Why? The question of why may befuddle even the most nobly, batty individuals, but that doesn't diminish the importance of having something you hold near and dear to you in your soap dish. Bacon is truth, friend. It's not only a food that knows no culinary boundaries, it is a forceful, vengeful, little pile of fat that loves to make things crispy and dangerous.
Bacon makes everything crazy. Tie two hot dogs together with bacon. Strangle Bay scallops with bacon. Devil an egg and then stab it with bacon. Stick seventy-seven strips of bacon up a Cornish hen's ass. Rape a baked potato with bacon. Fuck with your peanut butter sandwich. When it's expecting the grape jam, hit it with the bacon. Crush 6 pounds of the extra crispy stuff and make your soups and salad cry. Oh, and bacon gravy! Throw 97 biscuits into a hot tub full of bacon gravy. Clog arteries. Grow love handles. Eat bacon. Wake up and smell the bacon, Utah.
Ding.
In the middle of this delirium, the lights came on at the Black Table. The good ol' boot kicked the marble down the slide knocking the bucket off its ledge and we're off. Whoo hoo. We are off. Blenders are lighting up the room, the crappy beer cans spiral high to the ceiling and the evil fucking Baptists are picketing Fred Rogers funeral.
If cleanliness is godliness, bacon is truth. And the truth shall make you clean. Nobody wants to smell like bacon, obviously, but in the spirit of watching The Black Table's kooky ideas gurgle, belch, and shit all over the floor, we bring you bacon soap.
Amen.
THE RECIPE
You're gonna need some gear, like spoons and bowls and crap, but when it comes to actual stuff in the soap? Water and bacon are really easy. Lye's the hard one to find.
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1/2 oz., or 1 Tbl., of lye
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1/4 cup cold water
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1/2 cup lukewarm bacon fat
It's bacon, baby.
And you're gonna need a whole lot of it to make even the teensiest amount of soap. Mostly fat, without any nutrition, bacon has always been something of a ghetto meat, so go for the cheap-ass supermarket bacon. In the
Dark Ages, poor people lived on this crap like college students with ramen noodles. In the Wild West, bacon was just a penny a pound and so common that travellers reported seeing tons in piles along the road as people tossed it away. A tall tale, perhaps, but over time, the poor people of the world got inventive and learned that with the help of a deadly poisons, you can make soap out of crap like bacon fat.
Buckle up. It's go time.
A TIP TO COOK YOUR BACON LIKE A CHAMP.
1. Put the flame on low, not high, which
will ensure your bacon sizzles and doesn't scorch right into the pan. 2. Add bacon and wait. No seriously. Just sit there. 3. Bacon will get brown. 4. Bacon will get very brown.
FAT IS GOOD.
After a long time cooking the bacon, you will generate a lot of orangey-brown fat, along with black bacon bits. While you may be tempted to take a sip, resist the urge -- you're gonna need to use all this fat...
...just not like this. In the world of soap-making, the best soaps come from the purist fats. And bacon clearly ain't the front-runner for cleanest fat. It's the Detroit of fats, really. In order to make a soap that's not utterly gross, you're gonna need to purify that fat by boiling it. It's really quite easy if you follow the steps below.
CLEANING YOUR BACON FAT FOR FUN AND PROFIT.
1. Just dump the fat into a pot with an equal amount of water.
2. Boil the hell out of it for about 10 to 15 minutes, turn off
the heat and then let the pot cool a bit.
CHILL THAT SHIT OUT.
Once you've boiled the fat, you need to stick it in the fridge to get the water and the oil to separate. Fat is heavier than water, which is why John Goodman has such a tough time in the lap pool these days. Mush around the stuff in your fridge, make a little room for your pot of fat and be prepared to wait an hour or more for your clean and creamy bacon fat to sink to the bottom. While you're waiting, might we suggest spraying the house with some air freshener, because after cooking two pounds of bacon and boiling
the fat, your house is going to smell like a short-order cook after a triple shift. With the water and fat separated, carefully pour off the water that's on top and behold the wonder that is bacon grease.
NO, SERIOUSLY. BEHOLD.
This is bacon fat. It will feel exactly how you think fat would feel if there was no such thing as skin to keep it in. It's nasty, gloppy shit that can turn brown paper bags into picture windows and in no way resembles anything resembling soap. But once you add a deadly, noxious poison whose most prized characteristic is the ability to melt hair, that fat will toughen up a bit. Remember this picture. It will be the last time you will behold bacon fat in this lovely, lovely state.
INTRODUCING LYE AND THE ETERNAL QUESTION, "WHY THE FUCK DO THEY STILL SELL THIS DANGEROUS CRAP?"
Lye, is probably best known as that crap your grandmother used to clear the drains, but in the world of chemistry, it's an alkali. A very, very strong akali -- or basic solution -- that can cause gnarly chemical burns. Like in that scene from Fight Club, when Brad Pitt burns Edward Norton's hand. That's the magic of lye. Lye is also a descendant of lime, or that crap that Robert DeNiro told Joe Pesci to throw on Michael Imperioli's dead body in Goodfellas. This is some serious bad-ass shit. Don't try to go all commando when using it, either. You're gonna need rubber gloves there, tough guy.
Chemistry fans take note: lye is also called caustic soda and sodium hydroxide, but most people just call it lye. You can find it in the grocery store, with the other drain cleaners, but most people only buy it to make soap now, really.
Another important ingedient: COLD water. You mix powdered lye with hot water and that stuff could fizz up like Pop Rocks and blind you for life. And while making soap from bacon is a noble pursuit, it's really not anything you want to get blinded doing. So wear those rubber gloves, use cold water and eat your vegetables because there are starving people in Guam. Oh, and as a number of readers have pointed out -- use eye protection, too. A drop of lye gets in your eye and you'll lose your depth perception or go blind. That's not cool.
IT'S MAGIC TIME.
1. This is fat. Say goodbye, fat! 2. Put it in a bowl. 3. Add the lye to a small amount of cold water and stir it gently, making a solution that you will 4. add to the fat. 5. Stir the fat, which 6. should loosen up a little bit at first, but then as you keep stirring, 7. it will thicken again and that fat will begin to change. 8. Keep on stirring fast and 9. you'll get white, fluffy wannabe soap goo that's perfect for the next step.
1. Once you've got yourself some soapy glop, pour it into an ice
cube tray. 2. Wrap this tray with some Cling Wrap and let sit for
24 hours. 3. You now have some rudimentary and crude bacon soaps.
SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR AWAY.
Sadly, you're not ready to start washing with bacon soap. The soap needs to cure, which will cause it to harden and become more brittle. The time on this varies a great deal, but you should probably allot a good two or three weeks to let your soap firm up and get more soap-esque.
Go ahead and smell your new bacon soaps. Doesn't smell like bacon, huh? It just goes to show you: When you add burning horrible chemicals to fat from the worst possible cut of pork, you'll get cute little fucking bubbles. The world rules.
"I woke up breakfast and then all of a sudden, someone threw poison all over me, beat me with a wooden spoon and left me out to dry for three weeks. What the fuck!"
Click here to see more lunacy from the lab.
*BT*
