Soft soap, how to rebatch.

[jettibo]

OK, I searched and couldn't get much help on this, I got tired of reading after several pages of threads.

Anyways, 3 weeks ago I made some Peppermint soap. It has 12 oz each of coconut and olive oil and 8 oz each of Wheat Germ and Castor oil and I got the lye and water amount from plugging this into soap calc. I mixed everything as normal and in the middle of blending my stick blender crapped out on me and I had to complete by hand. I got to a light trace and poured the peppermint EO in and continued stirring by hand for what felt to be an eternity. I finally got it to a decent looking trace and put it in the mold. Well, fast forward to today (3 weeks later) and I STILL can't unmold the soap because it's too soft. If I press hard enough with my finger I can leave a fingerprint. It gelled nicely, but just isn't hardening. I REALLY need this soap for Christmas gifts so I need help on fixing this fast!!! I have friends who also need this batch for Christmas as well.

What can I do and how do I rebatch this?

 

[mandolyn]

Here are several different methods:

http://www.soapnuts.com/indexrebatch.html

 

[jettibo]

Will it fix the soft soap? Most of those methods call for liquid to "soften" the soap, so do I leave that out? My problem is that I don't know what additional things need to be done to make a soft soap batch harder. Do I need to take out extra water? Add something? Or will rebatching just fix it all on it's own?

 

[mandolyn]

When I plug your numbers into soapcalc, your soap is below the recommended range for hardness. Yours is 32 & 36-50 is the range recommended.

Your INS value is on the low side which would contribute to a softer soap as well. You might tweek that recipe by decreasing the wheatgerm oil & adding some palm oil.

Based, on that, this may never be a hard bar even after re-batching. That's just my best guess, though.

I'm hoping someone with re-batch experience will jump into this thread.

 

[jettibo]

It should harden some though. It's the consistency of cool (but not completely chilled) butter and when I tried to take it out of the mold large portions stayed on the mold. I guess I'll just try, if it doesn't work then there won't be peppermint for Christmas and I'll have to move on to the rest of the soaps I need to make.

 

[JANMAG]

soft soap

I'm sorta new at the super-technical end of the soap world, but have made about 10 batches, and they all came out great except the last one was soft, like you said an imprint was left but it wouldn't budge without cracking. So on the 3rd day I just scooped the soap out of the molds and made balls, they were really popular in the 70's. Then maybe just find cute baskets & adorn with pine cones and Christmassy stuff. Good luck.

 

[cdwinsby]

I've made shampoo bars in the past with 20% castor oil, 25% coconut oil, 25% olive oil, 25% palm oil, and 5% wheat germ oil. I lined my mold so removal was easy but they did need to cure for 8 weeks due to the high percetage of castor oil which really makes for a softer bar.

Even after cure this bar was softer than any of my standard bars and remained that way. This was ok since it was for shampoo and I was willing to have the softness to get the proper cleansing action.

Yours may or may not get hard enough due to the combined amounts of castor and wheat germ. A 40% total is pretty high for those. If it gets hard enough to handle, cut them and hopefully they will harden up faster.

If not you can always fall back on making it in to laundry soap. All of my trimmings and flubs get recycled now.