pinterest creations: super laundry sauce, aka laundry miracle whip

I love making stuff in the kitchen. I also love clean clothes. So when I came across this pin on Pinterest for "Mom's Super Laundry Sauce", well, I had to look. Turns out that it's basically a recipe for detergent that you make... IN THE KITCHEN. WHAT. Plus, it claims to get out every stink and stain - perfect for a mom of two preschoolers and a husband about to devote his working hours to smoking meat. Also, it's cheap: for the detergent alone, it's about $1.78 for 128 loads of laundry. And it's safe for the earth AND safe for super-sensitive skin like mine.

I detailed my experience below. It's a long post, mostly because I tried to photograph each step for those of you wanting to give it a whirl, so it might look complicated, but it was really quite simple. A few words up front:

Any struggle or difficulty I had was a direct result of not following the instructions exactly as written. In other words, it was my own stinkin' fault. I think it's actually a pretty good rule when you try any recipe for the first time - I realize some things just beg for variation, and I'm not trying to stifle y'all's creativity, but trust me, if there's a voice in your head going, "Hmmm, I don't have this, so I'll substitute that", tell that voice to shut. up. now.

Also, as with any project or recipe, read and reread that sucker eleventy million times before you start it. If it's off of a blog and there's more than a couple of comments, read those a lot, too. You can often save yourself massive headaches by learning from those who ventured before you, and if you have a question, often times someone else has asked it and gotten it answered already. Very helpful.

Okay, I'll get off my high horse now. Read on:

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS:

You'll need:
--2 regular mouth quart Mason jars. DO NOT GET WIDE MOUTH. (I'll explain in a minute.)
--1 cup of 20 Mule Team Borax
--1 cup Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda (NOT BAKING SODA! Why the people at A&H felt the need to make these boxes look identical, I'll never know.)
--1 bar Fels Naptha soap
--4 cups of water, plus maybe 1/2-3/4c water later on
--(handsome lounging husband in background completely optional)

I found all of the soap stuff (fels, soda, Borax) right next to each other in the laundry aisle at Walmart, and I've also seen them - right next to each other - in Publix and Target. If you can't find these items, DON'T SUBSTITUTE. Get them off Amazon. Heck, write me and I'll send ya some. JUST DON'T SUBSTITUTE.

Your equipment:
--a blender
--a medium sized saucepan
--a wide funnel - Ball makes these for canning as well
--your instructions (most important!)

First, grate your Fels Naptha. I used a box grater, but some food processors have a grating option, so that also works.

Doesn't grated soap totally look like cheddar cheese? Mmmmm, cheese. Anyway, while you're grating your cheese soap, get 4 cups of water to a minimal boil on high heat:

Add in your soap shreds, turn your heat down to medium, and slowly, continuously stir that sucker.

You'll want to get a gentle rolling boil going here as you're stirring, with a very minimal amount of sudsing. If you seem to get a lot of suds and/or the mixture appears to be "creeping" up the sides of the pot, it's too hot - turn down your heat just enough to keep it rolling but not creeping up. I have a gas stove, and my settings are lo-2-3-4-5-6-hi - here's where my perfect, gentle rolling boil was:

(Geez. You would think I woulda CLEANED it before photographing it. Anyway.)

It took about 5-7 minutes for my soap to completely dissolve in the mixture. Make sure it's completely dissolved before going on to the next step.

Totally dissolved. I couldn't pull up any clumps of soap with my whisk.

Next, take your mixture off the heat and slowly add in your Borax/washing soda:

This is where you continuously stir for, I don't know, a couple of years. (Kidding.) In order to get that lovely creamy consistency in the end, this needs to completely dissolve - you'll be stirring for 10-15 minutes. It doesn't need to be fast, just continuous. Stir, stir, stir.

When you are first stirring, you will definitely feel the grain and grittiness of the Borax/soda stuff at the bottom of your pan. When you can't feel the grit anymore, it's ready. Like I said, this takes a few minutes of continuous stirring - I think it was about 10-15 for me.

Next, you'll want to pour the mixture into your Mason jars, an equal amount into both. I'm borrowing a picture from the original poster's blog so you can see the little funnel thing Ball sells to help with the pouring - it's maybe $2, if that. Anyway, once poured in, add just enough water to bring the mixture up to the "shoulders" of the jars:

Once you've poured the mixture into the jars and stuck the lids on (tightly), turn over the jars... and walk away. Let these set for 4-5 hours. (I'm told if you wait longer than 6 hours, it gets grainy.)

Within the first hour, you'll see the layers start to separate:

After the four hours or so is up, open up the lids SLOWLY. The hard white layer will "gloop" down into the yellow liquid and splash you if you're not slow about it! Use the handle of a wooden spoon (or other similar instrument) and break up the white stuff.

Here's where I stress that you must use the regular-mouth and not WIDE-mouth Mason jars. You can see in the above photos that I had the wide-mouth ones; the original poster had regular-mouthed. I didn't realize there was a difference or that it even MADE a difference... until I got to this step. See, the whole point of pouring it into two Mason jars was that, after opening up the lids and breaking up the white stuff, you can simply take a blender blade attachment, screw it on top, turn over the jar onto the blender, and whip up your creation AND BE DONE. Here's a picture of what I mean:

With a wide-mouth Mason jar, I could not do this, as the mouth is too fit the blender base. (Also, I'm told that any other size jar will. not. work for setting the mixture, regardless of the mouth size.)

So, at this point, had you followed the directions, you would blend each bottle for maybe a minute each and be done. I took one photograph of what I had to do instead so that you, reader, would not meet such an unfortunate fate. Basically, I had to take the contents of both jars, stick them into my stand mixer, and try to whip them with my whisk attachment. One word about this: NO.

Just... no. You can see it looks like lumpy egg salad. It didn't emulsify properly like a blender would have done. So if you don't have a blender, well, I don't know what to tell you. I made a huge old mess, and a lot of the solid bits fell to the bottom of the bowl and didn't get incorporated, and by the time I figured that out, I was fishing them out of the mixture and throwing them into the sink, except that the hard stuff is the "super" of the Super Laundry Sauce. Anyway, I finally dumped the mixture, half at a time, into my blender, made an even bigger mess, but finally got the consistency I needed. Voila:

Pardon the greenish tinge - it's the fluorescent lighting in my laundry room.

The instructions to use: simply take 1 Tbsp and put in directly with your clothes, NOT in the detergent compartment. If you have a top-loader, start the wash and let the water rinse out the detergent from the tablespoon. If you have an HE machine (like mine), still dump it in with the clothes, then use a sock or small piece of clothing you're about to wash to wipe out all the detergent from the spoon.

The verdict?

BRILLIANT.

It was worth all the mess, yes it was. My clothes came out lovely and clean, without a hint of scent. All the boys' stains of various origins all came out. I used fabric softener (in the softener section of the drawer, like normal) and cold water each time, too. Worked a charm!

One small variation: because of my earlier blunder of tossing some of the solid part of the soap before it was all emulsified, I'm finding I have to use more like a rounded tablespoon in order to get the right amount of detergent. But that isn't too big a deal to me at this point. I am planning to get myself the correct size of quart Mason jars to make this again, and I will be sure to provide an update.

You guys - I made DETERGENT! And it looks like MIRACLE WHIP! Whee!