I've been making bar soap for many years, and with time on my hands with the covid-19 quarantine I decided to try liquid soap for the first time. After doing a lot of reading here and on the internet, I bought Jackie Thompson's book Liquid Soapmaking. I decided to start with a simple soap paste w/o palm oil so chose her recipe #7: 60% coconut oil, 30% olive (pomace), and 10% castor oil. Checked the recipe against SoapmakingFriend calculator and see that the 255 gr KOH = 1.5% superfat. Her recipe uses less water than the lye calculator suggests.
I did it in a crockpot on low heat, and knew to expect a long amount of time to get it to come to the required pasty thickness before the cook. But my play time ran into dinnertime and so after I got it stickblended somewhere between a thin to medium trace with a covering of bubbles, I covered it up and went to eat, intending to come back and stickblend it some more every few minutes. Oops. Hours later, after watching a movie with DH I suddenly remembered the soap. It looked kind of the same, so I grabbed a whisk and started stirring it, then went to work with the stickblender...suddenly the entire mass started rising in the crockpot...do I have my very first volcano? Unplugged the crockpot, quickly moved everything on the table out of the way of the imminent flood of whatever this was, grabbed handfuls of dishtowels to form a dike around the pot...but it stopped just short of overflowing.
I gingerly poked at the foam with my whisk...and it all collapsed into itself and suddenly there was my pasty mass. Weird. I had read that separation could be an issue if you didn't stickblend it to this stage so I smashed and stirred and chopped it up as best I could, shrugged, covered it again and left it to cook for an hour or more. Did the test thing with phenol, stirred some escaped liquid back into the mass, cooked it some more, test repeat, got bored, turned it off and went to bed.
In the morning, it was translucent, amber, with maybe a teaspoon of honey-like liquid in the bottom of the pot that didn't zap. I'm doing some small dilution tests now with a couple of ounces of paste in each jar. 1 p paste :1.5 p distilled water (in a hot water bath to encourage it to dissolve), 1 p paste: 1 p distilled water (dissolved pretty easily), 1 p paste: 2 p water (dissolved really easily). Phenol test was barely pink, so when I figure out the ideal dilution I'll have to use a citric acid solution to adjust, correct?
It's kind of weird that there doesn't seem to be a table anywhere with more precise indications about how much water to use to dilute the paste. Is it always trial and error until you find what works with a particular recipe? If a 100% oil LS always had the same dilution rate, and tests were done for each different oil, couldn't there be a spreadsheet that would allow you to calculate the additional water needed for your batch by the percentage of each oil in your formula? Is the info out there and I just haven't found it yet?
Anyway, I assume that once the test jars are all dissolved, I set them aside and see if a jelly-like film forms on any which means that it can take a little more water? Is there any advantage to subbing some of the water for glycerin? I'm afraid this is going to be a little drying with so much coconut oil (the book said, "A nice balance of lather and emollience") so I'd appreciate any advice. There's a recipe with mango butter, avocado and castor oil that looks nice but again 60% coconut oil. And another with 80% olive oil, and maybe 15% coconut and 5% castor (haven't run it through the calculator yet but guessing) that should be gentle but I want bubbles too.
I want to thicken it a little, and remember reading something about adding some salt solution...is that also trial-and-error or is there a rule of thumb to use? What additives have been most successful or useful (aloe vera, glycerin, tocopherol, ???)
Thanks for any feedback!
I did it in a crockpot on low heat, and knew to expect a long amount of time to get it to come to the required pasty thickness before the cook. But my play time ran into dinnertime and so after I got it stickblended somewhere between a thin to medium trace with a covering of bubbles, I covered it up and went to eat, intending to come back and stickblend it some more every few minutes. Oops. Hours later, after watching a movie with DH I suddenly remembered the soap. It looked kind of the same, so I grabbed a whisk and started stirring it, then went to work with the stickblender...suddenly the entire mass started rising in the crockpot...do I have my very first volcano? Unplugged the crockpot, quickly moved everything on the table out of the way of the imminent flood of whatever this was, grabbed handfuls of dishtowels to form a dike around the pot...but it stopped just short of overflowing.
I gingerly poked at the foam with my whisk...and it all collapsed into itself and suddenly there was my pasty mass. Weird. I had read that separation could be an issue if you didn't stickblend it to this stage so I smashed and stirred and chopped it up as best I could, shrugged, covered it again and left it to cook for an hour or more. Did the test thing with phenol, stirred some escaped liquid back into the mass, cooked it some more, test repeat, got bored, turned it off and went to bed.
In the morning, it was translucent, amber, with maybe a teaspoon of honey-like liquid in the bottom of the pot that didn't zap. I'm doing some small dilution tests now with a couple of ounces of paste in each jar. 1 p paste :1.5 p distilled water (in a hot water bath to encourage it to dissolve), 1 p paste: 1 p distilled water (dissolved pretty easily), 1 p paste: 2 p water (dissolved really easily). Phenol test was barely pink, so when I figure out the ideal dilution I'll have to use a citric acid solution to adjust, correct?
It's kind of weird that there doesn't seem to be a table anywhere with more precise indications about how much water to use to dilute the paste. Is it always trial and error until you find what works with a particular recipe? If a 100% oil LS always had the same dilution rate, and tests were done for each different oil, couldn't there be a spreadsheet that would allow you to calculate the additional water needed for your batch by the percentage of each oil in your formula? Is the info out there and I just haven't found it yet?
Anyway, I assume that once the test jars are all dissolved, I set them aside and see if a jelly-like film forms on any which means that it can take a little more water? Is there any advantage to subbing some of the water for glycerin? I'm afraid this is going to be a little drying with so much coconut oil (the book said, "A nice balance of lather and emollience") so I'd appreciate any advice. There's a recipe with mango butter, avocado and castor oil that looks nice but again 60% coconut oil. And another with 80% olive oil, and maybe 15% coconut and 5% castor (haven't run it through the calculator yet but guessing) that should be gentle but I want bubbles too.
I want to thicken it a little, and remember reading something about adding some salt solution...is that also trial-and-error or is there a rule of thumb to use? What additives have been most successful or useful (aloe vera, glycerin, tocopherol, ???)
Thanks for any feedback!
the book really made it sound like you had to cook cook cook it. I see there's also a cold process method that looks a lot less fussy.
