Interestingly enough, one of the most popular recipes I’ve ever posted on Chocolate & Zucchini is not for a cake or a salad, but for a personal hygiene product: it’s an easy-as-pie formula for homemade natural deodorant made with coconut oil, baking soda, and starch.

I myself have been using it for two years, and I am so happy with it I sing its praises to whomever will listen: just a couple of weeks ago, I converted the sales assistant at the store where I splurged on this cute dress.

I have tinkered with the formula a bit since that initial post, and thought I would now share the latest version.

Improving my homemade natural deodorant

The first modification I made was to add a few drops of palmarosa essential oil. Its rose-like smell is quite lovely, and because it has anti-bacterial properties (among many others*), it reinforces the action of the deodorant on your body, and ensures that said deodorant remains uncontaminated. In France, it is easily available wherever essential oils are sold — at organic food stores, for instance, or online.

I am so happy with it I sing its praises to whomever will listen; I recently converted the sales assistant at the store where I splurged on a cute dress.

The second upgrade comes courtesy of Didier, a resourceful and generous reader who explained at the bottom of the French version of the post that he had modified the formula to include a small portion of beeswax**, which made the deodorant more temperature-stable. Indeed, the basic formula is mostly composed of coconut oil, which is solid at low room temperature, but turns to butter then oil when the temperature increases.

Making my homemade natural deodorant travel-friendly

This isn’t much of a problem if you’re staying home: you can either keep the deodorant in the fridge, or embrace the creaminess and apply it like a lotion. But when you travel, it can get messy. Last summer, we were on vacation in the Basque country during a heatwave, and my deodorant split, leaving me with a liquid layer of coconut oil at the top, and a starchy sludge at the bottom. I survived, but vowed to find a more travel-friendly formula.

And this is most definitely it: since beeswax doesn’t melt until 63°C (145°F), it keeps the deodorant nice and set even at a high room temperature (even if you vacation at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley), and prevents it from splitting or leaking from the container, so you can use it whenever and wherever you like, all summer long.

What about you: do you make your own cosmetics? What’s your favorite formula?

* I often use essential oils to cure various small ailments, and my go-to reference book is Danièle Festy’s Ma Bible des huiles essentielles.

** The beeswax I used was special-ordered from the guy who sells honey at the Anvers greenmarket on Friday afternoons.

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Photography by Gabriele Galimberti.

A few of my favorite finds and reads for May:

~ A French Tastespotting-like site devoted to vegetarian and vegan recipes.

~ I am intrigued by these Miso Almond Brownies.

~ A gorgeous sun-shaped spinach pie.

~ A photo essay by Gabriele Galimberti celebrating grandmothers and their signature dishes.

~ Roti prata being shaped and cooked at Namnam restaurant in Copenhagen.

~ DIY polka-dot tablecloth.

~ How cheap canned tuna is made (in French).

~ My Life in Sourdough, a mini-series about dating and cooking in NYC, directed by my friend Marie.

~ Other people’s kitchens, photographed and edited by Erik Klein Wolterink.

Illustration by MelinArt.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Haut comme trois pommes.”

Literally translated as, “high as three apples,” it is used to point out that someone — often a child — is small or very short. I’ve seen it translated to “knee-high to a grasshopper,” although I’ve never heard that cute English expression myself.

Example: “Il était haut comme trois pommes et devait courir pour rattraper ses soeurs.” (He was high as three apples and had to run to catch up with his sisters.)

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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Unless you are one of those blessed people with an outdoor space and a vegetable garden and the opportunity to grow your own sprightly things, chances are you only ever see heads of garlic in dried form, their ivory cloves enclosed in a papery husk.

But I’m here to tell you that, as dried things usually go, those heads of garlic were once full of life and moisture, only freshly dug out from the ground in which they sprouted and grew.

In France, where we have a knack for naming things in a clever way, we call this ail frais (fresh garlic) or ail nouveau (new garlic), and it is a prized feature of springtime stalls, going for around 2€ a head (a little more if organic) in my neighborhood*.

This is not a particularly cheap price to pay for a single head of garlic (dried and therefore shelf-stable garlic is less costly for distributors to handle) but the flavor of fresh garlic cloves is subtle and vibrant, and a perfect match to the new crop of vegetables that typify the season — think asparagus, green peas, and thumb-sized potatoes.

Although the girth of these fresh heads of garlic is comparable to that of dried, they are in fact immature — if left to dry, they would shrink to a much smaller size — and the cloves themselves are pretty small, so the trick to getting your garlic money’s worth is to use the whole thing, à la nose-to-tail.

Here’s what I do.

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