i, um…

WHY can’t I get the yurt clean enough for pictures?? Holy crap. Maybe I’ll just post little parts of it as I clean them. Would that work? Well, I guess it’s better than what I’ve been posting. Which is um, nothing.

ANYWAY. I did take pictures of my soaping process, and that means it’s tutorial time! Wootsies!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Lye (Sodium Hydroxide) I get mine from Texas Natural Supply
• Water without gross stuff in it (or whatever other liquid you’d like to use, just not extreme acids)
• Fat of some kind, vegetable or animal
• Scent, color, clays, botanicals, etc (More later)
• A big pot reserved just for soap
• A well-balanced recipe. I like to come up with my own using a soap calculator (25% coconut, 25% palm, 25% olive, 25% fun oils, 5% shea is my fave blend) but you’ll find a ton online if you search for them.
• Containers for measuring lye, mixing the lye slushy, and weighing oils and fun ingredients
• A super accurate digital scale
• Rubber gloves and eye protection
• Spoons. Lots of them.
• A way to melt the solid oils
• A stick blender, preferably the plug in kind
• A soap mold, I like the wooden loaf kind
• A rubber spatula
• Parchment or Wax paper
• 6 weeks of patience

Step One: Lye Slushie

It’s not as delicious as it sounds. Lye is a very caustic alkali, and when mixed with water, will cause severe (and very gross-looking) ouchies on your skin, both external and internal. So be safe kids, play outside and use protection!

Using your super accurate digital scale, measure out the correct amount of liquid according to your recipe. I’m a big fan of substituting goat’s milk for half of the water, but you can use anything from beer and wine to aloe juice and cold herbal teas. Stay away from lemon juice, though. Acid+base=boombooms.

Measure your lye separately and add it to the water. Stir with a metal spoon until completely dissolved, and do not breathe in the vapors! Bad, bad, bloody/cancerous things can happen if you do.

The slushy will get VERY hot, so don’t leave it on the hood of your car or on anything flammable. Probably best to keep kids & pets away from it, too. In the end, it will go back to looking like a bowl of plain water.

Step Two: Measure the Oils

Yes, this is the cold process method of soap making, but there’s still a teensy bit of heat involved. Some oils solidify at room temperature, like coconut, palm, babassu, and butters. Most waxes are solid at room temp too, so group those into this step as well if you’re using them.

I like to measure out all of my solids and put them into my soap pot before turning the heat on, this way they all heat evenly.

Be careful not to heat the oils too fast, or they’ll become grainy. Not sure why, but it happens. So, way low heat.

When the solids are just about melted, it’s time to remove the pot from the heat and start adding the liquid oils. This will cool down the mix a little bit, but you’ll still have to wait a while for it to cool completely. What happens if you don’t? Ugliness. Sometimes even burns and volcanoes. Just wait it out.

Step Three: Line the Mold

I HATE lining molds. It’s like wrapping presents inside out. But, because it sucks so hard, it distracts me from my cooling oils for quite some time, which I suppose is a good thing. I’ve found that using parchment paper is much easier than using wax paper when it comes to unmolding, so if you have it, use it. Otherwise, you’ll survive with the wax. The method of lining really depends on your style of mold, and of course how anal you are about the whole thing. I have molds with hinged sides, and I tend to cut a piece of lining paper large enough to cover the whole mold, clip the corners down to the seams, then tuck the length of the paper down into the hinged seams, trapping it with the sides. I know nobody has a hope of visualizing the process from that last sentence, but I figured I’d try anyway. Basically, just cover the interior with paper, ends included. You’ll figure it out!

Step Four: Add the Lye

Once the oils have cooled and the lye solution has finished heating, it’s time to combine the two. Very carefully, and very slowly, pour the lye into your pot of oils, then immediately rinse out the lye bowl. Start to blend the lye and oils with the stick blender on a low setting, being very careful not to spit any of the mix onto your hands or face. If you don’t wear Poindexter glasses like me, goggles would be an excellent idea at this point.

Depending on your recipe and the temperature of your oils and solution, you might start to notice a change in the behavior of the soap within a few minutes of mixing. The soap will thicken to a light custard consistency, revealing a lasting wake when the blender is drawn from one side of the pot to the other. This is called “trace”.

Step Five: Add the Fun Stuff

Once you’ve reached a light trace, it’s time to add your scents and things. There are way, way too many aspects of scent, color, and texture to explain them all here, so I’ll post a list of ingredient explanations separately. Some additives (mainly certain fragrance oils) are known to accelerate trace, meaning make your soap thicken way too quickly, and make pouring a major task. When you know you’re working with a trace quickener, feel free to add it before trace. It won’t hurt. For the batch pictured, I added Bulgarian lavender essential oil (3oz per 5lb) and dried hops petals at trace. Blend it quickly, because the more you blend, the thicker it gets, and the thicker it gets, the harder it is to pour.

Step Six: Pour

When you’ve got your fun stuff well blended into your soap, it’s time to pour the batch into the mold. Keep your spatula at the ready and your mold area clear, because if you’re anything like I was when I started, panic will ensue right about now. Remember to breathe, you’ll be OK. Once the soap’s in the mold, you can add stuff to the top or molest it with the spatula like I do, or you could just smooth it out if you like your bars to be perfectly rectangular and serious-looking.

Step Seven: Set & Cut

Place your batch in a cool, dry place to set overnight. It will give off heat, and it will look like crazy gelatinous things are happening in the depths of the loaf. This is normal, don’t panic. Saponification is an exothermic reaction, and the resulting heat sorta cooks the soap, causing that geled appearance. If you’d like to avoid the gel stage and a future dark spot in the center of your bars, you can put the whole thing, mold and all, into the freezer. Sometimes this works, sometimes it just intensifies the contrast. If you’d like to gel the whole thing, making the whole loaf slightly darker and less opaque, you can stick it in the oven at 170F for a few hours. I personally don’t care about the partial gel ring one way or another, so I just set mine out. In the morning, you’ll hopefully find a reasonably hard loaf of soap sitting on your counter. It should be the consistency of jack cheese, but don’t go poking at it. Unless you can feel heat coming from the sides or see a darker, softer area in the middle, carefully release it from the mold, and peel off the paper. Using a sharp, non-serrated knife, slice it into bars. I like to cut mine about 1.5″ thick, but you can do whatever you want.

Steps Eight through Thirteen: Wait

Cold process soap takes four to six weeks to cure. Eight weeks if you’ve made yours with nothing but olive oil. During this time, the oil continues to make the lye happy, and a lot of that liquid you put in there evaporates, making for a super hard bar of soap. The harder the bar, the longer it lasts in the shower. Everybody loves long lasting soap.

Congratulations on your first batch of soap, and welcome to the addiction!

Filed under: soap on August 28th, 2008