Soap thickening in Suet tallow vs muscle fat tallow

[Queeniewildwood]

Hi everyone.

I have previously purchased tallow for soap making (definitely not suet fat) and it works great in cold processed soap. I used the same formula with suet tallow I rendered and it gets quite thick when I mix the room temp liquid oils with the melted tallow, lard, cocoa butter & coconut oil. Then, when I add the lye water….holy moly it traces fast. Has anyone else had this experience? My formula is:

22% olive oil
25% tallow
20% lard
18% coconut oil
5% cocoa butter
5% Castor oil
5% avocado oil

 

[DeeAnna]

"... it gets quite thick when I mix the room temp liquid oils with the melted tallow, lard, cocoa butter & coconut oil..."

It's very likely the fats are solidifying when you add the cool oils. This is essentially what's called "false trace" when the fats cool down too much due to the cooler temperature and the mixture thickens as if it's at a "real" trace. Your situation is happening to you early on just with the fats, rather than later after the lye solution is added, but it's otherwise pretty similar.

What are your ingredient temperatures? Maybe they need to be warmer? Are you making sure the fats are visually clear before you proceed with soap making?

If the fats aren't warmed long enough to be visually clear, the soap batter is more likely to have "false trace" and the finished soap is more likely to have white stearic spots due to all of the fat crystals not fully melting.

Many soap makers don't measure their temperatures when making soap, but I suggest you measure the temperatures of your ingredients and the initial soap batter. Try this for a few batches -- compare the temperature measurements with the perception of warmth against the palm of your hand. As you become more informed, you can use your palm as a rough check of temperature -- that's often plenty good enough when you know what you're doing.

The commercial fat you're using isn't the same as the home rendered fat. Yes, they're both tallow, but one is fat from a huge vat of fat. The other is from a single animal. Other factors can all affect how a given fat performs -- how the fat is produced, the location of the fat source within the animal's body, the breed/diet/genetics of the animal, how the fat is handled during processing and storage, etc.