I MAKE SOAP NOW?
A few months ago, I realized that no one makes a hand wash for home cooks. I decided to make that hand wash myself — having no idea the rabbit hole I’d go down.
In this post, I discuss how my process for creating food recipes lent itself perfectly to creating a hand wash recipe (which I’m now selling!). It’s a process you can use for food or just about anything.
INSPIRATION
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PROCESS
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INSPIRATION 〰️ PROCESS 〰️
My after-cooking hand wash recipe
THE INSPIRATION
Words I never thought I’d say: I make a luxury hand wash now. I’m even selling it (preorders 20% off here). But how’d I get here? And what does thoughtful cooking have to do with hand wash?
Home cooks are different.
2023 was a busy year of cooking for me. Working in Michelin star restaurants. Hosting ramen and fine dining popups in SF. At one point I acquired a half-wheel of parmigiano reggiano and hosted a cheese-centric tasting menu for 40 people in my backyard — a story for another day haha.
But as the year wore on, I began focusing less on cooking and more on understanding home cooks — a function of my time leading product for CREME (a food app with step-by-step video recipes from chefs). Now well into 2024, I feel like I’ve developed a unique perspective on the needs of home cooks, and that’s translated into a desire to change how they cook.
Staging at Kadeau
Home cooks are a unique breed. They aren't just people that cook at home — they're people that take home cooking seriously. They cook to express themselves and to bring people together. They look at line cooks with admiration. They respect their ingredients, and they're not afraid of failure.
Home cooks face different constraints as pro cooks, because they manage the challenge of operating in a living space. Unlike the pros, home cooks have to integrate their craft into the everyday lives of non-cooks. For home cooks, cleanliness means something different: it means hands not smelling like garlic — it means making a kitchen feel like a home and not a workplace.
ENTER: HAND WASH
I felt the challenges of home cooks first-hand after working on a bulk garlic oil recipe. My girlfriend hated the garlicky smell on my hands, and I had to deal with it.
This absolute unit = the enemy
Her Aesop hand wash feels great when you use it, but it fails to address the garlicky smell. Gojo mechanics soap will exfoliate away the smell of garlic, but it leads your skin beat up in the process — hardly ready to prepare the next course. Meanwhile, the science behind rubbing garlicky hands on stainless steel is dubious at best (and not to mention just plain weird).
Convinced that making a home cook hand wash can’t be too hard, I decided to make one myself (and spoiler — it was a lot harder than I imagined). I imagined a hand wash that neutralizes cooking odors like garlic and seafood. Something with the right balance of fats for hardworking hands: not stripping, but also no after-wash oily residue that slows you down. Something with gentle exfoliants for a deeper clean without being too abrasive. Something worthy of display in the most important room in a home. Maybe even something with kitchen ingredient-inspired fragrance!
It took months of research and 100+ recipes tested, but I ended up making that recipe myself. I love it — it’s as premium-feeling as an Aesop soap but decidedly more effective for home cooks. In this post I describe the full process of how I did it.
INSPIRATION
〰️
PROCESS
〰️
INSPIRATION 〰️ PROCESS 〰️
THE PROCESS
This is the process I’ve use to write ramen recipes, fine dining recipes, and yep — hand wash recipes. Whether you’re inventing a new dish, trying to emulate an existing one, or starting a hand wash business (lol), this process can get you there.
We’ll walk through each of these steps in detail:
Defining your goals
Emulating reference points
Redefining your goals
A/B testing your own recipe to perfection
Let’s do it.
1. Define your goals
Explicitly defining goal posts before you start developing a recipe can help you to avoid moving those goal posts as you face challenges.
Tomato shio ramen
Beyond merely defining a goal like “great recipe”, try to define my recipe goals across multiple dimensions. For example, with my tomato shio ramen recipe, I defined goals across these dimensions:
Flavor: Leading notes from smoked fish, rounded off with clam and chicken. More intense and umami-rich than the shio at Slurp in Copenhagen, similar body to a pure chicken shio.
Nostalgia: Toppings that evoke memories of my time working at Kadeau in Copenhagen. Noodles with a rustic, homemade Italian feel.
Presentation: Golden broth at least as clear as a particular bowl I enjoyed in Tokyo. Folded noodles. Organic, gourmet presentation.
Prep: Possible to split work across 4 work hours each of 5 prep days.
Plenty of room for learning and evolving as you develop the recipe, but enough detail to hold myself accountable.
When making my hand wash, it took me awhile to even understand which dimensions were important. I sampled basically every one I could get, taking inspiration from cosmetics as well as body washes. Ultimately, I set goals across these dimensions:
Efficacy: More effective at removing cooking odors than traditional soap or stainless steel.
Acidity: Similar to human skin.
Fat content: Hands should feel like natural clean hands — not too oily, not without their natural protective oil layer.
Exfoliation: Gentle, like rubbing rice under water. Not stripping.
Feel and flow: Flows like warm honey, not sticky, not gummy.
If you’re running a business, you might also consider dimensions like cost and time and weigh them against what else is important. But for my hand wash, I went all in on quality and hoped for the best.
2. EMULATe Reference points
Comparing a prototype to the competition
The next step is reviewing each of your goals and asking yourself: who does it well? What can I learn from them? The goal here is to learn how the competition does what they do well so you can carve out your own lane.
When I’m cooking, this step involves trying the top recipes out there! Try to master the alternatives before you branch out on your own. Along the way, make replacements, get creative. Learn what works, learn what doesn’t. Add 10% more of a given ingredient and see why the % they landed on makes sense (or doesn’t!). Pull from another cooking discipline and see if it helps the process, and don’t be afraid to invest in some cookbooks to make the process easier.
For example, I made dozens of beurre blanc recipes before I made my pistachio beurre blanc recipe, and the final recipe was heavily influenced from what I learned experimenting with a Frantzen whey beurre blanc recipe.
For my hand wash recipe, I picked 4 reference points (Aesop Reverence, Aesop Resurrection, Kirk’s, and Fisherman Hand Scrub) and tried replicating them. The process of learning not only made me a better formulator but also made me more sure of my idea than ever — their products really suck for home cooks.
Hand wash (and personal care products generally) are actually super fun to try to dupe, because each ingredient is listed in order of use, and each ingredient has a suggested usage rate range. In a few weeks, I’ll share my Aesop dupe recipe so my readers can stop paying $43 for their hand wash.
3. Refine your goals
New pump of choice!
Once you’re familiar enough with the competition, your initial goals might seem totally naive. Adjust them with what you know now, ensuring you’re not slipping in any excuses to compromise.
I added more criteria to my hand wash goals after I saw what made certain hand washes special:
Presentation: Clear.
Pump output: One pump should be exactly enough hand wash!
Lather: Tight bubbles, easy rinse.
Fragrance: Not too strong — there are enough smells in the kitchen!
4. A/B testing your own recipe to perfection
With your goals and subject matter expertise in hand, it’s time to make your own recipe. The way I do this is through A/B testing. A/B testing isn’t complex — it’s called A/B testing because you are making version A of something, making a slightly different version B of something, and comparing them to one another. You learn from what you like best and then try again with another A/B experiment.
Since enjoyment of food is multi-dimensional, it’s important to evaluate your tests across the goals you defined in step 3. A recipe might be a winner across one dimension but not another! Keep track and learn as you go.
You can use a Google Sheet to make tracking easy, with recipes in each column and your notes across dimensions in each row.
I used a similar Google Sheet method for my hand wash, but each recipe’s definition was 20 rows, and I had 100 iterations! It was quite the chore.
Personally, as I’ve gained more confidence as a chef, I’ve learned to trust my intuition more and rely less on A/B testing. But there is no question that A/B testing results in superior results when you have the discipline to push for that perfection.
Eventually though, you’ll get to a recipe that dominates across all dimensions. And that winner is your recipe.
My HAND WASH
If you’ve made it this far, you’re at least aware of how hard I’ve tried to master this hand wash recipe (which is now available for preorder!).
It turns out hand wash is a lot different than cooking: any given ingredient might totally change the consistency or efficacy of another. There are concepts like clear oil-in-water emulsions, preservation without pH drift, chelating. My biggest challenge was long-term suspension of exfoliants: it's not easy when you want the soap to flow like warm honey.
I'm super happy with my current recipe. It takes a day to make. Uses enzymes from bread yeast to neutralize odors. Olive oil esters (an oil AND water soluble liquid made from olive oil) for rejuvenating hands. I’m calling it Naomi After-Cooking Hand Scrub, and I’ll share more on it soon.
