Has anyone successfully done an HP milk soap?

[Rachael]

Hi everyone. I'd like to do a hot process soap this week and use GM as the liquid. Is this possible however? I've done a little looking around online and some guides suggested adding milk at the end of the cook and mixing it in and they've had success that way, but I wonder if this would be the same as adding it during the cook or would be prone to rancidity since the saponification process has already mostly been underway by the end of it? I'm a beginner and I don't know much. Just thinking out loud at this point lol. I would think that adding it in during the cook would cause it to scorch but please correct me if I am wrong. I plan to use a cheapo Walmart 6qt crockpot to do the cook with a warm/low/high setting. If anyone has tried this and can report back I'd really appreciate it. If it ends up being too much of a bother I'll just leave the GM out.

A side question: how about HP soap with lard? I've heard lard can start smelling a little off or "piggy" at high temps, I have had great success with it in CP soaps but with HP I am not sure if the sustained temp would cause any adverse effects at all.

As always, thanks all.

 

[Dawni]

I can answer your lard question....

I use it regularly between 30-60% depending on the recipe and so far no piggy smell. Of course it could be my lard that's awesome not my process haha but I do cook on the high setting most times and with lots of stirring.

It'll also depend on your nose lol some here notice a piggy smell even with FOs and that's with CP. My HP lard soaps are fine with EOs for me.

Make a small batch on high n see?

Also, here's a good read on milk in HP.

 

[Arimara]

If you HP with lard, Be safe about it and use a low temperature on a crockpot or heat up your other oils before you add the lard. But low heat is more important. You may also want to make sure your lard doesn't smell a little piggie- it will come out in the cured soap.

HP with milk is doable but the timing can be tricky. I'm not confident with when to add milk as I've done it only once and it was over a year ago. I remember using a 50/50 lye/water ratio and then adding enough milk to bring the ratio to 3:1 liquid to lye. I might have added it around the mashed potato-ey stage.

 

[szaza]

I've made HP soap with full goat milk as lye water replacement with the Chickens in the Road method from Dawni's link and it works wonderfully. I don't have a crock pot so I oven HP. With that method I froze the goat milk to a slush, put it in an ice bath and slowly added lye, making sure not to scorch the milk (this can take up to an hour!)
Then I would also keep my oils at the cooler side where my hard oils were just barely liquid (this did give me false trace, so be careful about that, make sure you mix enough before starting the cook)
I then put the soap batter in the oven at 70C and just slowly let it gel without stirring. When it had all gone through gel phase I added my additives and plopped it into the mold.
Just as a side note, I did this a while ago when I was a beginner. I would now use the zap test to know if the soap is ready, back then I assumed soap would be done after gel phase, but I've learned that's not entirely true later on.
The pink soap (2nd from the left) is made with HP goat milk and colored with pink clay

 

[lsg]

You can do HP and at the end of cook add some instant dry milk, dissolved in a little water.