Making Goat Soap, Cheese, Yogurt & Kefir

One of the most recent sustainable living workshop we had was on how to make kefir, yogurt, soap and cheese using raw goats milk.  I was pretty excited about this class.

We spent the day with Jini Reynolds, expert on just about anything from herbal medicine to helicopter flying. Really.  She's got a lovely little homestead nestled in the hills of Redwood Valley overlooking Mendocino Lake.  

The first part of the day, we prepared the ingredients for making soap - you have to use lye, a chemical that essentially emulsifies the fats you add to produce glycerin, which is what suds up and is actually soap.  So, we added water to the lye and had to wait for it to cool down (adding water = chemical reaction = gets really hot) before we got started.  In the interim, we learned about cheese, yogurt and kefir.

Cheese, I discovered, is quite simple to make.  If you're using raw milk, you basically heat it up (just a bit), add some white vinegar, and let it sit over night.  The vinegar forces the curds to separate from the whey, (then along came a spider and sat down beside her...no wait, wrong post.) After letting this mixture sit overnight, you pour off the whey (liquid) and maintain the curds (cheese).  Put the curds in cheese cloth, squeeze out excess whey, and hang for a day or so.  I present to you ... cheese!  Easy, huh?

Yogurt is even easier if you can believe it. All you do is add a little bit of existing yogurt to a raw milk.  Let it sit out and it turns into yogurt!  I need to get me some raw milk to start experimenting ... Making kefir is much the same way.  You can either use the cultured kefir pearls from kefir that has sat out for a few weeks (too old to eat, but it produces some great starts), or use kefir pearls you purchased at the store.  Again, so simple.  The hardest thing is waiting for it to be ready.

After the morning session, we had a lovely lunch in her backyard, which included, of course, goat cheese!  We chopped up some garlic, chives and basil and added it to some freshly made cheese.  It was yum.  Jini also broke out a bottle of red and a bottle of white wine - quite a treat for our afternoon lunch.

Back to soap ... now that the lye/water mixture had cooled, we mixed up a few different kinds of oils - coconut, olive, palm - as well as some raw goat milk.  We then added the lye and took turns stirring - we ended up stirring for something like 45 minutes!  It was a huge batch, enough for like, 40-50 bars of soap.  But you had to keep stirring to force the emulsification else the ingredients would separate.

This is about 5 min into the mixing

We poured our mixture into soap molds and added some fresh lavender to a few of them for texture.  Because it takes a while for it to settle and harden, Jini said she'd mail our finished soaps to us.  Again, waiting is the hardest part!  I'll be sure to post a photo of once we receive them.