It’s a clean business but not without its risks. Autumn Cieslak teaches soapmaking at AACORN Farms, where she is also property manager, and at Tillers International. She specializes in simple, natural recipes made from only six farm-sourced ingredients: rendered tallow, coconut oil, olive oil, fresh goat milk, lye, and pure essential oils. It’s handling the lye that can get tricky.
“AACORN is the nonprofit I work for,” Cieslak says. “It is a skill-based facility for adults with intellectual differences, and we actually milk our own goats out here to be able to make the goat milk soap. We just got two lambs last fall. It’s to eventually breed them and be able to try out sheep milk soap also.”
Cieslak learned soapmaking skills from her predecessors at both facilities. One harsher lesson was about the curing process. She recommends that two people work together to make a batch of soap.
“The lye melts the milk from being frozen,” she says. “It’s a chemical reaction it has.”
Ingredients are mixed together to reach temperatures of 110 to 115 Fahrenheit. “The curing process takes between 30 to 40 days,” Cieslak says. “And then they can get wrapped. They continue to cure even after being wrapped. If you don’t allow time to cure, it will burn you … lye and chemical burns are no fun. When I first started, I got that a few times.”
Cieslak says her favorite time is after the soapmaking classes, when participants return to pick up the cured soaps they have made and sit down for a while to share stories. Autumn Cieslak will be offering classes at Tillers on September 8 (sold out) and November 10. Classes cost $100 and require registration. Participants may take 10 bars of soap home or return later to pick up their own soap after it has cured. The soaps are also sold at both facilities.
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