New Year’s resolution - test my FOs!

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Note: admin - if this should be in the FO forum, please move for me.

I’m using the method shown in the I Dream in Soap YouTube video. She tested 10 FOs in 10 cups, but I went with six. After three rounds of testing (but only 12 FOs, see below), the citrus smelling FOs and the green tea I’ve used frequently in the past were the slowest, while the florals tended to move more quickly. This isn’t surprising, but knowing the timeframes for trace stages is very useful. An oil substitution (by mistake, for round 1) and technique also seemed to make a difference, but more testing will be needed before I can say much about that. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized that I had picked up the HOSunflower oil instead of RBO for the round 1 batter. The soap is definitely whiter than it is with RBO and everything seemed to move a little more slowly than expected. For round 2, I was careful to use RBO, but then I couldn’t control myself and hit the batter with the mini blender one more time, which took my beautiful emulsion to light trace. I added the FOs, but the soap in all of the cups was already firming up. For round 3, I used the same FOs as round 2, and was super careful to stay at emulsion. Much better results! Some of the FOs we’re still at a light med trace after 20 min (for me this means that I can make a ribbon of batter on surface that disappears when I tap the cup on the counter). Other cups/FOs were making what I call “Future Prim” peaks by the 5-6 min mark, so pretty fast, but still workable. I didn’t observe ricing or seizing with any of the FOs, but that’s probably because I tend to stay away from FOs known for bad behavior. I’m using my highest stearic & palmitic recipe (tallow & shea) because it‘s one of the fastest to come to trace without FO added.

other details: I’m making 40g test soaps in #5 plastic condiment cups from the dollar store. The FOs are at 3% ppo. My starting oil temp is 90F and lye MB is more like 70F. After I put the lids on, the cups are going on a heating pad set to medium for 2 hrs. I’m not sure if they’re gelling, but I’m confident that I will be able to pop 5 of 6 round 1 soaps out of their cups by later today.

The best news for me so far is the perfect performance, and possibly even deceleration, of NS Satsuma Orange. I was disappointed to get little lumps in a recipe test soap I recently made with that FO. The oils were a bit warmer for the recipe test.

I still have dozens of FOs to test, but I think it will be well worth the time.
 
Having learned my lesson a couple of times now, I always do test batches with new FOs in my 4" Loaf Mold. After watching Lisa's video, I had though about scaling down...I have some small round cavity molds and could then test a lot more FOs from a small batch, but then I have watched Keely's videos (Soy and Shea) where her small test batches behaved very well, but turned bad when she made a regular batch. While logic dictates that with all things being equal, you should get the same results, but then again...water boils at different rates depending on the size of the pan you use.

Now I do want to do her colorant tests, I just don't have the room to store the results. I currently have 78 different colorants and about a dozen blends.

But as a whole, I agree that it is totally worth the time.
 
@TheGecko Thanks for the tip about Keely’s video. I will check it out. Batch-size changes in the behavior of fastEd moving FOs would be the most problematic, I think. A 50% decrease in time to heavy trace in an FO that took 3 minutes to reach that stage in a cup might make the difference between workable for a straight pour and not. Are the more “perfume-y” florals the most problematic? I tend to stay away from those :cool:
 
@Mobjack Bay

I honestly believe that batch weight makes a difference. I'd have to sort through my stack of notes to know exactly which ones changed when I went from a 20 oz total batch weight to a 50 oz, but I know that there were a dozen or so that did.

And since many of us are not working in a controlled environments, there are other factors to take into consideration. Like Ingredients...even if you are buying the same butter from the same supplier, the butter will change from batch to batch because of something as simple as growing conditions of the trees. The temperature in my kitchen isn't always the same...sometimes it's in the low 80s, sometimes it's in the high 60s. And while we make take the temperature of our oils and lye solution...how many of us take the temperature of our FOs before we pour them into our batter?

I wish I had the time and space to answer a lot of these questions, but I don't and so I do the best I can.
 
Well, I have no doubts now that I added HOSun oil to batch 1, which is on the left in the photo below. It’s much whiter than the soap on the right. In both sets, there’s a citrusy FO in the top cup. NS Satsuma changed the color of the white soap on the left, but NS Awaken didn’t have much impact on the color of the soap (w/ RBO) on the right, or maybe it produced a darker yellow. This difference in base color is enough to turn my pale blue mica soaps green unless I load in TD and use 2-3x the mica I would use with a white base.

5670A9A9-79EA-4BE4-922D-EEAC688DC914.jpeg


@TheGecko I like using the cups because they fit on my small, higher precision scale and I can tare the scale before each addition. I poured 40 g of batter into each cup and then tared the scale before adding 0.8 g of FO to each cup. That saved a step because I didn’t have to transfer the batter and FO from a cup to a cavity mold.
 
I did another testing round this morning with green or woodsy FOs, ranging from MMS green tea and cucumber (slowest) to NS Blue Agave (fastest and a tiny bit of ricing). After seeing the difference in the color from the RBO vs HO sunflower oil that I subbed in by mistake for an earlier round, I decided to do the testing using Sunflower oil. That will make it easier a to judge color changes due to the FO. The substitution seems to slow down my base recipe a bit. When I decided to stop taking notes at the one hour mark today, only the Blue Agave was making firm peaks.

I noticed that some of the test soaps from the previous rounds are popping out of the cups easily and some don’t want to come out at all. At this point it doesn’t seem to be related to how fast the batter moved when I mixed in the FO.
 
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