What happened here?

[SudsBird]

 

[steffamarie]

Looks like overheating to me - maybe due to the milk?? Someone with more experience may be able to help more, but given the caramel color and partial gel, I think maybe it got too hot in the center and the sugars in the milk caramelized.

 

[Obsidian]

Yep, thats from overheating. It needs to be rebatched, chop it up and toss it into a crock pot along with that brown liquid. Heat on low until its melted down then mold it back up. Or toss it, its probably not going to be safe to use as is.

 

[Kamahido]

I second re-batching it. Almost all soaps can be saved.

 

[earlene]

Next time you do that recipe, maybe split it between two smaller molds to decrease the impact of this kind of overheating. Also try and soap cooler than you did this time. You could also reduce your water by changing your lye concentration to 33% in the lye calculator. All that water, all that CO and the milk all work together to heat up the middle of the soap. Less water means it won't heat up as much.

 

[SudsBird]

Thank you for your comments, another little surprise when cutting. An oil cavity in the loaf.

 

[SudsBird]

This is the smaller loaf in the above pictures after cutting.
I thought they were getting a little hot. I put this one in the fridge.

 

[cmzaha]

It is definitely overheating, and your used a lot of water resulting in a low lye concentration (26.7%). Next time use the tic box for lye concentration Under Box 3 and put in 33%. This should help you a lot with overheating. More liquid causes higher faster heating and gm causing heat. Between the water amount and gm it is a volcano waiting to happen. Sorry but you do need to rebatch to save the soap. How much oil did you lose with the ones with the smaller holes? You may be able to use them after a good cure.
I would also ditch the Stearic Acid so you do not have to keep your oils on the warm side to keep it melted.

 

[OldHippie]

Did you subtract the goat's milk from the water allotment? If not, the extra water could make it overheat. Had you used the same FO before? Is it possible that you did not emulsify it well enough and it separated?
12 oz of concentrate has the same amount of butterfat as 24 oz of milk. You did not list the milk among the other saponifiables. I know that they only list bovine milk, but it gets you close. It has about the same effect as adding an extra ounce of oil. With 41% CO that might be a good thing.

 

[amd]

I've used stearic acid at 1% in soaps recently and they always go through a complete gel without any help. I agree that the problem is overheating, probably a combination of the stearic acid and the sugars in the milk. I also noticed that your goats milk is noted as 'evaporated' which means that it is more concentrated than fresh goats milk. I only make goats milk soap once a year, and I have to use the stuff from a can (I don't have access to fresh here, no one local sells it). When I make the soap I use about 3/4 of what I really want to use and add the remaining as water. My reasoning to add more water to the evaporated milk is that when evaporated, the milk is more concentrated - there are more sugars, proteins, etc. to react during the soapmaking process.

My advice: ditch the stearic acid, it's going to heat up too much even if you put it in the fridge/freezer and you're going to burn your soap. Check how much water you're using with your recipe - as Old Hippie asked, did you replace 12 oz of water with the goats milk or add in addition to the water? Your water to lye ratio is 2.73:1, which might be ok if you are replacing part of the water with milk. I usually soap at 3:1 water to lye ratio for swirling and coloring techniques. For a plain soap such as this I would go down to a 2:1 ratio, or even 1.5:1.