The Natural Soap Chef shows how to take wonderful natural ingredients and turn them into amazing homemade soaps. It covers all the basics of soap making and shares some great recipes and ideas for making soap.
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Table of Contents
The Natural Soap Chef soap making book
This book will show you the way your great-grandma made soap, by using the cold process method utilizing the basic components of soap: lye and oil. With easy-to-follow instructions and photos that guarantee success, you’ll be a soap-making expert in no time!
- Title: The Natural Soap Chef
- Subtitle: Making Luxurious Delights from Cucumber Melon and Almond Cookie to Chai Tea and Espresso Forte
- Author: Heidi Corley Barto
- Publisher: Ulysses Press; Original edition (June 12, 2012)
- ISBN: 978-1612430621
- Format/Length: Paperback (119 pages)
- My Rating: 4 out of 5
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Making Homemade Soaps
Soap is supposed to cleanse and soothe skin, but what’s available in stores often just dries and irritates. With The Natural Soap Chef anyone can quickly learn how to make all-natural soaps that gently wash even the most sensitive skin. Not only are these soaps good for the body, they beautifully dress up any home with their delicious scents and colors.
Natural Soap Chef Book Review
I have always wanted to make soap from scratch but have always been a bit intimidated by the entire process. I continue to read up on how to make soap and have started sourcing some of the ingredients so I can give it a try.
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The Natural Soap Chef caught my eye because of the food tie-in that many of these recipes have. I am a huge foodie and love combining new flavors and seasonings in the kitchen so the idea of incorporating the same concepts into soap making sounded intriguing.
Soap Making for Beginners
The first couple of chapters of this book are dedicated to newbies like myself who have no idea what we are doing. There is a discussion of the ingredients, necessary materials, and ‘extras’ you can add to your recipe.
In addition, there is a chapter dedicated to explaining the soap-making process and step-by-step directions in detail. This includes many pictures, which I always find helpful. Most of the recipes make approximately 8 three-ounce bars per batch which seems like a fair amount.
Natural Soap Recipes
After the author has given you all the information you need, she ventures into the recipes. I really like that she starts this section with ‘beginner recipes’. The first one is a simple olive oil soap that contains only olive oil, lye and water. Not all the beginner recipes are that simple…some still seem a little intimidating to me.
I think I would like to see a few more recipes that only have one or two oils….that makes the process seem less intimidating for me somehow.
Natural Soap Ingredients
The recipe selection is amazing. There are recipes using beer, goats milk, coffee, honey and many other unique combinations. Chai Tea soap and Almond Cookie soap sound absolutely mouth-watering and I can just imagine how they would smell in the shower.
If I could change one thing about the book I would like to see recipes that use natural essential oils instead of fragrance oils.
If you are a novice soap maker I think this book is a great resource. For example, you will learn what the ingredients are, how the soap-making process works, and the recipes and directions are easy to follow.
I am looking forward to trying some of these recipes and hope they come out looking as appealing as they do in the author’s pictures! Head over to Amazon and buy this soap making book!
Diane is a professional blogger and nationally certified pharmacy technician at Good Pill Pharmacy. She earned her BS in Microbiology at the University of New Hampshire and has worked in cancer research, academics, and biotechnology. Concern over the growing incidence of human disease and the birth of her children led her to begin living a more natural life. She quickly realized that the information she was learning along the way could be beneficial to many others and started blogging and freelance writing to share this knowledge with others. Learn more about her HERE.
I’ve always wanted to give this a try. Thanks for sharing this resource.
thanks for the great review – i’d love to make soap too, but have been intimidated – guess i’ll have to pick up a copy of this book 🙂