I am becoming less confident with every batch of soap we make. So far, knock on wood, we haven't had any flat out catastrophes but, completely ruined batches of soap are common when you are first starting out. I guess, I'm just waiting nervously for the other shoe to fall. Then again, cooking soap isn't all that different from what I already do everyday, so that shoe may be a long time in coming.
What makes you nervous, or me anyway, is that not only do each of the fats and oils have different qualities in the finished bar, but they act differently in the crock pot. Today, we changed from using lard, coconut oil, olive oil, and castor oil as the base fats, to using palm oil in place of the lard. Everything else about the formula was the same. The soap reached what is called full trace in a couple of minutes, as opposed to spending ten or fifteen minutes with the hand blender, and the soap cooked to the gelatinization stage in under half the time. So today's lesson: olive oil, and animal fats are slow to react in hot process soaps.
A short glossary: trace occurs when you've created a stable emulsion by hand or with the stick blender, that resembles thick pudding. Gelatinization is the final cooking stage when the soap takes on a glossy and translucent quality, not unlike Vaseline.
For those that let out a little shriek when you read the word LARD; outside of the Mediterranean region, where olive oil is most common, animal fats were the original fats used for soap. The merit of them is that they are closest in composition to the oils in our own skin. We've all been told that lard makes your skin and hair greasy when you eat them, and causes breakouts, and heart decease, and social destabilization, hurricanes, tsunamis, not to mention nuclear meltdowns, but it's just not so. It has zero trans-fats, and a better balance of omega three and omega six fatty acids than many "healthy" alternatives. On the skin, it is gently conditioning (moisturizing) without clogging the pours and without leaving an unpleasant oiliness behind.
Palm oil is more common in cosmetic applications since the end of the Second World War. But really, the chief components of the detergent bars you can buy in grocery stores are derivatives, and byproducts, of the petrochemical industry. More on this later... Palm oil is generally considered safe, but recently it has been labeled unsustainable because it often comes at the cost of Orangutan habitat. You can purchase double certified sustainable and Orangutan safe palm oils - which we did - but they cost more, and are still produced on the other side of the world from where I live. Sustainability is a constant, and measured compromise between choices. How far something travels to get to you is as important, as how it is grown or sourced, and how it effects the ecosystem from which it is derived. I understand some people are uncomfortable with using any animal products what so ever, so we are planning to make soaps that are vegan friendly and others that are...not. Specifically, I would like to use grass fed beef tallow in some of our soaps. My reasons for this are to support an industry that is preferable to factory farming, and to honor the unavoidable death of the large animal, not to mention the resources it takes to bring that animal to slaughter, by using all of it! That is, after all, what we used to do as a matter of course, and compassionate animal husbandry requires nothing less. Not wasting also appeals to my Scottish heritage. Somehow we have this reputation for being cheap, I can't imagine how this came to be...
I was too busy stuffing Lasagna into my face-hole to take a picture of my dinner tonight. Nor did I remember to snap any pictures of the soap in process. I am actually very bad at remembering to do this, even when I want to write about it.
I'm working on it.
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