What makes lard trace slow?

[Ladka]

Szaza, you're such an incredible story teller! Your post had me laughing loud.

 

[szaza]

Szaza, you're such an incredible story teller! Your post had me laughing loud.

Well I'm glad at least somebody got to laugh thanks to my misery

 

[dibbles]

I had to laugh a little too - sorry. The joys of soaping!

 

[szaza]

No need to apologize! The idea that I made people laugh is actually making my day a lot better

 

[Ladka]

Well I'm glad at least somebody got to laugh thanks to my misery

It was not your misery that made me laugh, it was your incredibly ironic presentation of it! But you already know that, don't you.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I call it "Murphy's Law" when anything that could go wrong, does go wrong. You seem to have had just that kind of day. Perhaps it's time for a cocktail?!

 

[earlene]

Again a long hyatus in this thread..

I looked into INS and it's a general indicator of which FA's are present in a recipe (it's kind of a one number overview). It would be a good indicator if there weren't other factors in play like with lard. Ins of lard soap is quite high because of the stearic/palmitic acids it contains, but lard traces slow. What I'm curious about is why some fats (like lard) behave differently than you'd expect based on their FA profile (or INS for that matter).

I also found another oil that doesn't behave the way it should based on FA composition. I recently experienced rice bran oil (RBO) to be a serious accelerator compared to butters.

Compare these 3 recipes:
View attachment 45578
View attachment 45579
View attachment 45580
All three have reasonably similar FA profiles, though the first traced considerably faster than the other 2, even with less butter (to give an indication of the difference in trace, I was only hand whisking recipe 1 and it moved so quickly I wasn't able to do the design I wanted, while I did the exact same design with the 3rd recipe without any trouble and there I did use my stick blender when the batter cooled down to 28°C - the first recipe never got that low a temp, even though starting temps were the same. Recipe 2 was used for a different design, but behaved similarly to recipe 3, used a stick blender and stayed at emulsion/light trace long enough to play around with color and design). With all recipes I only used known well behaved essential oils. I experienced a bit of acceleration with RBO before, mainly compared to other liquid oils, but attributed it to the amount of stearic/palmitic it contains. That assumption seems to be false.

I tried to look for information on TAG structure of RBO, but didn't find it. I might need to look a bit further. What I did find was that RBO has a relatively high amount of unsaponifiables (+-4%, but differs a bit between sources). I thought rosehip oil and argan oil might also have a lot of unsaponifiables, but as it turns out argan only has 1%. I haven't found a percentage for rosehip oil yet, but it might also be lower than I expected.

That brings me back to refined vs unrefined oils. I'd love to experiment with this and see how it influences trace. I already have 100g unrefined shea, some unrefined cocoa butter, extra virgin olive oil and unrefined avocado oil (and a refined counterpart for all of them). I also have a soap thermometer to control the temps of the oils/lye/batter. The only problem I run into (and why I haven't started making test batches yet) is that I have no idea how to quantify trace. I mean, there's emulsion, light, medium, thick trace, but it's a gliding scale and I have a hard time thinking of a reliable cut-off.

Another reason RBO may trace faster is the starch content. Starch gets gelatinous when water and heat are added. So in soapmaking, the lye solution is the perfect situation to promote that gelatinous nature of RBO, which I assume still has some starch content. This came to mind because ( make & drink rice congee, which can be quite gelatinous as it sits longer. In my research I found that for some reason, salt can inhibit that process. It made me wonder if adding salt to the lye solution would slow down trace in a soap with RBO.

Another thing I wanted to mention is related to a question you had on the first page of this thread about how pomace OO vs regular OO traced in comparison to lard. I think it was BattleGnome who said she does not experience any difference in how fast pomace OO comes to trace compared to regular OO. There may be someone else here on SMF who has said the same thing. That is not my experience at all.

I find that pomace OO speeds trace so much that I have to avoid using a stick blender altogether when I use pomace OO. In comparison, if I hand stir a soap with only regular olive oil, it will not come to trace for a very long time (I think about 45 minutes or longer.) Whereas pomace will take only a few minutes by hand.

How this compares to lard, I cannot say. I have never made a 100% lard soap.

 

[Claudette Carignan]

Yesterday evening I did Shea butter and everything went wrong (all of which was my own fault). Rant alert!
First, I realized I didn't have enough refined shea (93g instead of 100g), so I had to recalculate my recipe from 125g to 116.25g (which I did for both so I could compare them)
After measuring shea I measured out my coconut oil, but accidentally added the coconut oil to the same jug of shea twice. I picked out the bigger pieces that I could easily identify as coconut (whiter, more britle) until I had taken out 23.25g (ugh annoying measurements) and added that to the other jug.
Then to my surprise I somehow managed to perfectly measure out my water and citric acid in both cups, only to knock one of them over. I had to retry several times before I got it right again and my scale started acting up, not wanting to settle on a weight (when I needed to measure out 14.05g of water it would just go back and forth between 14.01 and 14.11, never to settle on an actual weight - I thoroughly regret breaking my scale in December, this new one really isn't as good as the one I used to have). In hindsight I really should have stopped here and tried again the next day..
I proceded to accidentally add a bit too much masterbatch, so I ended up with 3.8%SF and 35.12%lye conentration (instead of 4 and 35.1), but did that for both batches, so I think that should be fine.
When I started mixing oils and lye things actually went rather smoothly, though the refined shea butter traced considerably slower than I expected (similar to unrefined avocado oil).
To top everything off, this morning I suddenly started doubting whether I added 2.33 or 3.33g of citric acid when I redid the measurement after knocking over on of my cups. I just checked it off on the list and didn't write down the exact measurement (which I really should have done in hindsight). If I added 3.33, that would mean one of the batches has a 6.65% superfat instead of 3.8%. I really can't remember anymore and I have no idea which of the jugs could have ended up with more citric acid. It would be logical if the refined batch ended up with more C.A/higher superfat because it traced slower than expected, so that's what I'll assume for now.
I tried to lather one bar of both refined and urefined shea to see if there's a difference (if one bar has a higher superfat that should impact the lather), but since they're only 12hours old neither of them produce any bubbles yet. I did however manage to drop one bar in the small slit of open space behind the stove, which is hard to reach and therefore absolutely disgusting. Did I mention I did that after washing with it, so it could nicely stick to the dust? Yuck.
Obviously this all happened with the one batch that I can't redo because I don't have any shea butter left. I'll need to re-order, which will take at least a week, if not more.
Meanwhile, the room temp of my kitchen is slowly increasing, so I'm doubting whether to do cocoa butter today, or if I should just hold off on any more experiments until I have more shea butter and redo the whole thing again later. I'd like to redo the avocado as well, because I want to see if I can reproduce the weird results, redoing everything might actually be the best option. *sigh* This was so much work and I postponed (procrastinated) for so long, but now that I finally thought I could do the last batch today, I might just do the whole thing over

Sorry for the rant, here's a random picture of a chicken looking like a wise old dude with a long beard to make up for it..
View attachment 46057

At least you’ve kept your sense of humor! I live The giffy and the random chicken pic

 

[szaza]

Thanks for your input @earlene ! Your theory about residual starch in RBO is very interesting. I think salt would normally be supposed to speed trace up, so if it slows trace in RBO soap that would be a huge indication that starch plays a role. I've been debating whether or not to compare RBO to the other oils, so might just try it with and without salt

The shea soaps started to produce some bubbles, so I compared lather and didn't really notice a difference, which is a good sign but I still don't trust myself, so out of precaution I'll continue to assume refined shea butter traced slower because it has more superfat.
However, the difference between refined and unrefined Shea was big enough that I don't think all of it can be attributed to a few extra percentages of superfat. Refined shea took almost twice as long to reach light and medium trace than unrefined shea. Unrefined shea reached light trace after 15 minutes, refined took 28mins. Medium trace was reached around 23 mins for unrefined shea, but only after 43mins for refined shea.

 

[Savonette]

I feel I've been a bit all over the place in this thread so I'll try to be a bit more structured from now on. There are so many things I want to understand that I've been losing oversight. Thanks for bearing with me..
(This thread turned out to be longer than expected, so I marked the less important/easy to skip sections)

@Mobjack Bay the article you linked to is so super informative, I should really have started reading it sooner. Working on that now thanks for sharing it!

After doing some more research I found out that refined oils have less Free Fatty Acids than unrefined oils. This means FFA's could still play a role in slowing/accelerating trace considering unrefined oils seem to trace faster. I'm working on an experiment where I'm comparing trace of refined vs unrefined cocoa butter at 25% in identical recipes.
Raw/unrefined CB traced at a reasonable pace. While stick blending in several second pulses with hand stirring in between it took 6mins to go from barely noticable trace to thick trace. I'll repeat the same recipe with refined CB when I'm back home from my trip.

At the moment I have 3 main hypotheses for why lard traces so exceptionally slow.

1. Free fatty acid content could be lower in lard. I'm still looking for a way to test this. Any help/tips are welcome!
I know there are tests for FFA content of oils, because it's used as a test for oil freshness in the food industry. Unfortunately, all the tests I find are industrial (and too expensive)
I looked further and found a test that shows whether carboxylic acids are present in a substance using sodium bicarbonate (when carboxylic acids are present, carbom dioxide is formed and it starts to bubble). That just doesn't seem like a very precise approach. It doesn't reliably tell how much and what kind of carboxylic acids are present.

2. Maybe there are different FA's at play that I haven't included in my calculations. I based my lard replacement recipe on the fatty acid profiles on soapcalc, which I recently found out are not complete. Is there a good database with a complete listing of all fatty acids of different oils? Or do I just have to google each one separately?

3. There could be a catalyst in the unsaponifiable matter. I really hope this is not the case and I'm going to explore the other 2 hypotheses first, because finding which tiny fraction of the unsaponifiables is the catalyst is going to be a rather tedious job.

You’ve probably moved on from this, but I believe you can call lard a refined oil. I think it takes several renderings to get that beautiful, clean, white stuff.

 

[Savonette]

I always thought INS was a good indicator of how slow something traces. So aim for low INS number for slower trace. Achieve this by using lard, and reducing coconut oil.

What would you consider low?

 

[szaza]

I still can't tell if any of the shea soaps have a higher superfat based on bubbles, but I ordered a bunch of new shea butter, so I'll redo the whole thing. I feel like I learned a lot with the 3 'test batches' I did in May (especially about how to weigh accurately and taking better notes etc.), so I think it makes sense to retry.
I also ordered a new scale because the one I currently have is just not accurate enough (even though it displays weights in grams with 2 decimals, it's only accurate whithin in a +-0.15g range, which I think is way too much variability with these small test batches). I'll wait for the new scale to arrive (at the end of the month) and then try to motivate myself to do 1 soap a day for almost a week
If anyone has inspiration on how to make 125g batches of soap look interesting, let me know The previous ones were done in small individual cavity molds (because the batches are too small to use log molds) but I have a hard time making them look nice. I have a small 300g T&S mold which I could hypothetically us as a not so tall but still skinny mold

 

[dibbles]

If you have a round cavity mold, something like this?
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/yin-yang-soap.74086/or pour it through a sink strainer


or randomly pour colors and swirl with a chopstick

 

[szaza]

Thanks @dibbles those are all awesome options! I'm sure they'll work in my muffin mold (or maybe I'll have to give in to my addiction and buy more molds.. )

 

[Jersey Girl]

If you have a round cavity mold, something like this?
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/yin-yang-soap.74086/or pour it through a sink strainer
View attachment 46763

or randomly pour colors and swirl with a chopstick
View attachment 46764

I LOVE the swirled one!

 

[dibbles]

https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/yin-yang-soap.74086/

I LOVE the swirled one!

Thank you

 

[szaza]

Oh my, I only just now realized these were all your own soaps in the pictures @dibbes. They're stunning! I actually really love the sink strainer one.

 

[dibbles]

Oh my, I only just now realized these were all your own soaps in the pictures @dibbes. They're stunning! I actually really love the sink strainer one.

Thank you. I usually have a little batter left over, so sometimes that’s how I use it up.