Sausage fat? :-o

[Tara_H]

This may or may not be a really strange question, so bear with me! These days I've been pondering (as you do) the various fat contents of things and their suitability for making soap. We're trying to reduce as much as possible the waste we produce, and I noticed this morning that after cooking sausages in the air fryer, there's a lot of fat collected at the bottom which would normally be disposed of.
Would it be a feasible thing to collect this and wash it in the same way as I've just learned to do for tallow, in order to get a source of lard that I can't easily find elsewhere? (My next best option is asking the butcher and rendering it myself anyway). I'm not seeing any obvious flaws in this plan but I may well be blinded by my soapy desires.
Thoughts?

 

[Catscankim]

My grandmom used to make soap out of bacon fat that she stored in cans on her kitchen shelf, so I don't see this as anything much different, except for maybe the spices in the fat rendered from the sausage. Would be a fun experiment anyway. Try a small batch.

 

[PARTSBILL]

This may or may not be a really strange question, so bear with me! These days I've been pondering (as you do) the various fat contents of things and their suitability for making soap. We're trying to reduce as much as possible the waste we produce, and I noticed this morning that after cooking sausages in the air fryer, there's a lot of fat collected at the bottom which would normally be disposed of.
Would it be a feasible thing to collect this and wash it in the same way as I've just learned to do for tallow, in order to get a source of lard that I can't easily find elsewhere? (My next best option is asking the butcher and rendering it myself anyway). I'm not seeing any obvious flaws in this plan but I may well be blinded by my soapy desires.
Thoughts?

I was thinking the same thing this morning with the bacon fat I have for frying eggs for my wife and I in the mornings. I have probably a 4 pound container and could save more since my wife cooks @ 2 lbs every Sunday for the week. Not sure I want bacon smelling soap???

 

[Tara_H]

I was thinking the same thing this morning with the bacon fat I have for frying eggs for my wife and I in the mornings. I have probably a 4 pound container and could save more since my wife cooks @ 2 lbs every Sunday for the week. Not sure I want bacon smelling soap???

So I don't know if you've seen the info on how to wash these fats, but that's what got me started thinking. Because I use a fair bit of tallow and I've been working on getting the smell out so that I don't have beefy soap. Today's was the best yet, in fact; the character has changed quite a lot. So I don't see why the same shouldn't be possible with these fats that would otherwise go to waste?

Of course there's always the possibility of making bacon flavoured soap either, I believe bacon flavoured things have quite a following

 

[GemstonePony]

I think someone around here did a bacon and coffee soap, with coffee as the liquid a while back. Maybe some cream, too? It was a few months back, and I forget which FO was used, but breakfast soap is not unheard-of.

 

[AliOop]

I save most of my cooking oils in a ziplock baggie in the freezer. When it gets full, I "wash" it as clean as possible, and use the resulting mix to make what I call Barnyard Soap. It usually has mostly lard (from bacon, sausage, and other pork-derived cuts), tallow, a bit of chicken fat, and sometimes a bit of CO or OO if I used that to cook something.

I don't use fat from cooking fish because I have never been able to get the smell out. Everything else is deodorize-able with enough washing.

I will admit that I normally make a neem soap with this fat mixture, which has its own unique smell. And of course, I'm guestimating the percentages of the various fats, and thus not getting super accurate numbers for the lye calculator. But I've never had a zappy soap from it, probably bc the majority is lard and tallow, which are so close in SAP values.

 

[Tara_H]

Barnyard soap, I love it! @AliOop

Right, I'm definitely going to try this, I always hate throwing it out. Even if the first batches are far from perfect, soap of any kind is not going to go to waste.

 

[MarinaB]

In October I was in Turkey in one village. Turkish people make their own soap, usually using olive oil. I wanted to buy some bars. And my Airbnb host told me that will take me to one lady WHO DOESN"T USE what left over after cooking That host was teaching me how to see soap with used oils.

 

[ppruitt]

We bought a whole cow in January. I rendered the fat and have it in my freezer. The tallow from this cow is a lovely white and the fat was gorgeous. As I cook meals, I am removing fat that the processing company left. I save it in a baggie in my freezer and when I have enough I render and wash it. But I have also started saving the fat that I drain from the cooked ground beef. It makes lovely tallow also. I have made one batch of soap from this tallow and it turned out very nice. My husband loves it. So I would say we definitely got our moneys worth. And we still have a years worth of beef to eat our way through. Waste not, want not as the old saying goes.

 

[MarinaB]

Rendered tallow is fine. I buy beef fat from an Amish farm.
BUT!!! I do not want to buy soap that is made with oil from someone's meal left over.
If a soapmaker will use used oil and use those bars for self - fine.

 

[Tara_H]

Rendered tallow is fine. I buy beef fat from an Amish farm.
BUT!!! I do not want to buy soap that is made with oil from someone's meal left over.
If a soapmaker will use used oil and use those bars for self - fine.

Haha, fair enough! Everyone's certainly entitled to know what's going in to the soap they're using. In any case I'm not selling soap and have no particular plans to, so you needn't worry about any of my sausage soap getting out into the wild

 

[MarinaB]

Tara_H

 

[CpnDouchette]

Not sure I want bacon smelling soap???

I think soap is probably the first thing I've heard of that isn't made better with bacon...

 

[luluzapcat]

When I got into making soap recently I just loved the idea of using what otherwise went to waste, and made a number of batches from my own and my friend's leftover bacon fat. 100% "recycled" lard made lovely soap--but despite many cycles and versions of washing and purifying the fat, I was not ever able to make the faint lard scent completely disappear, and I ended up moving away from that ingredient for that reason.
If anyone comes up with a great way to get rid of the smell, I would totally return to this! Please do post any successes.