Question About Room Temp Cp Soapmaking!

[JMCintosh]

I made a batch of soap last night (at 3 AM) Best time no kids no hubby and no dog to interupt. Anywho.... I have been researching for a year now and this is my 5 batch of CP soap. The others were a simple recipe of goatsmilk. This one I made on the soap calc and thought it sounded good. Now I am not so sure. And it looked pretty in the box too, all swirled. But it didn't harden and oils seem to be seeping out all over the top. Did I do it wrong or add too much water?

I was afraid to discount any water so I didnt. It was a 8 lb batch. Beginning to think that was my first mistake. superfat/ discount was 5%.

oils were:

sweet almond oil-5%

coconut oil-25%

shortning (I used crisco)-20%

grapeseed oil 5%

olive oil 15%

pko 10%

safflower 5%

sunflower 5%

cocoa butter 5%

lye -18.47 ounces and for my water 23.14 ounces I combined water, goats milk 12 ounces of caned , coconut milk 13.5 ounces. On soap calc. after running it through came to

hardness 39

cleansing 23

condition 55

bubbly lath. 23

creamy lath. 17

iodine 70

INS 146

I made my lye up the night before with just the water portion also added silk.

Then turned my hard oils on warm. Just until it started to melt and shut it off since I have an electric stove it would stay hot. When they were all melted I added my other oils and let them cool about an hour. They were kinda cloudy. I added lye water and wisked, then SB for a bit then wisked somemore. Then when it looked like light trace I added the milks, oatmeal ground up and a couple of tablespoons warm honey. And wisked some more. Then scooped some out for mica coloring silver and then the trace looked right so I poured and wraped and left til today. I know it hasn't been 24 hours but I had to peek and didn't like what I saw. it was wet looking on top and mushy. didn't look like it hardened. Can it be salvaged (fingers are crossed (begging to the sky)plz plz plz. ok I'll stop begging now. it is driving me crazy this is the 3 batch messed up and I don't know what I am doing wrong. OH and it has been 19 and half hours since i made it.

[CareBear]

well two things come to mind -

- one is that it may have over heated - did it get hot and gel? If it was overheating just leave it for as long as you can bear to and the oils may absorb back in. both honey and milk can contribute to overheating.

- the other is that when you poured before you reached true trace. this is a risk of working with cool lye and oils and why many recommend new soapers use WARM ingredients (say 100 F). If you didn't reach trace then it will likely never really turn to soap and your best bet is to very carefully dump the whole thing (wearing gloves!!) into a crock pot or something similar and make it HP instead of CP.

[topofmurrayhill]

Your recipe adds up to only 95%. I think the typo is with the safflower oil, because I got your exact numbers when I changed it to 10%.

I think the simple explanation is that this is a recipe for mushy soap. Using SoapCalc's data, the linoleic acid is 28% and that's pretty high. It comes from all the grapeseed, safflower and sunflower oil plus the soft oil in the Crisco blend.

A recipe like this would be slow to trace and slow to saponify. It would produce a soft bar prone to sweat and eventually get DOS. To make a balanced bar you want to go easy on those linoleic oils. More almond and olive would have helped, plus consider using something like palm instead of Crisco.

You only need to follow Carebear's rebatch advice if the batch has actually separated, but I'm not convinced that's actually the case. I doubt you'd get a false trace with this recipe. There may not be anything you can do except keep it warm and covered for a few days and hope it firms up enough to get it out of the mold without too much drama.

[CareBear]

I don't know if I agree with Top - based on experience not necessarily on numbers. BUT with the large amount of soft oils AND the use of high-fat milks it could very well be that it's just gonna be very soft. Give it more time before doing anything, and like Top said, rebatch is ONLY if it's truly separated - if you see 1/2" of oils floating on top that would be a good clue! (ask me how I know!!).

[JMCintosh]

OOPS! I typed it wrong it was safflower 10% so still adds to 100! But if I leave it another day and still same result, can I salvage it, use it to add to another batch or would I have to pitch it? It didn't overheat the pan was cold the entire time. I that in mind about the honey heating up the lye. So I kept it cool. The whole top layer is oil. Not spounge muchy but mash potato mush. I have noticed every time i try to add color in swirls my batch messes up. I may just stick with no color. I looked at it again and after pulling off the freezer paper I had on top to eleminate ash I had oils dripping from it between 1/4" and 1/2" inch laying on top. It truely looks like the soft oils seperated. The mold I used was a cardboard box and it is cold. Could this be the reason? Do I need to pop it in the oven for a bit then wrap up again? Or would that make it worce?

[topofmurrayhill]

It may be you have two problems. With that much liquid on top it sounds like it may have indeed separated.

However you should also rethink that recipe. As far as I've gone with linoleic oils, the additional time the soaps took to trace and firm up was pretty dramatic. That was with less unsaturated oils than your batch, plus keeping the molds warm the entire time. The soaps came out in the long run, but I got a few spots of DOS on soap balls I made from them -- the only time I've seen that in person. Considering your recipe is more extreme, it's probably safe to say it's a little out of whack and needs to be hardened up.

Those super soft oils aren't going to do anything for you in such quantity. This is one of the ways SoapCalc leads you into la-la land with that conditioning number. More significant is that you have 35% lauric oils (CO and PKO) in that recipe, which can be OK but probably not exceptionally mild.