Natural handmade tallow soap recipe: coffee grounds
The recipes say to use fresh coffee grounds and fresh espresso to make the lye, but as we don't drink coffee, and this was just for washing hands, I wanted to use waste coffee grounds instead. We got some from a friend of a friend with a cafe and I dried them in the woodstove. I used packets of instant coffee that I keep around in case someone wants a coffee.
I decided to use half tallow, quarter coconut oil and quarter olive oil for this recipe as the coconut oil adds more suds and that seemed appropriate for a soap that would be used to clean hands. The recipes also suggested that the coffee would remove other odours. I wondered what it would smell like, so I didn't use an essential oil for this first batch.
Coffee soap recipe
250g olive oil
250g coconut oil
500g tallow
6% superfat
142g caustic
300-330g coffee (cooled)
The soap doesn't smell like coffee, so next time I would use an essential oil like tea tree or eucalyptus. I quite like the colour from the coffee, and it does seem to work at cleaning my hands after gardening.
What do you think? Do you like to play around with soap recipes? What else should I try?
You can find out more about tallow soap in my eBook Make your own natural soap
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