want to use an oven mitt - it will still be really hot!) Cover the blender and turn it on to a relatively low speed.

7. Wait. Soap made with pure olive oil can take 20-30 minutes to blend. Be patient. Remember, Grandma used to have to stir this by hand all day!

You'll know this part of the process is done when the soap "comes to trace". This means that the soap has a thick, pudding-like consistency, and that when you stir it with a spoon it leaves a trace of where the spoon has been, it doesn't just flatten out again like when it's fully liquid.

At this point, you have your soap base. If you wanted to make regular soap bars, you could pour this into your mold and let it sit for 4 weeks to finish saponifying ("cure"). It's not finished soap yet; all of the chemical reactions haven't fully happened.

Or, you can speed up the process with heat, which is what we'll do in the next step.

8. Pour the soap base into a slow cooker. I like to use my Instant Pot, because the stainless steel insert doesn't react with the soap. I've done this in a regular Crock Pot, and the process eventually (after multiple batches of soap) ate away at the enamel and ruined the pot. I don't worry about having a separate pot for soap making, since once it's cooked I have finished soap, just like what I use to clean the pot after cooking.

You'll want to cook the soap base on low for several hours, stirring a couple times just to make sure it's cooking evenly and to see how it's coming along. It will go through several stages; it will start out like pudding, then look something like applesauce, and eventually get to a stage when it looks more like yellow mashed potatoes, with no liquid left. When it's thick like this, it's ready for the next step.

Again, this is a point where you have options. You can pour it into a mold and wait for it to cool to make bars (it's fully soap at this point, so you don't have to wait for it to cure), or you can mix in water to make liquid soap, as I'll show you in the next step.

9. Mix in 5-6 cups of water. This, for me, is the tricky part. Too much water, and you end up with runny soap (which you can cook off; just turn your slow cooker back on and let the excess water evaporate); too little, and your soap is too thick and gloppy and will clog up your pumper (to fix this, just add more water - which is much easier than boiling off excess, so I usually start with 5 cups of water and tweak from there).

Mixing it can also be a challenge; I like to use my stick blender, which does a pretty thorough job, but leaves the soap foamy, so you need to wait for it to settle before pouring it into its final container. A whisk and good old elbow grease will do the job, too, with less foam - but I'm lazy and have a stick blender.

As I mentioned before, you can add essential oils to your finished soap, either to the whole batch when you store it or to the pumper when you're ready to use it. You want to add them at the end, when your soap is cool, since essential oils are heat-sensitive.

And that's it! Kind of putzy, and it does take a while (most of it waiting while the blender runs or the soap cooks), but not really that hard. In only a few hours every month or so, you can keep your family stocked with soap!

The Story Behind Ruth's Homemade

Have you ever read about the health benefits of some herb and thought, "I need to get a lotion with THAT in it!" Or maybe it was trying to find a bar of soap without certain things in it. That was me. The more research I did, the more I wanted products that apparently weren't available. It's getting easier now to find "natural" health and beauty products, but somehow I could never find exactly what I wanted. My kids were little at the time, and I wanted to be sure that anything I put on their skin was also safe for them to put in their mouths (because they would!)

So, since I couldn't find the products I wanted, I decided to see if I could make them myself. First I learned how to make soap (I wrote a post about that here). I experimented with different oils (coconut oil, castor oil - even lard and tallow. In case you were wondering, soap made from home-rendered tallow makes you smell like beef. Your dog will love you!) and I tried different scents - I didn't want to use fragrance oils, which did nothing but smell, and were made of chemicals I wasn't sure I was comfortable with. So I moved to essential oils, only to find that it takes a lot of essential oil to make scented bar soap, and it's questionable if it retains the oil's medicinal qualities, due to the high heat of the saponification process). I even tried different fun shaped molds. Eventually, though, I realized that what I really wanted was just a plain, unscented soap with as few ingredients as possible - my Nothing But Clean bar.

Next came shampoo bars. I'd read about the hormone-disrupting effects of the chemicals in most shampoos, and I knew I needed to keep those off of me and my kids. So I began to experiment. It took a lot of trial and error (no, plain castile soap does not work well for cleaning your hair!) but eventually I found something that would work for my straight, oily hair. Best of all, my husband likes it! He even complains if I use "regular" shampoo - he hates the overpowering scents.

My next product came from necessity. I get cold sores when I'm under a lot of stress, and I read in The Handbook of Vintage Remedies that lemon balm can heal and prevent cold sores. So I found a simple recipe for lip balm and added lemon balm essential oil. It worked! I rarely get cold sores anymore, and when I do it's usually because I haven't been using my lip balm recently.

From that basic recipe, I also made peppermint lip balm. Peppermint is great for clearing your sinuses when you have a cold (think the menthol in cough drops) as well as for easing headaches. Plus it just smells yummy!

The next product was more serendipitous - I read somewhere, just randomly clicking through herbalism websites on the internet, that plantain (the herb, not the fruit that looks like a banana) was helpful for stopping the itch of mosquito bites. It grows like crazy in my yard (most people actually call it a weed), so it was easy enough to pick it, chew it up, and press it onto a mosquito bite or bee sting. But what about when we were travelling, and I didn't know where I could find some; or if I found some, if it had been sprayed with something I didn't want in my mouth? So I started making plantain salve from the "weeds" growing in my yard. I mixed coconut oil, beeswax, and olive oil infused with dried plantain leaves - basically the same recipe I'd used for the lip balm, but this time using plantain. It worked like a charm, and I soon had people requesting some for their families. To my surprise, it worked for more than just bug bites. Friends reported that it helped with a variety of skin problems, from eczema and hives to just plain dry winter skin. It's become my best selling product.

Another product that came directly from one of my family's needs was wound salve. With five active kids in the house, this is the one we use most often. I studied which herbs had the best antiseptic effects, such as tea tree, lavender, calendula, and chickweed, as well as plantain for its soothing qualities, and blended these together. It's been our go-to for minor cuts and scrapes for years.

I first found out about lotion bars when browsing Pinterest one day. I liked the idea of a non-goopy way to keep my skin soft in the winter (Wisconsin winters can be brutal for your hands) without unpronounceable chemicals. I tried it, and it worked great - now I use one every night before I go to sleep (and usually my husband does, too; his hard-working hands need some TLC!)

When friends and family started asking about my soaps and lotions, I realized that maybe I could make a business out of my hobby. Not everyone had the time or inclination to make things themselves - I know that when I started out, I would rather have just bought the products I ended up making. I could save them the time it took me to research and find the recipes I'd gathered, as well as the time preparing the actual products.

So Ruth's Homemade was born. All of the products I sell are made from food-safe ingredients, and are safe for children and pets. I use as few ingredients as possible - and list them all clearly on the label - so people with allergies and sensitivities don't have to worry about what might be hiding in their products.

Since the whole company is just me, I stick to what I know - which unfortunately is not computers! So I haven't set up an official online store - just a simple website listing my products and my email address (the links above are all to that website); if you would like to purchase something, email me your list and I'll happily send it to you. I've figured out how to do Paypal, or I'll also accept a good old fashioned check.

As you may have noticed, I love to try new things, so I enjoy making custom orders - let me know what you'd like, and I'll see what I can do!

So that's the story behind my little brand - just a mom making soaps and salves for her family, and now sharing what I've learned with you. You can be sure that I stand behind every product - because I use them all myself.