100% Lard Soap

[deetlebug78]

Hello soap warriors! I made 128 oz batch of basic lard soap I used up coconut milk and goat milk that I had left over and used aloe Vera Juice to bring it to amount needed. I soaped at room temperature with a 40% lye concentration. In past experience it has taken forever to trace. But this time after a good 45 minuets of stirring and stick blending I never reached a lite to medium trace nor did the temperature of the batter rise above 115 degrees, so I decided to pour the batter anyway (batter was 103 degrees at this point) this was around 4 in the afternoon it is now 2 am and it’s incredibly soft. My question is can I pop it in the oven and cpop it at this stage or should I leave well enough alone and it will eventually harden. IS THIS NORMAL??? It has been quite sometime since I did a lard soap but don’t remember it being anything like this. Thank you in advance for any advice/suggestions/ reassurances! Also sorry for the many grammatical and punctuation errors.... it’s after 2am and I cannot sleep and have to be at work in a few hours.... SIGH...

 

[BattleGnome]

You can CPOP almost any soap. I think the cutoff is fully cured soap but don’t quote me on that. You could probably also leave it as long as you had a stable emulsion.

Lard does take a while to trace but I don’t know how milks or aloe would affect it. Any particular reason for such a large batch? I imagine some of the extra time came from the amount of chemical reactions that needed to happen to reach trace

 

[deetlebug78]

Hello BattleGnome, thank you so much for your feedback and I hadn’t thought of the size factor, duh. Im stocking up!

 

[Lin19687]

Curious what you did. I would think the Milks in it would make it hot hot and volcano ?

 

[DeeAnna]

If the only CO is coming from coconut milk which is what I understand from the OP saying this is a lard soap, you can't physically add enough coconut milk to get the CO content anywhere high enough to cause unusual heating. In my experience, anything up to maybe about 30% CO is just a "normal soap" that shouldn't get too crazy about heating up. I do get heating and potential cracking with 70% CO soap, but the OPs recipe isn't anywhere near that if I'm following things correctly. The aloe might cause some warming, but the soap shouldn't come anywhere near volcano conditions just from aloe.

Radically changing the size of a batch will affect how the soap behaves, even if your recipe is the same, just larger. Larger batches require more mixing in the soap pot to get to the same level of emulsion. They will take longer to warm up in the soap pot and in the mold. When they get warmed up, they are likely to reach a higher max temp and will also take longer to cool down.

 

[MorpheusPA]

CPOP away any time until it sets up (you can even do it after that, but there's not much point).

Keep in mind, the goat's milk will react rather badly if it gets too hot, so keep the oven a bit cooler than you might otherwise. The sugars in the goat's and coconut milk might also contribute to overheating, but after some hours the likelihood of that falls to near-zero.

If the milk overheats, it'll take on a strong ammonia smell and a bad color. It's unattractive and stinky, but the smell will fade and the soap will be perfectly usable at home. You just might not want to give it as gifts.

 

[deetlebug78]

Thank you everyone for your response! It is the weirdest thing it got a very hard smooth “crust” for lack of s better word .... softer inside them out but still super lovely soap....p

 

[MorpheusPA]

I've had that happen, too! It seems to go away during cure and the center hardens up until you could pound nails with the stuff. And it just gets nicer as it ages.