Red Osier
Member
So yesterday I made my first ever soap, and nothing went as expected….
My recipe was a hot process deer tallow soap. Tallow, NaOH, water. 5% superfat. We pulled the quantities for the ingredients using soapcalc.net.
My friend and I, carefully working out doors (temp around 7C) heated the tallow to melted through in a crock pot, added the lye to the water in a pyrex measuring cup and stirred to dissolve, and then poured the lye carefully into the fat. We didn’t have an immersion blender, so were expecting to spend a great deal of time stirring before it came to trace.
Less than five minutes later we were dealing with a crumbly wax like mass like candle shavings. If it went through all the steps, it happened too fast to recognize.
My first thought was that the fat had resolidified for some reason, that we’d experienced false trace, but the pot was on and all the ingredients hot.
We did some fast googling!
We almost put it aside as a failed batch to try rebatching with the intention of starting a fresh batch based on what we thought we got wrong first time round, but we developed a theory that the soap had seized, so we set it to cook til it reached the gel phase, which it eventually did, and then till it started to be ‘light and foamy’. We did a zap test, and then scooped the mess into silicon molds. It resolidified so quickly that it was a solid, brittle hard grainy mass that looks a bit like crunchy peanut butter.
Clean up determined that it was a nice mildly sudsy soap that was gentle on the hands.
We each have taken a loaf to try rebatching experiments, since they are certainly no good for making samples as is. I am considering using milk instead of water, and adding some honey for sudsing.
Here are things we’ve come up with that may have contributed to the weirdness.
Thanks!
My recipe was a hot process deer tallow soap. Tallow, NaOH, water. 5% superfat. We pulled the quantities for the ingredients using soapcalc.net.
My friend and I, carefully working out doors (temp around 7C) heated the tallow to melted through in a crock pot, added the lye to the water in a pyrex measuring cup and stirred to dissolve, and then poured the lye carefully into the fat. We didn’t have an immersion blender, so were expecting to spend a great deal of time stirring before it came to trace.
Less than five minutes later we were dealing with a crumbly wax like mass like candle shavings. If it went through all the steps, it happened too fast to recognize.
My first thought was that the fat had resolidified for some reason, that we’d experienced false trace, but the pot was on and all the ingredients hot.
We did some fast googling!
We almost put it aside as a failed batch to try rebatching with the intention of starting a fresh batch based on what we thought we got wrong first time round, but we developed a theory that the soap had seized, so we set it to cook til it reached the gel phase, which it eventually did, and then till it started to be ‘light and foamy’. We did a zap test, and then scooped the mess into silicon molds. It resolidified so quickly that it was a solid, brittle hard grainy mass that looks a bit like crunchy peanut butter.
Clean up determined that it was a nice mildly sudsy soap that was gentle on the hands.
We each have taken a loaf to try rebatching experiments, since they are certainly no good for making samples as is. I am considering using milk instead of water, and adding some honey for sudsing.
Here are things we’ve come up with that may have contributed to the weirdness.
- The fat was a bit off. (Not using my best fat for my first trial!) I rendered it several years ago before mastering my process, and it had been stored at room temp. (I had rewashed it this week in a couple baking soda and water baths to try and remove all the free fatty acids, and it certainly smelled much better, but that process went weird too, and instead of water under my cake of hard fat was a mass of stuff that looked line soft whipped cream in various densities. My current theory is that it is a suspension of glycerine and soap from the baking soda and fatty acids, since I had used salt to break the emulsion. Would welcome thoughts on that, too.) Certainly when the lye mixed with the fat, it turned orange and stank of rancidity. It did settle down, and now looks like peanut butter, and doesn’t smell much of anything.
- We didn’t make sure the fat and lye were at the same temp, and they were both at at least 120F, if not more, due to the high melting point of the fat. We poured the lye into the crockpot while it was on low, because we didn’t want the fat to resolidify. Though I would have expected this to slow things down not speed it up…
Thanks!