Deanna, I have a question...

Okay, 24 hours later and it seems like either my additives or my lack of gel interfered with the process. I weighed the soap, and it only lost 2g. Yes, you read that right. Virtually no water has evaporated, and this is in a slab mold, with a lot of surface area! And it's still very soft (I had gloves on and touched the bit that had been up on the sides of the freezer paper). This is so crazy!

...I'm also going to need to find a heating pad or something so that I can start getting things to gel. My house is apparently cold enough and the oven large enough that even with its insulation and adding elements prone to overheating isn't enough to get soaps to gel for me.

ETA: Also, the contrast color of this soap is still pink! It's so weird. The webpage and the label both had a warning that it would morph orange in high pH, but it doesn't look like it's morphed at all to me.

AnnaMarie said:

Would someone kindly explain to me what "salting soap out" is and what it entails? I am not familiar at all with that term.
Cheers!
Anna Marie
Ps- while I'm thinking about it, what soap calc are you all using to be getting these negative percentages and such? I don't see such things on the soap calc I use, and I'm feeling left out

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Salting out is a method for washing away excess lye or other impurities from soap.

Even though it also washes away the glycerin, I still find salted out soaps to be milder than normal CP soap. Some here will disagree on the mildness. All soaps I have salted out has been mostly olive oil. It might be this disagreement comes from different effect from different oils. My olive oil soaps clearly gets milder.

Salting out means this: First you dissolve the soap into a lot of water. After this, you saturate the water with salt. This requires about 350g of salt to each litre of water. Now the soap will float up to the surface, leaving the lye containing brine under. Take a spoon and spoon over the soap into a strainer and let the brine drip off. Repeat the whole procedure until your soap is clean of excess lye.

Finally when the soap is clean, I usually mix in a bit of fresh water and then let it drip out in order to remove some of the salt residues left in the soap.

Salting out allows you to use excess of lye and this is good if you deal with unknown oils. You can make soap out of any soaping fat regardless if you have the SAP values or not. If you want to superfat, you can do it in a blender after you have been salting out the soap.

okay, i've managed to stay away from the oven

i've also managed to drain the liquid and the soap fell out to the sink. okay, it ain't going to be a pretty soap coz it's got dents here and there, i think i can live with that, LOL!

i put the (still soft, like a dough) soap on a plastic tray and just let it sit there inside the oven (turned off of course!) to do whatever thing it needs to do. i was soo tempted to try to remold it to make it prettier, since the soap is still pretty soft anyway, but i've restrained myself and just let it be

eta: next time i'm gonna use a wooden mold and just place it on a tray or something for the liquid. i think it will molded better.

"...what soap calc are you all using to be getting these negative percentages and such?..."

You can do it in soapcalc, AnnaMarie. The original recipe, translated to grams is:

1 qt (868 g) olive oil
1 qt + 6 oz (1113 g) water
6 oz wt (170 g) NaOH

I just went to http://www.soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp and entered 868 g olive oil and kept entering in negative numbers in Section 4 where the Super Fat % can be changed. If you want more oil than lye (the usual) then put a positive number in. If you want more lye than oil (this recipe) then put a negative number in. I just kept trying different negative numbers until I got the same lye weight (170 g) as your recipe. Trial and error ended up about -45%.

I didn't bother with trying to make SoapCalc's water match this recipe, but I'd do it the same way.

i think putting the soap in an off oven is not gonna bring a good air circulation. the soap is still very soft, with soda ash forming on top and sides. putting it next to a fan instead to help the water evaporate.

i can't wait to try this soap, GAH! *patience... patience.. patience....*

Now I have 14 soaps

They are only for own usage so I did not care to press even bars. After one week they will be rock hard and ready to use. It is almost unbelievable it had 20% excess lye yesterday.

Thank you DeeAnna for the explanation with pictures (I tend to need those as I'm a visual learner )

Something new for me.... My soap was concave in the middle with big holes filled with lye water. The only thing I did different this time was to pour thinner bars. I usually pour thick bars by setting up my mold accordingly. This time I just lined the whole mold and poured resulting in thinner bars. I think I'm going to have to test this again :smile::smile:
Btw- I weighed two test bars that were the unaffected ends: 9.35 & 7.60 oz. I will weigh later today.

interesting AnnaMarie, by looking at yours and DeeAnna's, it seems that the middle bars were having the problem. mine is looking very ugly right now from falling into the sink, but as long as it sets up right, i'm a happy camper.

this soap is one big mystery all right

Thank you all for sharing this journey, it's very interesting to read.

I have to say that mine have always turned out beautifully, so this was a surprise. I will ue these for laundry soap eventually, and will probably make this batch again, setting up my mold for thicker bars.

Can you imagine a poor newbie trying to make this soap successfully if we're having all these troubles???

Weighed my bars. In 2 1/2 days, they've lost 8% of their weight right after they were cut. My normal soap loses 9-10% only after curing for 50 days or more.

I think you're all mad! I love it! :clap::clap:

The Efficacious Gentleman said:

I think you're all mad! I love it! :clap:

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care to join the madness?


i'm def going to try to make this again soon. i wanna try a different technique next time, the one said by engblom and DeeAnna earlier about mixing the water to the oil. a lil at a time after the lye goes in. i wonder what will happen.

right now my soap is getting harder than before, but still too soft to cut. i reckon another good 24 hrs i should wait. hate the waiting game!

oh and the soda ash is something i've never seen before..

eta: according to ehow (which has the same recipe posted there) the soap usually set up around 3 days. glad to know this. mine's not yet 24 hrs. i'll give it another 48, and from the looks of it i think it can take that long. still dough-y (is that even a word?) right now.

I still have too many other soaps to make to even think about it!

This has been very educational. I don't think I'm ready to try this yet myself, but definitely something interesting to keep in mind.

^^^

yes. i wasn't interested at all at the beginning to be honest (up to a point where i was thinking, hell no, wasn't possible, too scary with that much lye excess), but then last night i saw AnnaMarie posted her lab report with very interesting pics, and suddenly i wanna do it, ha! i don't even know why as it was 4AM when i began (i'm a night owl as i work from home).

and now this soap is stuck in my mind like a virus!

All these experiments! I'm having a great time. Another experiment I wish I could do would be to determine how much essential oil/extracts survive cp. I don't suppose there is a way to test this...DeeAnna? Or another is whether or not super fatting soap really is to our benefit....

I am bugged enough about that stupid hole in my soap that I am going to make it again.

seven said:

i think putting the soap in an off oven is not gonna bring a good air circulation. the soap is still very soft, with soda ash forming on top and sides. putting it next to a fan instead to help the water evaporate.

i can't wait to try this soap, GAH! *patience... patience.. patience....*

Click to expand...

That was my thought, so mid-day yesterday I pulled it out and put mine on the stove...

As of this morning it still looked the same, no soda ash forming... I'm guessing something went wrong with mine. Especially since the color didn't morph to the high pH color.

"...Another experiment I wish I could do would be to determine how much essential oil/extracts survive cp. I don't suppose there is a way to test this...DeeAnna? Or another is whether or not super fatting soap really is to our benefit..."

Goodness, AnnaMarie, you have high expectations! Without a chem lab and a gas chromatograph, I'm not sure the first experiment is do-able. I agree it would be great to have a clue, however. So much of soaping is "I think it might..." rather than "I know it will...." and the issue of EOs surviving or not is a huge black hole in our understanding.

I also agree about the superfatting thing. I have wondered at times about the rather casual way some people jack up their superfat. I also wonder about the placebo effect -- "my soap is superfatted to high heaven so it must therefore be mild". The effect of superfat could be tested with a blind panel. Send soaps, identical except for superfat, to people and see which they prefer. Don't disclose why you're asking them to evaluate the soaps. Or possibly look at some way of using soap to wash something that is a stand-in for human skin and look for signs of "skin irritation". Just thinking out loud ... don't have any specifics.

"...I think you're all mad! I love it!..."

It takes one to know one!

Late to reporting.

I weighed my bars yesterday evening. I had them lined up with space in between. Not surprisingly, the end bars lost the most, from 5.0 to 4.7 ounces. The ones in the middle lost 0.1 ounces. I set them in a different spot now where they have more space around each bar.

I did this again last night. 3 hours almost to the minute. An hour in, I was thinking about the comments about stirring the same direction and the person watching the fire.... I felt my bowl and it was cold. I think that's the reason for the slowness when I do it. I put the bowl (SS again- too much heat loss for me?) in a pan of warm water but it didn't seem to make a difference. Still took three hours. I don't think my SB is that wimpy; I think it's a temp issue.

I poured and put in my gelling box but it was too cold to generate any heat. Still soft and probably pourable this am. I now have it in the box with a heating pad on medium to see if I can get a normal gel on it. Otherwise I have no idea when I will be able to unmold.

RE: the water issue, the one loaf I made that had just started to separate but went back together had no weeping at all. None. The other loaf that really really separated and kind of went back together had a lot of lye water around it and has a gradient of softness and lye. Top is soft and non zapping, bottom is hard and not zappy but is tingly. I should also note my "good" loaf does tingle with a tongue test but isn't a true zap.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for my second batch.

DeeAnna, I think your blinded superfat level idea is a great one. That would be worthy of a swap, like the additives swap and then a number of people test all teh levels in different water types. That would be really interesting.

FlyDancer,

what is the state of yer soap now? mine is still soft to the touch and nowhere ready to be cut, and it's been 24 hrs. it is getting a tad harder than before, but the process is slow. i think the excessive water is the culprit.

on ehow it said to give it 3 days. so, that's a glimmer of hope. it is fascinating to see that we all have different results from the same recipe.

AnnaMarie is to blame for all this madness