More Soap Experiments

A long while back, on a whim, I ordered a block of cocoa butter to use in soap.   It came.   It smelled divine.  

Creamy white chocolate heaven.  I left it on the table for 4 months just so I could smell it.

Eventually I hunted down a recipe for cocoa butter soap and tried a batch.   Fail.  

I had used crio grounds from our favorite winter drink [Vega Real and Cavalla are my faves].  Even though I used the dried, unused grounds and added them after trace, they soaked up the alkali and never saponified, so that batch of finished soap had tiny pockets of lye everywhere the grounds were.   Weird.  Caustic.   I pitched the whole batch. 

So this time we left out the crio grounds and used cocoa powder to color the soap instead.   Worked just fine.   We made some beautiful soap that is very hard.  [That's one of the characteristics of cocoa butter.]

Notice the lighter centers?    I have no idea what did that.   We'll see if it stays that way over time. 

Soap, Soap, Soap

The weather put the kibosh on some of our plans last week, so Claire and I seized the moment to make a couple of batches of soap. 

This was a really fun one.   We tried three new things:


1. A new recipe using  a lot of rice bran oil.
2. Coloring using alkanet.
3. Coloring using charcoal.

Rice bran oil makes great soap.   I highly recommend it.   I love this soap.  We mixed it with coconut oil, canola oil, olive oil and veg shortening.   The canola oil really slows the trace, which was lucky in this case, because we divided the batch.  We finished the pink stuff first, and then decided to add the charcoal to the rest.  And then we decided to add more charcoal, so that stuff almost seized before we got it into the mold.  It turned out really pretty though and it smells fabulous.

To use alkanet to color, we had earlier put a tablespoon of dried alkanet into a pint jar of canola oil.   It colors the oil a deep dark red.    The red turns to a medium blue during the mixing.   The blue turned to light pink during the drying.   Interesting. 

Charcoal is easy to use.  We bought ours ground from Brambleberry.com.   Started with 1/2 tablespoon and wanted it darker, so we added more.    It would probably have been better if we had stirred it in by hand instead of using the stick blender.   Things go really fast with the blender. 

Homemade Laundry Soap

Lily came home the other day from her public speaking class with a recipe for homemade laundry soap that was super easy and super cheap.  The woman who had made it has three active boys and she swears by this stuff. 

Right about the same time, our youngest started getting a rash that we thought might be related to a new laundry soap, so I seized the moment and made a batch.

A batch is 5 gallons of concentrated laundry cleaning superpower.  You dilute it in equal parts with water.

To use it, you fill your soap container [I use an old empty Era bottle] half full with this concentrate and then fill it the rest of the way with water.    I keep it on my dryer so that it's always vibrating and stays mixed. 

The recipe:

Laurie's Homemade Laundry Soap
[She got it via the Duggar Family]

1 bar Fels-Naptha soap, grated
4 cups very hot water
1 cup Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda [not baking soda!]
1/2 cup borax
5 gallon bucket with lid

Heat the water in a saucepan and add the grated soap.    I used the grater you see in the pic above and then used the same grater to stir everything with.   It took about 15 minutes to melt the soap.   I didn't want any lumps, so I stirred until all the lumps were gone.

When you get bored of stirring, measure the borax and washing soda into the bucket and fill the bucket half full with the hottest water you have out of the tap.    Then stir until it's dissolved.   I put the bucket on a chair next to the stove and took turns stirring the bucket and the Fels-Naptha stuff [all with the same grater]. 

When the soap is done melting into the water, then pour it into the bucket and stir, stir, stir.   Fill the bucket the rest of the way with water and put the lid on tight.    It'll be ready to use tomorrow after it cools.  The color is sort of a pearly pale gold.    It smells nice as is, but they say you can add some essential oils if you like.   Laurie's got thick like consomme, but ours didn't.   It works fine anyway.

The Math:
The truly fabulous thing about this is that if you get a few bars of Fels-Naptha, then you can easily store enough dry ingredients [soap, washing soda and borax] for a year or two's supply.  And it's cheap.    Really cheap!

On Walmart.com, the prices are as follows:

Fels-Naptha $2.34/bar
Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda:  $3.24/box
20 Mule Team borax:   $6.58

We bought 3 bars of soap and a box each of the other stuff [enough for 3 batches or 30 gallons of laundry soap - and enough washing soda and borax for many more batches if we got some more Fels-Naptha.]

Total:  $16.84 for 3840 fl oz.  [Yes, three thousand, eight hundred and forty ounces]
Or:  $  .56/gallon.   [Yes, fifty-six cents per gallon]

Era cost $8.97 for 150 fl oz.  Or  $7.65/gallon

If you go through a gallon a month [conservatively speaking if your family is like ours], then you'd spend a half an hour in the kitchen and about $6.72 for the homemade stuff.   Or you'd spend $91.80 on Era or something like it.  

You'd save $85.08 a year.   And if your family is more like mine you'd go through twice as much laundry soap [we dig a lot...] and so you'd save $170.16 a year on laundry soap.

A substantial savings, wouldn't you say?    Enough to buy the supplies you need for a decent 72 hour emergency kit.    Yep.

New Soap Mold

While I was reading this book, I noticed the author's  handy-dandy soap mold.   Way cool.   Right now we pour soap into round molds made of PVC.    We have set up a good system and can turn out a pretty nice finished bar of soap in a half moon shape.  

But I've been hankering for a box mold so that we can make some layered soaps like the ones in the pic, here.    They've got vanilla soap on the bottom and mint on top.   The vanilla will get darker over time and they they'll be two-toned bars.    They smell great!

I mentioned it to Eric [read:  Honey! I think we need one of these.  Soon!  It's chemistry.   It's school.  It's math.  It's geometry.]   So we talked over the design and he bought a couple of hinges and disappeared into the basement and came back with a handy-dandy wooden mold that opens on the sides so you can pop the soap right out.

I.  Love.  It.


Here's one end from the top.   You undo those hooks to drop the sides.   We saw a plan that holds things together with velcro, but soap making is messy and none of us wanted to mess with washing the velcro.

Here it is from the top with one of the sides down.  

Sweet!

And here it is on its side so you can see the hinge on the bottom.   Notice the extra wood on the bottom.   That pops it up so that the sides drop down completely flat on the table.   It makes life easier when you're popping the soap out.  

Eric made the mold big enough for one of my 6 lb batches of soap.   It makes nice big bars.  We line it with freezer paper [shiny side up] before we pour the soap in and then cover it with towels when we're batching a cold process recipe. 

Now it's easy to make those layered bars of soap.   Thank you, Eric!!

Hot Process Soap Making Saves the Day

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we've been making soap for many years using the cold process method of saponification.  You mix up your oils and lye and then pour it into a mold and let it cool slowly over a couple of days, then it finishes saponifying over the next few weeks.

I had heard about hot process soap making but never tried it before, so when I found Delores Boone's book Handcrafted Soap, which is all about hot process soap, I was excited to try it out.

It's easy.

EASY.

You make soap the regular way, then there are three options for heating for the final cooking:
1. Crock pot on LOW.
2. Stove top double boiler.  Temp should be high enough to maintain a slow boil of the surrounding water.
3. Oven on 180-200 degrees.

Decide what method you're going to use to heat the soap to cook it [above].    If you decide on methods 2. or 3. then use stainless steel or enamel pots.   Stainless steel is best.   Soap making is very hard on enamel pots. 

You can mix your lye and oils right in the pot you'll use to cook it in.  So nice!

Mix the oils and lye to trace [thick as gravy], add your color or botanicals.   Wait to add your scents until the end of cooking.   Put the soap in the heat source and check it every 15 minutes or so.  

1.  Crockpot: LOW.  1 hr. A large wave will start at the side and curl up toward the center.   When the wave has completely submerged the center 'island', the soap is done.   Shiny wet areas are glycerine.  You can stir it in.

2.  Double boiler:  Temp should be high enough to maintain a slow boil of the surrounding water.  45 minutes or so.  Stir every 15 minutes.   The outsides will start to curl in toward the center. When it looks translucent, but not wet after you stir it, it's done.   To make sure, carefully touch some of the soap on the spatula or spoon [It's HOT!] and rub it between your fingers.  It should not be gritty.  Keep cooking until it's smooth.

3.  Oven:  180-200 degrees.  30-40 minutes.  Check it every 20 minutes or so.   When the soap is translucent and wet looking on top [that's glycerine], the soap is done.

Once your soap is done cooking, you add the scents and stir and stir and stir to cool it down slowly.   Boone says to use a spatula and fold the soap over and over and over.   When everything is mixed up well, it will have the consistency of mashed potatoes and you can put it into molds to shape and to finish cooling.   

Once the soap is cool, you can use it right away.  

I had a bad batch of shortening that was making my soap do funny things and I used the hot process method as a way to save a batch of what had been going to be [past perfect future infinitive verb tense, in case you wondered] a simple cold process batch.   When the mix grained and went very thick immediately, I poured the whole batch into my slow cooker, turned it on LOW and used a hand blender to blend it until it looked smooth.  It was slow careful work.   Blend for a slow count of ten, then stir with the blender off for a bit so the motor didn't overheat.   As soon as the mixture looked smooth, I covered the crockpot and waited.   

Saved!  It totally worked!   The mix curled just like she said it would.   After an hour, it was done and we put in the scents and stirred and stirred.   When it was thick enough to spoon out like mashed potatoes, we put spoonfuls on freezer paper [shiny side up] like cookie dough and let it cool some.   When it was cool enough to handle, we put two of those 'cookies' together back to back and formed them into balls as well as we could. [Photo above!]  They're not beautiful, but they're fun and it saved the batch of soap.  K2 used the soap that night.   It's wonderful.  

This was a very fun way of making soap.  Perfect for last minute soap projects.  Instead of waiting weeks, you'll only need to wait a day to finish it.  We'll definitely do hot process soap again.

Soap Book Reviews

I've been making soap for years using a cold process method.  There were just a few books on the market when we started making soap but there are several new books out there now and I realized it was time to check them out.  So much fun to read through a pile of new soap books!  I liked these two the best.  Soap Crafting, and Handcrafted Soap. 

For those of you new to soap making, let me answer a couple of questions first.

'Melt and pour' is when you buy pre-made soap, usually clear glycerine soap, at your local craft store and then all you have to do is melt it, add some color and scent and pour it into fun molds.  Easy.   These books aren't about that.  They are about making cold process and hot process soap.

Hot process and cold process soap making start the same way:  with oils and lye.   You start by mixing the lye into water and cooling it to under 120 degrees.  You melt your oils together and cool them to the same temp as the lye solution.   Then you mix them together to make your soap mixture. 

Cold process is when you pour the new soap mixture into a mold and let it cure slowly on its own.   You can unmold it after a couple of days, but saponification occurs slowly over the next few weeks.

Hot process is when you pour the new soap mixture into a slow cooker or pot and heat it up to quickly finish the saponification process in an hour or so.  

Soap Crafting: Step-by-Step Techniques for Making 31 Unique Cold-Process Soaps is a new book on cold process soap making that takes you through the basics and then shows a bunch of beautiful techniques for how to mix colors and make your soaps fancier. It was written by Anne-Marie Faiola, the Soap Queen, who has a terrific blog and who owns Brambleberry, an excellent (if pricey) source for soapmaking supplies.  The book is clear, beautiful and excellent for beginning and intermediate soap makers.  There's a good list of ingredients and a troubleshooting section.  It's got a spiral binding that allows you to open the book and keep it open while you're working.  I love it!  I've put this book on my book widget [See BOOKS tab above], too, if you need to find it later.

The second book Handcrafted Soap is all about hot process soap making, something that I had never tried. This book is by Delores Boone, who has done a great job of introducing soapmaking for beginners who want to finish it quickly by heating it at the end. There's a good description of oils, the basic process and the finishing processes. A great book for people who want to use the hot process method. Only one problem. The book is now out of print and it is way too expensive. I include the link here only so you know what book I'm talking about and so you can keep your eye open for it at used book places. It's definitely worth a few bucks to put in your how-to library, but not more than that.  The process is EASY.   I tried it right away and will give you a report tomorrow.