If the irange is anything like avocado skins, you'll want to grind them up and then dry them! Avocado skins are rock hard when dried!Hmm ... sounds interesting. I'm thinking ground shredded coconut or finely ground orange/lemon peels would be cheap. Especially if you eat oranges. Just shred and dry, then grind them up.
Adding in some Oatmeal and Orange Oil and help even more. I always add oatmeal to my 100% salt bars because customers expect them to be more scrubby than my other soaps, and just do not realize the fine salt will usually become smooth. Even though the orange oils will not necessarily hold scent especially in salt bars the orange eo will help cut grease and oil.
Sounds like you made the kind of soap my great grandmother would make. She used a mixture of cooking fats and trimmings off the pork and beef and would render it down to get the crumbles out of it and then she'd mix up her lye water using the ashes from the woodstove. She'd set a pot by the fire and add the lye and her fats and let it cook down. The soap she ended up with was a soft brown soap that she'd just scoop out what she needed. It was like a playdough consistency.It started out as a recipe... At least as much of a recipe as you can have when you are not entirely sure what oils are in the used fry oil -- probably soybean, cottonseed, corn, canola, and various animal fats... From there, it became more of wing it thing to see what would happen if different things got added to it since I did not consider the first iteration as hard enough for a hand soap. It only got to about fudge type hardness initially. If I had never achieved a hard soap, it would not be a deal breaker though. Since it was just for my own use for cleaning grease and such off my hands, I could just cast it into a large open top container and rub my hand across the top of it when I needed to wash my hands. Kind of somewhere between a liquid and a bar soap, I guess...
The 2nd batch that I made with a single vegetable oil hardened up noticeably better, although since I didn't know what type of vegetable oil it was, I might not have had enough lye. Regardless, it worked and my wife seems to like the way it makes her skin feel -- she tends to have dry skin and normally ends up putting tons of lotions on after a shower.
I second the use of 100% coconut oil for serious cleaning. I made a small batch for cleaning paintbrushes and spot cleaning laundry. For natural hair brushes, I rinse them in diluted vinegar after cleaning.
