How to Bathe in Bacon Grease

If you’re not going to cook with your bacon fat, why not make soap out of it? Noahw at the DIY website Instructables asked himself that very question after he ended up with a liter of the grease (the byproduct of cooking 10 pounds of bacon for a group of hungry whitewater-rafters). I stumbled on his step-by-step guide recently and was intrigued by the possibility, which now seems so obvious: Any fat can be made into soap if it’s purified and mixed with lye! To “clean” his raw grease, Noah simply boiled it in water.

There’s something appealingly hard-core about the idea of making bacon soap, but does it make you smell like bacon? Not really, it seems. Noah actually tried to add bacon scent back into the soap by mixing in vegan bacon bits. Ironically, if he’d left actual flecks of meat in the fat mixture, they would have gone rancid. The vegan bits had “some nice bacon aroma which I thought would flavor the soap nicely and act as an exfoliant on skin,” he writes.

Ah, the many wonders of bacon.

Posted by Christy Harrison | Monday, May 21, 2007 at 11:16am | 1 comment
Tagged with: bacon, soap, instructables, diy, pork fat

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Comments

I think anytime you can reuse products; and not use chemicals of the soap, is great. I have very dry skin; especially in the cold. I have trid every lotion, oil, and cream to no avail. One day I took some extra virgin olive oil with a lot of water in a regular dollar store bottle and when im in the shower I shake it up, spray myself down and pat dry. It works great. If i used bacon grease my boyfriend wouldn't leave me alone. Hey, not a bad idea...

Jil May 21, 2007 11:27PM | link

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