New to Soapmaking… Crumbly Soap

[elizab1998]

Hi! I am fairly new to soap making. I’ve made a few batches and I’m very confused on what is going wrong with my soaps. The first few batches turned out completely fine, but my last few have been hard and crumbly. I have cut within 2 hours of blending before and I’ve cut at 48 hours after blending. Both times they have ended up crumbling.

My recipe is:
9.0 oz coconut oil
10.5 oz olive oil
10.5 oz beef tallow
4.2 oz lye
9.6 oz distilled water

I combine them when they are both less than 100 degrees and within 10 degrees of each other. Can anyone tell me what is going wrong? Could I be overmixing?

 

[Booker]

I have a soaping book that says soap like this is a result of too much lye. Now, I'm a soaping newbie too, so I can't say if that is truly the case.

If your first few batches were fine, is there something that has changed? Like is your scale working ok?

I hope other experienced soapers can chime in--I'm quite curious myself!

 

[MelissaG]

The lye amount is fine. 1:1 would be 8.4 water to 4.2 lye. But you have alot of hard oils in comparison to soft oils. Coconut oil and tallow are considered hard oils. Olive oil is a soft oil. Hard oils are oils that are solid at room temperature. Try making the mix 60% hard oils and 40% soft.

 

[AliOop]

The soap calculator says that with these oils and that amount of lye, you are using 30.3% lye concentration (maybe because you left the default at 38% water-as-percent-of-oils), and 8% superfat. So, that's all good.

Are you using any other additives, like EOs, FOs, clays, etc.? Those are the most frequent culprits when soap doesn't turn out as planned.

Also, you mentioned that you combined everything below 100ºF. That makes me wonder if you might be getting false trace from the tallow being that cool - especially if the lye solution is even cooler than that. By any chance, were your first few batches combined when they were warmer? If so, then try soaping a bit warmer again, and see if that works.

If neither of those are the issue, then I second Booker's thoughts about your scale potentially being off; perhaps it needs new batteries. In the meantime, try scaling the batch back to 16oz instead of 30oz. One-pound batches are a newbie soaper's best friend.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

My thoughts are somewhat similar to above. I agree that the lye amount should be fine. Here’s what the recipe looks like in the calculator:

With the soap looking brittle like cocoa butter out of the frig, rather than crumbly, false trace seems unlikely to me. If the soap is lye heavy, it will zap. Although the recipe is highly cleansing and unlike anything I’ve made, I’ve noticed that all of these fats have a tendency to get brittle as single oil soaps. Perhaps you’ve formulated the “perfect storm” for brittleness. Are you adding fragrance, salt, sodium lactate or any other additives that should be taken into consideration? If not, I would go with the suggestion above to sub liquid oil in for one of the hard fats. I make a soap with 43% tallow, 20% coconut oil and the rest as liquid oil(s). It gets a wee bit brittle, but is manageable as long as I don’t wait to long to cut it (< 18hrs).