How To Make Soap With Milk

This tutorial will teach you how make your own creamy, skin-nourishing milk soap! Pretty much any cold process soap recipe that calls for water, can be made with milk, or a milk substitute instead. You just need to take a little different approach to make sure you don’t scorch the milk or overheat your soap. Lye is a requirement when making homemade soap. It seems scary and dangerous, but I assure you - if you can safely and responsibly work with strong chemicals such as bleach and ammonia, then you can handle lye.

There are two types of lye: sodium hydroxide (for solid bars of soap) and potassium hydroxide (for liquid soaps.) I buy and recommend Essential Depot’s food grade lye from Amazon. Safety equipment is a must. This includes: goggles to protect your eyes, long sleeves in case of accidental splashes, and gloves to keep your hands from coming in contact with lye solution or raw soap batter. When you first mix lye into water, milk, or other liquid, it can give off strong fumes.

Work in a well ventilated area and try not to directly breathe them in. I work in my kitchen sink to catch spills and because it has a window right over it for fresh air. If you have chronic breathing issues or feel concerned about the fumes, consider using a full face ventilation mask. All measurements are by weight, not volume.

You need an accurate digital scale to make soap. Guessing or eyeballing could make you end up with soap that’s too slimy from not enough lye or too harsh from too much lye. I used THIS SCALE for years before it broke and then replaced it locally. This is how I make milk soap.

It’s not the one and only way though. There are other methods. If you see someone on the internet elsewhere doing things differently, it doesn’t mean that they or I are wrong in our method. The great thing about soap making is that there’s tons of room for individuality and different approaches!

Milk type can be: cow, goat, coconut, rice, almond, and so forth. I use whole milk, since that’s what we drink, but you can use lower fat versions as well. When using milk substitutes, the less additives, the better. Note: High olive oil soaps like this one sometimes take a little longer to set up and cure. Olive oil is a soft/hard oil.

It starts off causing the soap to be on the softer side, but once it cures for an extended time, the bar will grow very hard, yet extremely gentle on your skin. You can reduce the amount of milk by an ounce or two, if you’d like to speed up the process. Reducing liquid is also helpful when using silicone molds.

Step 1: If you use a different recipe (or even one from this site), run it through a lye calculator to make sure the lye and oil amounts were typed in correctly. I like Majestic Mountain Sage’s one (HERE) best. For more detail on using lye calculators, read up on my post How To Make Any Soap Recipe Palm Free. Step 2: In order to keep the sugars in milk from scorching, it needs to be icy cold or even frozen, before adding lye.

I like to weigh out the amount of milk needed into a heat proof plastic pitcher and pop it in the freezer the day before I plan to make soap. You can also freeze your milk in ice cube trays or put it in the freezer until slushy. Step 3: Assemble all of the ingredients, utensils, and safety gear that you’ll need.

It’s helpful to jot yourself a step-by-step checklist, to refer to as you go. Step 4: Prepare your mold. Silicone Column Mold (from BrambleBerry) - when using silicone, decrease the amount of liquid a bit more and allow to stay in the mold a few extra days. You can also add 1 teaspoon of salt to the milk, before adding lye, to make the soap batter firm up faster in the mold.