Fryer Oil Soap


As if frying food in F A T isn't shameful enough, after a few uses you're left more than a couple of dollars out of pocket and with litres and litres of oil to dispose of. Oil being one of the worst pollutants of land and water - one litre of oil will contaminate over one million litres of water - it's essential to dispose of it properly, or to recycle it into something useful again. So what about soap? That uses oil, but - does anyone really want to 'wash' themselves with fish and chip fragrance? Hmm.

So I tried it out as an experiment, and reasoned that if it smelled strange, it could become an 'outside' soap to wash off greasy boy hands and muddy child feet. Well knock me down, there is no aroma reminiscent of a dodgy fish & chip shop, and the lemon essential oil held it's scent really well.

The oil I use for frying is a canola blend, so I added some coconut oil (copha) to harden the soap. I filtered the oil through a couple of layers of paper towel. The 'water' component was made with a lemongrass tea, and the lemongrass added back into the soap at the end as an exfoliant. I used organic lemon essential oil at a 3% concentration.

So if you're a fellow fat fryer and would like to give it a go - here is the recipe!

Lemony Lemongrass Soap
2900g canola oil
750g copha
500g caustic soda (sodium hydroxide)
1000g water (or tea)
100g lemon essential oil

The instructions for making the soap are in this soap tutorial. The water/tea in this recipe takes the place of the milk. For information on caustic soda/sodium hydroxide/lye check out the post on it here. Happy soaping!

3 comments:

E said...

that's cool as! Now I want a deep fryer :P

Unknown said...

what a wonderful idea Id been putting hubby off for ages on fish & chips because there is so much oil & how do I dispose of it I hadn't even thought of soap & here I am a beginner soap maker! thanks for the idea. Not so good on the waist but terrific on the waste.....

Unknown said...

I would like to understand something. I am reading on the net that you can use old or recycle cooking oil to make soap. I would like to know what appropriate oil to choose in the lye calculator if persons use one oil or mixture of oils for their deep frying and the person never told what was used as You just know you were able to get recycled oil.

Suppose a person use just soybean for their deep frying, would the soap come out soft since I read that oils like soybean, canola and sunflower should not be used over a certain % if you want to have a hard bar?

Can the recycle oil be mixed with fresh vegetable or animal oil to achieve desired results?

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