Deanna, I have a question...

"I'm with AnnaMarie -- hand stirring is the key. Where I (currently) differ with her is that I think a moderate amount of SB'ing is okay, especially at first. Maybe 30 seconds of SB'ing out of every 5 minutes with gentle hand stirring the rest of the time. Once it reaches trace, however, hand stir only."

DeeAnna, I think I mentioned this earlier, but this thread has grown so stinkin' long (I don't really want to spend a day reading back through it ), but I did hand stir until trace and then pulled out my SB to thicken it up a bit. I know this is the opposite of what you recommend, but I think our mutual experiences show that this recipe will put up with a moderate amount of technology, but hand stirring is key.
I was looking at my hand stirred batch this morning, and I still am in awe over the difference hand stirring can make with regards to the soda ash and lye crystals (apparently). My original bars are coated thickly, but these have very little. The more I read this thread the more I become convinced that simplicity is the key to success here. This recipe does not respond to technology well. DeeAnna, my offers still stands if you want to test a bar of my original batch-just pm me, and I will send you one.
Cheers!
Anna Marie

YES!!! that's it! Thank you so much DeeAnna. I had no idea that losing heat could cause a problem and this makes total sense. I thought it would work to just hand stir it a little because I did that with the lye heavy batch BUT the lye heavy batch is generating so much more heat all on it's own. There's the difference and probably also the reason why SB isn't a good idea, it's over heating and causing the separation.

AnnaMarie -- "...DeeAnna, I think I mentioned this earlier, but this thread has grown so stinkin' long (I don't really want to spend a day reading back through it )... the more I become convinced that simplicity is the key to success here..."

Yes, I know what you mean!!! I'm sure I read your original post about using the SB, but it is really difficult to keep all the details straight after 460+ posts. Thanks for setting the record straight.

"....the difference hand stirring can make with regards to the soda ash and lye crystals (apparently)....."

It's also possible that humidity levels may also affect the amount of ash formation. My guess (and it's JUST a guess) is that low air humidity may cause more ash, all other things being equal. Water will evaporate from the bar more quickly when the air is dry, thus it will bring more lye to the surface of the soap, and so there is more lye to react with the CO2 in the air. But I could well be wrong on this. I need to make some batches this summer when it's the most humid (our house is not air conditioned), and see if the bars get a lot of ash or not. Won't definitively prove my idea, but it would be interesting to know.

MzMolly -- "...probably also the reason why SB isn't a good idea, it's over heating and causing the separation. ..."

Hmmm, yes, I'll have to give that a think. You may well have a point there. I was focusing on the SB'ing itself as the culprit, but perhaps it's more than that.

I'm glad I stumbled across some good info to solve the mystery of your other castile. Wasn't really looking specifically for an answer, but when I read Kathy's troubleshooting tips about crumbly soap, I thought immediately of you. I know problems like this can gnaw at me until I solve them, and I think you're that kind of person too.

I've just spent half my day reading this fascinating thread. Thanks to all who have joined in and shared the results of your experiments!

DeeAnna said:

My guess (and it's JUST a guess) is that low air humidity may cause more ash, all other things being equal.

Click to expand...

This may be a good guess. I'm in the pacific NW .. land of wet and I have very little ash on this particular bar.

Now some of my others have a ton of ash on them .. just not this particular recipe.

I seem to be on the far end of the bell curve with this recipe but I will still offer my opinion about SBing.

I've made 5 or 6 batches and I've required SB'ing for all, even the one I had the most normal experience with. I've needed a few bursts around the first third, timing-wise, to get the water layer in more contact with the oil layer and I've required SB'ing to get them all to a good trace. SB'ing gives that strange slick plastic texture; I have not gotten that without the blender, although my hand-stirred to heavy trace batch was bordering on it. The batch I made blending almost the entire time resulted in the rubber ball soap, which had this resilient pretty well unstirrable texture to it; at the end, I just ended up pushing the ball of soap around with a spatula. It's almost like SBing toughens the soap the more you use it in the process. My (mostly) hand stirred batch was the most delicate, the most easily colored and softest batch to make. How you stir didn't seem to affect the actual soap in that all the bars have turned out fine as long as they did not get hot in any way.

So I have not had the impression that this recipe is too delicate for the stick blender at all. I have had the impression that too much stick blending actually changes how it emulsifies and can even make the soap over-emulsified (is that even a real concept?), to the point that it's hard to break into. When I had the rubber ball soap, it was very difficult to break into portions for coloring and it was very strange and difficult to get color blended in, although it was possible. Batches that were SB'ed but not as much were still strangely self-contained, for lack of a better word, where the soap was gliding along on a layer of water and would not stick to the surface of the bowl. In unmolding those soaps, you could actually see how the soap had layered and folded itself as it was poured. Really bizarre. My mainly hand-blended one was more normal and did stick to the bowl as we expect batter to do.

Just my 2 cents.

Zap test the lye heavy coconut heavy soap today, no zap. The soap is very white and very hard, and I mean rock hard.

Wash my hand with it, produce big bubble. It felt really clean afterwards. Didn't feel like it was drying on my skin, but I guess I need to use it a few time to see if it has that effect. It has no smell at all. My other soaps, including the lye heavy sweet almond one, has a subtle smell of soap, but not this one.

Not sure if this soap need more curing time, because after I wet it, the soap was still hard, no mushy-ness at all.

When this recipe goes into the plastic-y "ball" stage, it's my opinion is that the physical structure of the emulsion has radically changed.

To explain what I mean, forgive me -- I need to put on my professor hat....

An emulsion is a mixture of droplets of one liquid suspended in another. (You can have gas-liquid emulsions or liquid-solid emulsions, but that's another story.)

Getting back to a liquid-liquid emulsion, Liquid A can be suspended in liquid B OR Liquid B can be suspended in Liquid A. Either way works.

Usually, but not always, the liquid that is the smaller amount is the one that is suspended in the second liquid. A good example is when you squirt soap into a pan of water to wash dishes. Droplets of soap are emulsified and suspended within the very large amount of water.

But there are times when the reverse is true -- you have water emulsified within soap. Handcrafted liquid soap paste before it's diluted is an example of a water-in-soap emulsion. (Another interesting emulsion is bar soap -- it is actually an emulsion of sheets of liquid water suspended within a structure of solid soap.)

Under the right conditions, a given mixture can even switch from one type of emulsion to the other. Liquid soap changes the form of its emulsion when water is added or when people try to thicken it with salt, etc. When people have problems with their liquid soap being too runny or not thinning out is that they cannot find the sweet spot where the proper type of emulsion is present to give them the thickness they want.

A typical soap batter is normally a water-in-oil emulsion. The fat is the main "outer" liquid and the water droplets are suspended within the fat. It's easy to visualize because the fat is usually the larger portion of liquid in a soap recipe -- it "makes sense" that the smaller amount of water should be suspended within the fat.

With this superlye recipe, there is a roughly the same amount of fat and water. So which emulsion will form? Fat in water? Or water in fat?

When the batter looks normal throughout the whole process, like cream or gravy, the emulsion is water-suspended-in-oil, just like the usual type of soap batter. When the superlye batter starts to look plastic-y and "run around" in the bowl, I suspect the emulsion is becoming a blend of oil droplets suspended in water. Why does the emulsion switch for some batches and doesn't switch for others? A combination of factors -- temperature, intensity of mixing, the specific ingredients, etc. -- will determine what happens.

If it does switch, the emulsion will be the least stable at that time. And the same combination of factors -- temperature, intensity of mixing, the specific ingredients, etc. -- will determine whether the emulsion remains intact during the switch or whether it breaks down, at least partly. I think this is contributing to the variable success that we're seeing with the superlye recipe.

That follows with my experiences. Given this, the change from water-in-oil, to oil-in-water must happen when it breaks or separates and has to be stirred back together. The only time I did not have this happen was when I hand-stirred to thick trace, the one that stuck to the bowl. However, when I poked at it later and now unmolded, it seemed/seems rubbery like the oil-in-water texture. Could it switch over time within the mold? WOuld one emulsion be able to tolerate heat when the other could not? It seems like this recipe does not like heat under any circumstance.

"...Could it switch over time within the mold?..."

Yes, it could. Not to say that I know it actually does, but it's possible.

An example of an emulsion switch -- An enthusiastic newbie grates up NaOH soap, mixes it up with water, gets a nice and thin soapy solution, and congratulates herself for being the first to make wonderful liquid soap so easily and simply. Then she comes back a day or three later to find a container full of "snot". The initial thin solution is an emulsion of soap dissolved in water. The thick, gloppy gel is a water in soap emulsion. Given time, the soap will make this rather amazing switch all on its own. (Yeah, I don't like snot either, but it is amazing even so!)

"...Would one emulsion be able to tolerate heat when the other could not? It seems like this recipe does not like heat under any circumstance...."

I'm sure some emulsions are more heat stable that others, but in the case of this soap, I don't think it likes heat, regardless. I get the feeling the more "normal" batter may be a little more warmth tolerant, since AnnaMarie said she has insulated the molded soap. But even she has experienced some issues -- internal cracking -- that might have partly come from emulsion failure. Not sure -- I'm just speculating here.

Okay, so my milk & honey castile turned four weeks old on Monday. I just weighed it and took pictures. It's at about 65% of its original weight (a weight loss of 35%).

Also, the parts that were mixed with TD are more of a creamy pale tan. There is a layer of ash on the top, turning the pink nearly white!

I haven't tried any form of testing yet. There's enough ash formation that a zap test wouldn't be valid, and I'm too chicken to try washing with it yet! (Not to mention I"m in the middle of testing other soaps. lol)

I just tried a wash with OO/castor oil one I made a couple weeks ago, the one with all the ash crystals. I meant to just rinse off the thick coating of ash (by far the most of any of these batches) but in doing so, I noticed the soap quickly became very snotty. I had strings of goo that would stretch out between my hand and the bar and also noted a layer of slimy goo was immediately coming off the bar, enough that it would leave a pile on my finger when I wiped the bar. I have to assume this is the castor as the OO bars did nothing like this. It lathers a lot more than the straight OO and that lathers starts pretty bubbly and then becomes more dense and foamy, but the goo factor is very unappealing. It's a young bar though.

I can see why the soap is considered a laundry soap. I made the 100% OO version and finally got around to washing a white item...it came out sparkling white. Not sure what it would do to colored/black items, but I'm pleased with this one piece I hand washed.

I know it was mentioned that this may not be the best for a new person, and I was not drawn by the challenge, but more of the 'old' way about it (sort of hard to explain).

So with one batch of other soap under my belt, I gave it a shot but am not sure it is 'working'. Today is the second day and it is the consistency of buttercream or room temp butter. I removed one from the mold this morning and placed the log on a lined tray. It held it's form all day. I removed the other one from the mold and weighed both (the molds are wooden and were showing some small signs of leaching of oil or something where the freezer paper had a gap).

-------
When I started making the soap, it was hand mixed for almost 2 hours and only reached a light trace (that was dedication :smile:...and a sore arm). I eventually pulled out the heavy artillery and stick blended on and off for another 15 minutes. I said a prayer and poured.

A few details:
1. I used extra virgin olive oil by accident. I read that this oil takes longer to trace. The color is a butter color and not white. The oil was pretty dark.
2. It did not gel. I read that non-gelled soaps can take longer to harden. Plus this is not a solid oil.
3. There is no separation or puddles on top going on and I take that as a good sign with all the water that is in there.

Can this soap be saved? If not, I promise I will not give up on it.

Oh you are trying to compete with me for longest time for this damned soap to come together! My longest was 4 hours.

Until it has really traced, it does look yellowish, very pale. My soap got very firm within 24 hours though and certainly firm enough to cut. I think you may not have gotten to the proper trace on this one, which is a bugger to tell. Thank goodness you didn't gel. This soap really doesn't like that, at all. People have made it will pomace to regular OO so I don't think the extra virgin OO would make this soap not work.

I have had the slippery slidey plastic type trace, the rubber ball rolling around type trace and the Cool Whip type trace. The cool whip one tended to get thicker faster and be more solid that the plastic ones.

When you were SB'ing at the end, did it break up and look like a horrible cellulite problem before it went back together or what did you consider trace before your pour?

Oh, boy, my brain is fried. Been a long day. But here's my lab report....

I weighed my two "superlye batches" again today. I wanted to compare the weight loss of these soaps with my "normal" soaps, so I had to do some re-thinking of the data. So the attached chart is not just an update of the charts I've presented earlier -- I had to put the weight loss for all the soaps on a consistent basis so I could compare the data properly.

Because superlye soap has such a high water content, the rate of water loss is also very high at first -- much higher than for a soap with a lower "normal" moisture content. When the water content of the superlye soap drops to the same water content that a normal soap has when it is first cut, the rate of water loss of a superlye soap is pretty much the same as a normal soap after that. This happened about 17 days after the superlye soaps were cut. You can see this on the chart -- all four curves lie reasonably close to each other if I match up the moisture content for the four soaps on Day 17.

I did a lather test at the sink today. I compared my two superlye soaps with a young "normal" castile that a fellow soaper graciously shared with me. I really appreciate her generosity, because I had no idea what a real handcrafted castile is like. Now I have a lovely "normal" castile to compare with my soaps.

What I found was the normal castile made a small amount of lather. The lather was a foamy lotion made of all small bubbles. I can see why some people might call the lather slimy, but "lotion" was the word that came to my mind instead. I liked the silky feel. I also liked that the soap left my hands clean feeling, but not dry or tight. Very nice.

The superlye castile (the homely soap that cleaned my oven) and the superlye safflower-lard (the pretty soap) both produced slightly more lather than the normal castile. That surprised me. The superlye castile lathered the most, the superlye safflower-lard was second, and the normal castile was third as far as lather volume. I kept trying all three soaps one after the other to see if my technique or personal bias was affecting the lather. I finally decided that, yes, the superlye castile really was lathering more than the normal castile and the superlye safflower-lard.

The lather for both superlye soaps is different than the normal castile -- the lotion-like dense suds is overlaid with a fluff of larger bubbles. The sense I got was of a "looser" lather, so I think this lather might be acceptable to someone who doesn't care for "castile slime". The superlye soaps also left my hands feeling clean, but not dry or tight.

Conclusions: I expect the moisture content of the superlye soaps to stabilize in another 30-40 days, if my normal soaps are any indication. All three soaps -- normal castile, superlye castile, and superlye safflower-lard -- are not big lather-ers at this point in their lives. All three like a lot of added water to do their best job of lathering. The lather of the superlye soaps is "looser" and fluffier.

"...There is no separation or puddles on top going on and I take that as a good sign with all the water that is in there...."

Hang in there, Robert! I'd let the soap do its thing for awhile longer if I were in your shoes. If it's not weeping all over the place, it may well be fine -- just a sloooow saponifier of a batch.

Please share your story as it unfolds -- I'm very curious to hear how things go for you....

Newbie ---

4 hours? Wow! I realize I should have stirred longer now but was unaware of the effect. After the stick blender, I would say it was a medium trace (based on pictures I have seen). The trace was like a very light lotion but not nearly like AnnaMarie's picture. It never broke apart. I sort of find this exciting though!

DeeAnna ---

Thanks for the encouragment. I checked it this morning and it is still holding it's shape. It is no where near cutting as I could run a finger to smooth out the indentations/smudges from the freezer paper. I am hoping that by having the logs out on the tray it will help with evaporation (with more sides exposed). The bits left on the freezer paper side after unmolding seemed a tab firmer this morning. I tried to wash with a tiny bit of the bits left and it did have snall bubbles so that was encouraging. My finger did not sting but it is a combo of smooth and dried right now --- maybe too caustic still.


Anyone ---

One thing I noticed is that AnnaMarie wrapped hers in towels very well. Wouldn't that cause some sort of gelling? Her soap seems to work every time. Just curious. I read about the oven process impact too.

"...I am hoping that by having the logs out on the tray it will help with evaporation (with more sides exposed)...."

Yes, that will definitely help. If you look at the chart I posted last night, you can see how dramatic the water loss is for the first few days. When the log is firm enough to cut, that will help the soap dry out even better, but I agree with not rushing that.

I'd be careful with the handwashing tests. I know it's hard to not try a new soap, but this one will roughen and irritate the skin until it mellows for a few weeks. Be sure to wash after handling the soap so you don't accidentally rub any in your eyes or on your face -- a little bit of lye can have a big effect in a tender area!

Don't take me for any sort of baseline on this recipe! I am way out on the bell curve. Nearly everyone has had this go from start to finish in about an hour and I seem to be the only sucker sitting out there tending to the soap for hours on end. Okay I don't watch it every minute but still, no one else has had it take 2, 3, 4 hours to make this. I don't know what is wrong other than I live in a slow trace vortex.