How to Make 3 Sugar Tallow Soap Recipe (Cold Process)

This three sugar tallow soap recipe might just become one of your new favorite soaps to make. Using honey, molasses & maple syrup, these homemade soap bars look good enough to eat! You’ll have a luxurious bar of soap with a bubbly, creamy lather and a warm, sweet scent. 

This 3-sugar tallow soap recipe combines the skin-loving properties of tallow with the natural benefits of honey, molasses, and maple syrup, plus their beautiful coloring. The sugars boost lather, while tallow provides a long-lasting, conditioning bar. With a little finishing touch of turbinado sugar and vanilla bean powder, you’ll add a little aesthetic and a gentle exfoliation. This bar works great for sensitive skin as there are no fragrances or essential oils. 

Benefits of Tallow in Homemade Soap

Tallow is a great addition to homemade soaps as the fatty acid profiles of rendered animal fat is similar to our own skin barrier. If you don’t have enough fatty acids, then your skin can become dry or irritated. Some of the benefits of animal fats like tallow include increased hydration, gentleness, and barrier strengthening. The lipids in tallow are considered bio-compatible with human skin so it’s a great addition to any homemade skincare. 

Tallow has several key fatty acids including: Oleic Acid (Omega-9), Stearic Acid, Palmitic Acid, CLA (conjugated Linoleic Acid), and Alpha-Linolenic Acid (Omega-3). Those may sound like super fancy words, but all that to say tallow can penetrate the skin well to help hydrate and support your skin barrier, is a natural emollient, is an anti-inflammatory agent, and supports restoration of the skin. 

Check out our How to Render Tallow Tutorial or our How to Make Tallow Soap Tutorial for the basics of soap making. 

**SAFETY FIRST when working with lye: wear gloves, safety goggles, and work in a well-ventilated area when handling sodium hydroxide (lye). Have vinegar or citric acid solution nearby in case of spills.

You may also like our how-tos on making Tallow Laundry Soap, Tallow Shampoo Bars, or Tallow Balms.

Base Oils & Butters for 3 Sugar Tallow Soap

The fats used in this recipe are fairly simple. I use rendered tallow, olive oil, and coconut oil.

Why Use Sugar in Cold Process Soap?

Adding sugar to soap enhances lather, creating big, fluffy bubbles. Plus, it adds a caramel color without extra additives or clays. However, sugar also increases heat in the soap batter, so careful temperature control is necessary to avoid overheating or soap volcanoes. 

Homemade Tallow Soap Instructions

Prepare Your Work Area and Supplies: Wear gloves and goggles, and work in a well-ventilated area. 

Melt Fats and Oils Together: I like to weigh and melt my tallow in a small crockpot on the warm setting a few hours before I plan to make my soap. When I begin getting ready to make soap I will measure and add my olive oil and coconut oil to the crockpot to come to the same temperature as the tallow. This is usually somewhere between 130-165 degrees. 

Measure Sugars: While oils and lye are cooling, measure 1 teaspoon of each sugar into separate ramekins. Add 1oz of water to each sugar and mix well. Set aside.

Make the Lye Solution: Put on protective gear before starting this step and make sure you are in a well-ventilated area or outside. Weigh 8.5oz water in a heat-resistant bowl and lye crystals in another bowl. Slowly add sodium hydroxide (lye) to the water (never the other way around!). Stir until fully dissolved and allow the lye solution to cool to around 100 degrees. This will take about 15-20 minutes. 

Cool Oils: Pour oils into a soap-safe bowl and let the oils cool to around 100 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Combine Lye Solution & Oils: Slowly pour the lye solution into the oils while stirring with a spatula. Using an immersion blender, keep it submerged, and pulse for about 15 seconds. Then use spatula to stir the mixture, switching between pulsing and stirring until you’ve reached a light trace (a pudding-like consistency). 

Mix Sugar into Soap Batter: Evenly divide the soap batter into 3 soap-safe containers. Working with one sugar at a time, add your HONEY sugar-water mixture to the container of soap batter. Using an immersion blender, mix until a medium trace is reached. The batter may darken and thicken quickly! 

Layering Soap Batter: Pour first sugar batter container into the soap mold.

Repeat the previous step for the MAPLE sugar-water and then the MOLASSES sugar water. When pouring on each additional layer of soap go slowly so it doesn’t immediately sink to the bottom (this is just visual, it will not affect the actual soap)

Cool: Put soap molds on a cookie sheet for easier transporting. Then I place my soap mold (uncovered) directly into the refrigerator for 1 hour to help prevent overheating.

Insulate, Cut, & Cure: Lightly covered soap with plastic wrap (to help prevent soda ash). Allow it to fully saponify for 24-48 hours before unmolding. Cut into bars of desired size and cure for 4-6 weeks for best hardness and lather. 

What is Cold-Process Soap Making?

Cold process (what we used for this 3 Sugar Tallow Soap) soapmaking is a wonderful craft and hobby that allows for creativity and customization. I choose to use the cold-press method when I make soap because it is how I learned to make soaps, but the hot-process method is very common too. As a note, I am not a professional, but please ALWAYS check my (or others) recipes using a lye calculator before making a recipe. 

Saponification is the chemical process that converts fats into soap by way of sodium hydroxide (lye). This reaction is exothermic, so it gives off heat during the process.

Cold Process (as opposed to Hot Process) is a traditional way to make soap where you combine fats and lye at a lower temperature, at around 90-100°. It doesn’t take a lot of time (about an hour) to make soap this way and gives you more leeway in customizing colors and scents. It does take an additional 24-48 hours to fully saponify. 

Hot Process uses higher heat as a way to make saponification happen faster, often within an hour as opposed to the 24-48 hours of cold process. This method requires more water than the cold process. Hot process still requires weeks of curing but may be shorter than the 4-6 weeks recommended for cold process.

What is a lye calculator?

You can mix and match many different fats and oils, but it is VERY important to use a lye or soap calculator anytime you make soap. Soap makers should always double-check recipes, mine included, using a lye calculator before you make them. Use something like SoapCalc.net to help you calculate how much lye you will need for different ratios of ingredients and different oils. You cannot just swap castor oil for coconut oil in a soap recipe because every fat has a different SAP value (how much lye is needed to make a certain fat into soap).

Lye calculators help you to formulate the lye and water amounts needed for your combination and weight of oils to be able to saponify properly. It will also account for a “superfat” amount. Superfat is when a little extra fat is added to a recipe so that a little is left unsaponified to provide more hydration in a bar. I usually stick to a 5% superfat, sometimes going to 8% on special formulas.

You also want to make sure your soap isn’t either too cleansing (because it will dry your skin out), or too conditioning (because you’ll be left with a layer of scum on your skin). Each fat or oil also has different properties like lather or bubbles. My recommendation is to use a basic recipe and get good at it before you try new variations. This site is super helpful in understanding the different qualities of natural ingredients in soaps and using the lye calculator.