Soap dough and late superfat/colour/FO addition

[ResolvableOwl]

Oof. Just made 14 mini soaps (about 20 g each). @Mobjack Bay Your pre-mix trick saved me about an hour of tedious work, and the skin of my hands the kneading of 8 lye-heavy soap loafs.
No way around for the 6 ones with individual oils, though. BAD idea. My hands feel like frozen, sandblasted and covered with superglue at the same time, although I have put lotion, pure babaçu oil and stuff multiple times already.
It's bed time now, but tomorrow I'll share pics!

 

[Johnez]

With a different reading of your comment, you're raising another point that I didn't find an answer to yet: Is soap dough itself of any use if it undergoes gel during its initial preparation? All sources I found either avoided gel or didn't really care/mention. HP soap dough, anyone? I can't really predict if gel phase does something to the consistency that makes gelled soap dough inferior to ungelled. Sounds like yet another thing to try out.

There is never a shortage of experiments. If only we could clone ourselves!

 

[user 29214]

Great idea! I was about to knead the dough and the oil together in a bowl with hands/gloves, but this appears to scale up a lot better. I will try both and report back.

@Johnez Ah, you mean something like a repeated scale-out parameter scan? Yes, that makes sense, although, if you want to make all soaps of one “iteration” at once, you don't need the dough step! Just make a basic soap batter, divide and melt the butters into the small portions, and treat them like normal CP/CPOP.
Food for thought to obtain training data sets for @Tara_H's ML project


Uh, dunno. I won't bother to CPOP my dough soaps (we'll se if this will revenge with stearic spots). It's just that the possibility exists to avoid and/or force gel to taste, while in HP gelling is obviously unavoidable.
My point is, the soap dough detour appears the only way (as far as I overlook it) to get an ungelled soap with a well-defined superfat or heat-sensitive ingredients.

With a different reading of your comment, you're raising another point that I didn't find an answer to yet: Is soap dough itself of any use if it undergoes gel during its initial preparation? All sources I found either avoided gel or didn't really care/mention. HP soap dough, anyone? I can't really predict if gel phase does something to the consistency that makes gelled soap dough inferior to ungelled. Sounds like yet another thing to try out.

Bee from Sorcery soap always advices to avoid gel phase for soap dough, the reason is that gel phase creates an undesirable texture in the soap dough. I have seen it in some of mine, it gets lumps that are not ideal when a smooth finish is the goal, and it does not knead as well.

 

[SoapWitch]

I am confused by the discussion of gelling or not gelling soap dough, or maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose.

Gel speeds up saponification, but why would that be desired or necessary with soap dough? Because you want to be able to handle it sooner? To get more vibrant colors? To make a potentially more translucent soap dough? Just curious.

All soap saponifies, whether gelled or not, even when kept in the refrigerator (in a plastic bag, of course, to keep the air from drying it out).

I am a bit confused too. I don't understand the desire to gel CP soap in the process of creating soap dough. Gelling soap will create a harder/stiffer bar. I've made soap dough, let's say, CP with the desire to use it as soap dough. I used a fragrance oil that gelled the soap. The FO was a gingerbread scent. I have found these types of FO's (replications of ginger, cinnamon, some bakery) will gel soap, causing the soap to heat. No matter how I tried to work with this soap intended for soap dough it wasn't going to happen. Too hard and crumbly, wrong consistency.

I discovered that is one were to make their recipe (depends entirely on the ingredients water/lye ratios) and then keep it from curing, a pliable substance, which we now call soap dough, can be rendered. To color it, mixing colorants after saponification is less ideal than mixing while being made/processed. However, mixing colors of soap dough works well. For example, mixing blue made dough with yellow made dough will produce green.

Ideal soap dough needs to rest. It just does. If one wants to force the situation you will have soap dough, however, to have ideal consistency, resting soap intended for soap dough is ideal. I've been asked so many times how I make this consistency, and this is part of the process. Leaving soap for approx 36 hours before use. Longer, a week to a month can produce amazing results as well. Making soap dough quickly, like I've seen some do, can make soap dough, however, as someone who has worked with it daily for years, the process I use is resting soap before use.

Does this help?

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Yes, that's very helpful! As first-hand as it can get. I just hadn't found any information about gelling soap dough or not, but your explanations and experiences have clarified that case for me. I'm glad you shared your knowledge, so that the insight from negative experiments (like your gingerbread crumbs) doesn't have to be rediscovered (the hard way) by others.

I'll wait for tonight to share my findings, since it'll be very interesting to observe some colour shifts over time already – but I want to photograph under the same lighting conditions as yesterday (white balance ).

 

[SoapWitch]

Yes, that's very helpful! As first-hand as it can get. I just hadn't found any information about gelling soap dough or not, but your explanations and experiences have clarified that case for me. I'm glad you shared your knowledge, so that the insight from negative experiments (like your gingerbread crumbs) doesn't have to be rediscovered (the hard way) by others.

I'll wait for tonight to share my findings, since it'll be very interesting to observe some colour shifts over time already – but I want to photograph under the same lighting conditions as yesterday (white balance ).

. I know I've covered this before... Just can't remember where. I'm glad it helped. I'll look for your results.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Judgment day (T+7d)

Quick wrap-up of my procedure:

1. Soap dough made from low-IV HO sunflower/hydrogenated canola/PO/PKO/castor/ROE. It had turned alarmingly solid after two days, but became well malleable when hand-warm. 7% excess lye.
2. On make day, I split the dough into 8/14 and 6/14 each, and kneaded in just enough canola oil into the larger half to end up at 3% positive superfat (via @Mobjack Bay's trick of putting into a bag and kneading in bulk without skin contact). Letting that rest/saponify for a few hours. I'm aware that this is not a sufficient amount of time for the extra oil to eat up all the excell lye, but still it turned out to be a lot less irritant than the original dough.
3. Each mini soap of this silicone mould holds 20 g soap. Unless otherwise noted, from the solid colourants (S), I added 0.5 g (4%ppo) to the canola pre-mix. For the bulky/oily additions (O), I used 1.4 g (11%ppo) each, kneaded into the original lye-heavy soap dough. The two exceptions are the piece in the very middle (control group: no addition, just canola), and the bottom-left indigotin, where I stopped kneading after barely touching the blue powder with the dough clump – I just loved the marble effect so much, and 0.5 g would have been a lot too much colour anyway.
4. You can tell from the section photos that I wasn't quite comfortable with kneading (particularly) the bulk oils barely enough to get the majority of them incorporated. The whitish specks are unworked pieces of dough. It indeed didn't end well with the skin on my palms, but it would have been even worse if I would have ignored my pain and kneaded them even more thoroughly.
5. One day after forming, I cut each into half, and popped them into the oven for an emergency CPOP/late forced gel.
6. One week of drying later, things have settled a bit, and the soaps have entered their boring cure phase. Time to wrap up! I've put the ungelled and force-gelled pieces side by side, to judge the difference the emergency CPOP made.

(O) Pumpkin seed oil	(O) Yerba mate infused babaçu	(O) Yerba mate infused HL sunflower	(S) Yerba mate powder (Brazil style)	(S) Yerba mate powder (Argentina style)
(O) Sunflower purée 21%ppo	(S) Cocoa powder	(S) none (pure canola control)	(O) Biodiesel	(S) Butterfly pea powder
(S) Indigotin E132 (trace amount)	(O) Canola lecithin		(S) Caramel food colouring E150c	(S) Manganese blue pigment artist grade, toxic heavy metals!

Obviously, ma priority was to explore natural shades of green, blue, and brown, even though I didn't categorise each of the outcomes in the right category from the beginning .

I can go on chatting about most of these for hours, but I'll focus on a few, IMHO, most interesting observations. Feel free to ask me if you want to learn more about the many things I will leave out in the following!

• Chlorogenic colouration. Chlorogenic acid is, among few other plants, contained in yerba mate and sunflower seeds. I caught the most dramatic effect with the latter, but the others were by no means less impressive (I just had dirty fingers and couldn't photograph them). Upon kneading the sunflower purée into the dough, it turned bright yellow. BRIGHT yellow, as if I had put considerable amounts of annatto in there. Within a minute or so, however, it turned darker and dirty, and lost much of its brilliance. Further tanning, it turned beige-brown, with something obviously going on by means of air contact (see the outer zone on the freshly cut surface). Gelling considerably deepened the colour to a dark maroon. Essentially the same happened to the powdered yerba mate samples. They first turned lime-grass green, but became darker and darker within minutes. Expectedly, the Brazilian variety (unaged, light green powder) kept its greenish hue a bit better than the aged (Argentina-style) powder that is more olive-coloured by itself. The yerba mate infused oils, however, behaved vastly different. Chlorogenic acid is water/lye soluble but insoluble in oils, so when infusing oils, yerba mate is “just another” of many green plants, with chlorophyll extracted and all its downsides (fading, colour intensity).
• I'm hugely impressed what happened to the cocoa powder. It really darkened too from the outside. Gelling made the tone darker, more uniform, and a bit glassy. But, unlike CP, the powder retained its brownish, chocolatey hue and didn't turn into a “cold” black.
• Not sure yet what to think about butterfly pea. The blossom powder that dissolves into water to give a bright blue/greenish/purple (pH sensitive) solution. It didn't quickly fade like red cabbage etc. do. Initially an agreeable teal/turquoise hue, the brilliance is about to get lost right now. Definitely one of the most interesting to watch over weeks/months.
• To address my initial point: Yes, soap dough is a way to add late superfat and lye-sensitive ingredients to CP soap, with full freedom over gelling or not. But, expectedly, the fine-print reveals limitations of this process. As evident as it sounds, not touching lye heavy soap is A Good Idea™. Thorough mixing of soap dough is a tedious task for 20 g sized sample soaps already, and I expect it to scale very badly (muscles needed, or better, an extruder and muscles). Even when not lye-heavy (a situation I strictly haven't tested here), soap is a harshly alkaline medium, with all its consequences for sensitive supplements.

Edit: the forum software had crazed out from my table formatting

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Update time, 7 weeks after making

These beautiful walnuts brains soaps sound and feel like mostly cured, with an agreeable hardness. Most haven't changed colour much since making. One (unpleasant) exception is the butterfly pea soap, that eventually turned from fir green into a pale, dirty olive. The ones coloured with powdered yerba mate have faded a bit, while the ones with infused oil kept their colour reasonably well.

 

[earlene]

Update time, 7 weeks after making
View attachment 58576
These beautiful walnuts brains soaps sound and feel like mostly cured, with an agreeable hardness. Most haven't changed colour much since making. One (unpleasant) exception is the butterfly pea soap, that eventually turned from fir green into a pale, dirty olive. The ones coloured with powdered yerba mate have faded a bit, while the ones with infused oil kept their colour reasonably well.

Okay, I'll bite. How does cured soap sound?

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Umm. Hard, bright, some recoil. Like a log of dry wood sounds different from a freshly cut one when dropping onto a hard surface, or a piece of (mineral) clay that isn't sticky-soft any more, and has dried up for the kiln. Difficult to put into words, actually a good opportunity for a video/audio record.

 

[earlene]

Umm. Hard, bright, some recoil. Like a log of dry wood sounds different from a freshly cut one when dropping onto a hard surface, or a piece of (mineral) clay that isn't sticky-soft any more, and has dried up for the kiln. Difficult to put into words, actually a good opportunity for a video/audio record.

So basically, you're talking about a tonal difference somewhat like tapping on a wall trying to find the stud when hanging a shelf on the wall.

I'll have to ask my husband to see if he can hear a difference. My hearing is impaired, so I doubt I would notice the what I assume is a subtle difference in tone. Perhaps if you do an audio recording, you can look at the decibals, soundwaves or whatever and see if it shows graphically in that way.

Well, here is a video that demonstrates the difference of how seasoned firewood versus green wood sounds. I can hear that. I don't know if I want to knock two bars of soap together, though. I'd probably hurt myself, although not as badly as I would if I started knocking firewood together like that guy.



Alright, maybe I'll test out tamping on some soaps later and see if I really do hear a different tone. Folks are going to start thinking I'm wacko if the see me doing this.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Oh, I didn't know that was a honest question

That's how the knock-wood-logs sound from your video clip looks like, displayed as a spectrogram (time left to right, pitch to the top, volume colour-coded):


I'd expect soap to come out similarly, though not quite as pronounced. Well, there's a way to find out

(The worst thing that might happen is that someone builds a xylophone out of soap bars )

 

[earlene]

Facetious though the question may appear, I really was curious, as I have no recollection of anyone ever mentioning a sound method for identifying cured soap.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Dropped from ca. 20 cm height onto the chopping board lying on a soft towel. I tried to hit with the rounded edge of the half-cylinder shapes, since it gives the most distinctive acoustic impression.
For obvious reasons, it's not the same soap dough recipe, but the effect observed here is close enough to my memories.

Apologies for the lazy screenshot spectrograms without time key, but I think the percussive nature of the impact somewhat speaks for itself.

The longer a soap is cured, the stronger are high frequencies present in the spectrum, and the longer it takes until the vibrations damp down. Dull plastic deformation with the fresh soap, but you can literally see in the spectrum how often the cured soap bounced back after the first hit.

 

[Tara_H]

a sound method

Pun intended?

 

[ScentimentallyYours]

CP puts a lot of strain on ingredients (this is intentional to break up the oil molecules, but not so much for whatever might be sensitive to concentrated lye). One popular way to circumvent this is HP, and add the more sensitive ingredients only after saponification is (mostly) done.

However, the heat involved in cooking the batter is not the important part in this, but the opportunity to tune composition after the major part of the saponification reaction. HP is just a conveniently quick way to achieve this.

Leaving out the cooking step, however, leaves us with soap dough, i. e. fully saponified soap that has been kept from curing by storing it air locked. Now, wouldn't be this a good time to eventually add lye-sensitive things? Knead in FOs/EOs, colourants, specialty superfats, etc. in a way how you would incorporate something into a bread or biscuit dough.
The obvious drawback is that “liquid” designs (swirls, mica lines, scrape-off layering etc., but also precise mould casting) are impossible – but IMHO this is at least balanced by the plethora of fun things to do with soap dough!

After adjusting the final composition, one can still decide to force gel/CPOP the soap, or not. One could even masterbatch complete soaps in huge quantities (universal, neutral soap dough) for weeks in advance, without compromising flexibility in fragrance/colour/additives or shape, and without the hassle that comes with conventional (hot) rebatch.

Has someone heard of such a “HP late superfat, just without heat” method, or done it already?

(Unless someone comes up with reasons why this is a terrible idea, I will try it for sure – once I'm through with my challenge submission.)

Great experiment idea! Isn’t this post saponification flexibility the advantage French milled soaps have over CP & HP?

I have polymer clay tools. I can see how some artists have incorporated PC techniques into soap embeds. Soap clay is safer than CP, so my daughter with autism could enjoy a soaping activity with me. Can I experiment, too. I have a pasta roller still in the box and had already vowed to try using it to incorporate mica and other mix ins with the soap dough. It could also roll a thin sheet for shaping or cutters. I have a leaf fondant cutter with a built in embossing stamp. It would be so nice to have customizable soap dough available when inspiration strikes.

Help!!! I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole!!! (Again)

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Isn’t this post saponification flexibility the advantage French milled soaps have over CP & HP?

I have polymer clay tools.

Yes. In principle, post-saponification tuning composition is possible for HP too, but you'll have to have all the different batters finished & liquid at the same time.
But in the end, if it is about the soap composition itself (oils, additives etc.), this is strictly experimental: to try out new things and to seek for the ideal base recipe with the things at hand. Once that's settled, there is no reason to fool around with lye-heavy dough any more.
BUT soap is indeed about optics as well. It's totally possible to split the soap clay process into a make-a-neutral-base (dangerous lye stuff) and tune it to the current needs later on (safe, just messy).
In fact polymer clay tools (extruders etc.) would have been valuable for me too, to homogenise the clay prior to actual use. Feel free to be smarter than me

 

[ScentimentallyYours]

Yes. In principle, post-saponification tuning composition is possible for HP too, but you'll have to have all the different batters finished & liquid at the same time.
But in the end, if it is about the soap composition itself (oils, additives etc.), this is strictly experimental: to try out new things and to seek for the ideal base recipe with the things at hand. Once that's settled, there is no reason to fool around with lye-heavy dough any more.
BUT soap is indeed about optics as well. It's totally possible to split the soap clay process into a make-a-neutral-base (dangerous lye stuff) and tune it to the current needs later on (safe, just messy).
In fact polymer clay tools (extruders etc.) would have been valuable for me too, to homogenise the clay prior to actual use. Feel free to be smarter than me

Polymer clay is conditioned by rolling it through the pasta rollers, so it doesn’t require much hand strength. My special needs adultwere able to condition clay and enjoyed seeing how it changed in the pasta rollers as it was conditioned. PC artists invest in motorized pasta rollers, so they can condition plenty of clay with minimal effort.

I hope to have soap though made and ready to use by the end of the week. It will be interesting to see if I can blend colors (ombré) with the rollers.

No possibility of me EVER feeling smarter than you.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Fair enough, I have just NO idea about polymer clays. Though I have some experience with pasta dough (Ampia disciple by coincidence), and I know that you better shouldn't underestimate it (or, amongst friends, make up some gamification fuss, to out-source the hard parts of the work ).

I'm half envious about whenever I see people playing around/working hard with extruders and stuff, but only half (the other half in me is mindful of Socrates' “What a lot of things I don't need!”).

 

[ScentimentallyYours]

(the other half in me is mindful of Socrates' “What a lot of things I don't need!”).

Your house must not have the disorganized, overwhelming ocean of crafticlutter as mine!