Salting out for Laurndry soap

[DeeAnna]

12. Again, I returned the soap to the pot and began to gently warm and melt the curds. After the melting process was well underway, I added 3% sodium lactate (based on the original weight of the scrap) to help smooth out the texture of the soap. I kept stirring and warming the soap until it turned into a smooth gravy-like mass.

13. I poured the soap into one of my wooden molds. It was at this point that I realized my mistake in not letting the soap drain and dry longer. Liquid started to drain out of the ends of the mold. I sighed, put the mold in a cookie sheet, and resigned myself to the inevitable mess.

You can see the paper to the left of the mold where I dropped samples of the soap as it changed. The top four dabs are from the first pass, when the soap was the darkest. The bottom four dabs are from the second pass and molding-up steps. The numbers by each dab is the time the sample was taken.

Boyago's method of just letting the curds dry without molding is probably a better option especially if you want to eventually powder the soap as he did. I just wanted to see how this soap would mold up. I'm sure there will be a lot of shrinkage as the bars lose a tremendous amount of water, but it will be an interesting experiment to follow.

14. The soap doesn't taste particularly salty, but I'm sure it has more salt in it than usual. I was wondering how that residual salt would affect the lather. I'd say the lather is okay but not any better than okay. I hope it will improve as the soap dries out and cures.

 

[KristaY]

Thank you Boyago and DeeAnna for posting the process and results of your experiments! I know it was a time consuming project for both of you. I'll be interested to hear how the laundry comes out using this soap as compared to 100% CO soap.

Great work, both of you. Plus a wonderful learning experience for all of us following along! :clap:

 

[boyago]

Let me know if I can clear anything up and I'll try and make it better.

or ya know, we could just wait like four hours for DeeAnna with all her teaching experience and giant chemistry brain to post a far superior tutorial that crushes mine into non re-batchable dust.

 

[Susie]

Thank y'all both for convincing me that making 100% CO laundry soap is the way for me to go! I will also continue to use my "less than pretty" bars for confetti!

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

or ya know, we could just wait like four hours for DeeAnna with all her teaching experience and giant chemistry brain to post a far superior tutorial that crushes mine into non re-batchable dust.

There's room for both!

 

[Saponista]

I really enjoyed reading both of them and am now inspired to give it a go myself.

 

[DeeAnna]

Oh, Boyago -- You were the one person who inspired me to actually try this for myself rather than just spout what I've read. I really enjoyed your tutorial and got a lot out of your pictures -- they were definitely worth 1000 words and all that!

I have rained on your parade. I am sorry.

 

[boyago]

Oh, Boyago -- You were the one person who inspired me to actually try this for myself rather than just spout what I've read. I really enjoyed your tutorial and got a lot out of your pictures -- they were definitely worth 1000 words and all that!

I have rained on your parade. I am sorry.

nah, the only thing I am sore about is not having yours to read before I did my soap

I do have a question for you though. I think I'm missing something in my understanding of the oldtimey frontier sopamaking. What I know is pretty much just from the intros of soap books and tidbits I've picked up here and there. Earlier you had said that the boiling process wouldn't work with KOH soaps because they are too soluble. I thought the wood ash method of soapmaking produced mostly KOH when the ash was filtered (or water was filtered through the ash, what do you call that?) and then fats were boiled in the lye water and as the soap was making itself the pot was skimmed and the soap was collected and cooled. Is that incorrect? Would they boil the water out of the soap?

 

[DeeAnna]

You're right about the process, Boyago. Wood ashes don't make KOH though, they make potassium carbonate. Although it is a weaker alkali than KOH, it can still be used to make soap. It just takes more time and effort to saponify with a carbonate rather than with a hydroxide.

A soft KOH soap can be partly converted into a harder sodium soap by adding table salt. The conversion isn't 100% however, and a potassium soap just won't grain out ... so you'd end up washing away a bunch of your precious soap if you tried to salt out this type of soap.

Not to mention that salt was probably better saved for seasoning and preserving food than for mere soap. (Thinking like a tired pioneer wife in the midst of the wide prairie as I type this!)

I suspect they just evaporated as much water as they could from their soft soap and used it that way. Potassium soap will not float like sodium soap, so you would never be able to scoop it out to separate it from the excess water. You'd need to deal with the whole kettle full of stuff as the soap ... that means you'd have to either evaporate it down as best you could or just use it as is.

Sent from my KFTT using Tapatalk HD

 

[biarine]

My aunt that married a German in Barbarian area she doing this soap for more than 20 years she learn it from her Mother-in-law. They called it as curd soap in English speaking people. She use them for cleaning.

 

[DeeAnna]

It's been about a week since I salted-out my scraps and molded the resulting soap. The bars have stayed a light ivory color. I can lightly dent the middle of a bar with a moderate press of the thumb, so it still has a fair bit of drying to do. Thankfully the bars have dried enough so I can actually handle them fairly normally now. Absolutely no ash to be seen on the bars -- that's maybe a small benefit of the salting-out process.

The soap is forming suds easier than it did a week ago, so I expect it will lather fine after a good cure. I have been wondering if the salt residues from the salting-out might affect the lather, but that doesn't seem to be an issue.

I just washed my hands with this soap, and my hands feel good -- definitely not stripped or dry. The scraps came from half a dozen batches -- they would have some castor, some high oleic safflower, some rice bran oil, but my recipes have been mostly lard, then olive, and next coconut oil. Most of my recipes have a cleansing value of 10 or under, so not a lot of CO in there. I'm thinking if the base soap recipe is mild, the salted-out soap will be mild too even though the natural glycerin has been removed by salting-out.

 

[biarine]

My newly mad salting out and the laundry powder I made in my first batch of salting 4 months ago.
And the powder I made 550 grams of salting out soap with 25% percent borax and 30 % washing soda.

 

[DeeAnna]

It's been about 3 1/2 months since I last reported on my "boiled and salted out" scrappy soap. I stumbled across this thread today and thought I'd give an update.

The bars have remained an attractive ivory color. There is no DOS or anything else objectionable. The FO scent I added just before molding the soap has stayed clear and true. The bars have gotten shorter as they've dried out, but there is very little warping or deformation of the shape of the bars otherwise -- they're just shorter. What's really cool .... the bars FLOAT!

The soap is lathering easily and freely now and the lather looks and feels comparable to the lather I'd expect from the original soaps. Since most of the original soaps were high in lard and have only a modest amount of coconut, they have a dense creamy lather with a spray of light fluffy bubbles. That's what I'm seeing from this scrappy soap now.

Boiling and salting out a soap is a lot of work and I don't think this method is for everyone because of the time, patience, and mess required. It is an alternative to rebatching as a way to process a large amount of scrap or to correct a soap that is lye- or fat-heavy. Boiling-and-salting is pretty much the only way I know of to remove objectionable material (unwanted fragrance, color, additives) from a soap -- not even rebatching can do that.

 

[Saponomancer]

This was a really informative thread and I loved reading it and about the experiments with it, its definitely a technique I'll remember for if I ever need it

 

[DeeAnna]

Glad you've found it helpful, DragonGirl. I appreciate Boyago for sharing his method with lots of pics -- very helpful. It's been a lot of fun to try it myself!

I wouldn't do this again unless I had a good sized batch of soap to process. I salted-out about 1000 g (about 2 lb) of scrap and Boyago did about 750 g (about 1 1/2 lb). That's the least amount of soap I'd bother to salt-out as a hobbyist, because it takes about the same amount of effort whether I do a lot or only a little bit. I want to reprocess enough to make it worth my time and trouble.

 

[Saponista]

I ordered a maslin pan today as they were on sale. I previously didn't have a large enough stainless steel pan to do this in, so as soon as it arrives I will be trying this on my big bucket of scraps!

 

[DeeAnna]

Update to this thread -- for anyone who is curious about "salting out" and likes to watch videos, I uploaded a video tutorial tonight:

"Salting-Out Soap Scraps" tutorial on YouTube:

Part 1: Prepare and melt the scrap. https://youtu.be/DedPOZIOnfI

Part 2: Salting-out the melted soap. https://youtu.be/ZHAtoLDF2PA

 

[dosco]

DeeAnna:
Question: does boiling and salting out remove the glycerine from the soap?

-Dave

 

[DeeAnna]

Yes, it does.

FWIW, here's a written tutorial -- http://classicbells.com/soap/saltOutTut.html