LOL!!! Lesson learned

Maybe...:shifty:

Yeah, when I was HP-ing my carrot soap, it traced fine, all nice and smooth, and I left it alone to cook for a bit, and when I went to check, it had gotten to the gel stage, that's when it started to separate. I had to keep stirring it back together over and over until finally it stayed and started to move on to the next stage. And yes, the ammonia smell from the milk. UGH! lol I can't imagine my recipe working as CP, since it separates at gel like that. Maybe if I just used a small amount of carrots at trace, but I use carrots for almost the full water amount in my recipe, sooooo HP it is!

Photos

shredded and in the crock


bit o carrot juice and buttermilk added


cooked


back in the mold

day later


still very soft to touch, like jello .. easily mushed

I would set it aside somewhere with good air circulation and forget it for a few weeks. My carrot soap used a lit of liquid when i did HP, and it stayed soft for quite a while. Even now, fully cured 8wks later, it's one of my softer bars but it's also my favorite.

Looks like you used a tad too much liquid. I've never had rebatch that running, its usually quite thick. Your bars will harden in time.

When i rebatched scraps of my carrot and pumpkin soaps together and added milk, I got the melted rebatch quite runny on purpose so i could ladle it out of the crock-pot into these cute flower molds I found. In the original bars, the pumpkin ones are nice and hard, and the carrot ones, using a slightly different recipe, as mentioned, got firm, but never as rock-hard as some of my other soaps. The rebatched mix was a great balance of the two recipes, but it took a couple days to harden up from the extra milk i used to make it pourable.

I wish i'd taken pics of that rebatch -- they turned out pretty. I mixed calendula petals in, and sprinkled gold mica in the molds before pouring, and got lots of gold-topped bronze flowers. They're gone already. Friends snatched them up when i was handing out presents last month lol.

Just give em time.

Sooo .. any idea what's going on here?



It's been sitting for a week now and it's harder but it's got a "soft" feel to it and it's still a bit oily/watery along the edge that's not getting full air. It doesn't taste right when I zap test it but it's not full on zappy .. more of a "this doesn't taste like my other soaps" tingle and my tongue feels odd after.

.. and these white ricey looking marks but there was no fragrance added to this recipe so I don't know what they are or what's causing them.

This is one strange batch o' soap! I'm tempted to toss it in the round file but it's such a fun experiment to just leave it and watch it morphing with no real idea what the heck is going on.

I think the chunks are probably parts of the soap that didn't melt completely with the rebatch, looks pretty normal comparable to photos and videos of rebatches I've seen (never done one myself yet.)

Personally since you didn't add extra oil in the rebatch, I'd rebatch it again adding more oil. But I'm on a super low income and don't have money to waste so I'd be insistent on making this soap work rather than tossing it lol. You may prefer just tossing it For example, I recently burned coconut oil with coffee. I was trying out an infusion in my bfs crock pot slowly over a few days, melting it down and stirring it when in the kitchen then turning it off when I left. Well, once I turned it on high to try and melt down some of it in a short period of time before we left somewhere and apparently forgot to turn it back off. Came home to the kitchen smelling like burnt popcorn! I couldn't toss out an entire 6 dollar jar of coconut oil so I decided to try out the method I'd seen discussed here for cleaning oil. You mix the oil with equal amount water and 10% salt and mix thoroughly over heat, when agitated really well you leave it for the oil to separate out and then discard the dirty water. SUPER easy to do since coconut oil is solid at room temp haha. I did it 3 times over a few days, and now I've got coconut oil that smells mildly of coffee, but all the burnt coffee/popcorn smell is gone and its ready to re-infuse coffee for a strong (GOOD) smelling oil.