I’m happy bring you our very own, made here near the Lake District, castile soap. It’s surprisingly good! It’s unscented and made of just 3 ingredients, so it’s incredibly gentle and kind to sensitive skin.
A while ago, I was given a gorgeous bar of handmade soap. It had lovely swirly colours and it smelled wonderful. When I used it, the eczema on my hands flared up. I started looking at soap. A lot of natural soaps have added ingredients that can affect your skin. Plus, they contain ingredients from far-flung places. Mango butter, coconut oil, palm oil…all very exotic but it started me looking for something simpler. Even unscented soaps have a wide range of ingredients.
During my research I found out more about Castile soap. It is made by cold process and then has to be cured for a number of months, during which time it develops into a bar of soap that is firm but lathers nicely and retains a gorgeous creaminess. It’s soothing to the skin and is pleasing to use. Castile soap has been around for hundreds of years.
The earliest evidence of soap making comes from Egypt from 2800BC. Aleppo became famous for soap made of olive oil and laurel oil. In the 12th century, Muslim and Jewish artisans who were fleeing persecution brought their soap making techniques to the Mediterranean, including Spain and Italy. These artisans found that although there were plenty of olives, they couldn’t get hold of any laurel oil, so they made it exclusively out of olive oil. Aleppo soap is quite hard, and is green with a slight antiseptic smell. It’s a very nice soap. But the soap that was made in Castille, using just olive oil, resulted in such a pure, creamy white soap that it became superior to its contemporaries. The soap’s purity and high quality made it popular with royalty across Europe.
My kitchen was given over to making batches of it. It’s literally made with three ingredients: olive oil, water, sodium hydroxide (lye). It’s a chemical process, at the end of which you get sodium olivate, water, and glycerine. The trick is to get the proportions and temperatures of these exactly right, and to stir it until the saponification process happens. It was easy in the kitchen to make enough to fill a loaf tin, but then to scale it up took a few goes. It’s still very small batch, and it has to be cured for 6 months before it’s ready, so it’s very much a limited edition product.
Friends and family received samples of it, and the feedback consistently was that it was surprisingly good. I don’t know what they were expecting, for this to be a surprise, but it certainly is good soap.
