I'm truly surprised you were actually able to run across as many as 2 people who posted pics of their cured bars, but the huge dearth of after-pics makes me wonder if they are really and truly post-cure pics, and if so- how many weeks old were they?
Sorry, Jbot, didn't mean to go on a rant. I wish I had an answer to your ripple conundrum, but I have no idea. Hopefully DeeAnna might be able to shed some light on it.
Well, since I'm in agreement with pretty much everything you said, the rant doesn't bother me in the least! One of the pictures was "a couple" weeks old, according to the poster. Since they generally look fine for the first 2 weeks, that wasn't very meaningful. Another one was supposedly a "couple months" old, but it looked exactly like all the fresh pictures she posted, so I wondered if it was a picture of a soap that WAS older, but the photo was taken when it was fresh. Who knows.
Thanks for explaining how you do HP. . .Your technique is a little different, so it makes sense that you are seeing different things happening as your HP soap cures.
I have been seeing pretty much the same type of rippling thing with both of the HP methods I've tried; it's the degree of rippling that varies. I used to make it in the oven, but lately I've been doing the "Sharon Johnson stick blend" method, where I get the oils hot, don't let the lye water cool down, and stick blend continuously for several minutes. Then I zap test and put in my fragrance, colors, etc. It goes really fast, I get a more fluid batter, and there's less rippling in the finished bars.
This is pure speculation, but I think this method helps cut back on rippling because the batter saponifies more evenly. When I was using the oven, the soap would sit undisturbed and gel from the outside in, which meant the outside was probably over-cooked by the time the inside was done. I would stir it up when it was finished, but maybe that just wasn't enough to even things out. I did try stirring it periodically during the process, but that actually made things worse.
Besides using less water, the other things that seem to help reduce rippling are unmolding sooner and letting the unmolded log sit for a day or two before cutting. I don't really know why those things help. I'm also wondering whether faster (or slower) cooling of the soap after it's in the mold might make a difference. What do you think?
My mold doesn't fit in my freezer, unfortunately, so I can't try that.
As I mentioned before, HP soap is usually stirred a lot while it is saponifying and then it is put into a mold when it is fairly cool so it doesn't remain undisturbed and in a gel state for long, if at all. What I think is happening is the different types of soap molecules (short chain soap molecules vs. long chain ones) respond to all this disturbance by creating different types of crystalline structures compared with how the same soap molecules would organize in a CP soap.
That's getting into the territory that I had in mind when I first asked about crystallization! Now I'm wondering: is this something I can manipulate? You mentioned soap sitting undisturbed in a gel state. If that helps the organization of the crystals, then what about re-gelling, so to speak? Like making the soap, putting it in the mold, then putting it in the oven at 170 for an hour or so? (This was actually suggested to me by topofmurrayhill, but I haven't tested it yet.)
"...Is rebatching and HP sort of considered the same basically? ..."
I'd say in a general sense, yes, they're kind of the same. I would be comfortable saying they are more similar to each other in how they're processed than either one is to CP soap.
Not sure I agree with that. Other than the application of heat and molding after saponification instead of before/during, do HP and rebatch really have that much in common? CP and HP are both made up "fresh," combining oils and lye water; none of that is involved in rebatch. You can also get a fairly homogenized texture with HP that I think is closer to CP than rebatch. I've never seen a rebatch that didn't have visible chunks here and there. The way I look at it, HP is just CP that's being taken a step further prior to going in the mold. Rebatch is more like taking finished soap and going backwards.
I tried adding the sugar syrup after the cook in yesterday's batch. I wasn't comfortable using the 10-14% recommended in the video, so I went with my usual 5%, but instead of putting it all in the water before adding the lye, I split it in half. Half went in the water up front, and half was added as a warm syrup after the cook. It DID make the batter more fluid. Not as fluid as in the video -- she used more water, more sugar, and also glycerin -- but definitely enough to be noticeable.
The downside: it's one more thing to juggle during the process, and it made the batter rather sticky, which was problematic when I was trying to pour and swirl. So the stickiness might cancel out the increased fluidity.
The stickiness went away as the soap cooled and hardened. It does not seem softer than usual, probably because I used my standard amount of sugar. The logs actually seem harder than usual now that they've cooled.
Do you think that strictly in terms of the affect on lather, it makes a difference whether the sugar is added up front or at the end?
