Hot, Cold or Melt and Pour?

How to make homemade soap? That's what this blog is all about.

And why, you ask, would you want to make homemade soaps?

When you make your own, you can indulge yourself with rich, creamy, wonderfully-scented soaps or you can use them as gifts to to show friends and relatives how cleaver and creative y0u are. And you'll save money, too. Plus, there's just a great feeling of accomplishment when you make something from scratch yourself.

Getting Started

First, understand making homemade soap is not that tough. In fact, if you pick the easy method (melt and pour), you can make some soaps in about an hour.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, you need to know the main ingredients or what the heck is soap made of anyway?

The answer: Fats and lye.

Lye is a common, easy-to-buy chemical but very caustic and needs to be handled with care. The fats are usually a combination of something like olive oil, lard and tallow.

When these two are combined correctly, their little molecules dance around with joy, form a huge mosh pit, and then hurray! They turn into soap (a process technically called saponification).

What You Need to Make Homemade Soap

There are three methods for making homemade soap.

• Hot method
• Cold method
• The aforementioned melt and pour

I'll deal with melt and pour later so here's what you need for both the hot or cold method:

• A recipe (more about this later)
• Sturdy rubber or heavy-duty latex gloves
• A "point and shoot" thermometer
  
• A digital electronic scale that measures down to 1/10th of an ounce.
• Goggles
• Stainless steel or enameled painted pot
• Plastic or stainless steel spoon
• A stick mixer (like that used in a glass to make milk shakes)
• Soap molds
  
• And if you choose the hot method, a professional stand mixer

The recipe

No matter which of the three methods you choose, you'll need a recipe. A recipe will give you no only the required ingredients, but the exact amount of each. Here, for example, is a recipe for Coconut & Olive soap, courtesy of Cristin Ocasio, Owner, Wyndham Soapworks.

• 8 oz weight olive oil
• 8 oz weight coconut oil
• 8 oz weight rendered tallow
• 3.49 oz weight sodium hydroxide (pure lye) Red Devil brand 100% lye (*NOTE)
• 9 fluid oz water

You can find other soap recipes at web sites that are on my link list to the right.

Hot or cold? What's the difference?

Without getting into a lot of technical jargon at this point, let's just say that the hot method requires the main ingredients to be mixed at a temperature of 110 - 115 degrees F., and the cold method calls for doing the mixing at a temp of around 90 degrees F.
The Hot Method

In this method, you first put cold water in a plastic container and slowly add a measured amount of the lye (following whichever recipe you've chosen).

Next, you liquefy the fats (some combination such as coconut oil, olive oil and lard) by heating them on your stove. Once the fats have liquefied, you remove the pot from the stove, put it in the sink and slowly drizzle in the lye solution.

In the hot method, the oil solution and the lye soltion are mixed in a double boiler or crockpot at a temperature that's between 110 to 115 degrees F. You can stir and walk away, do something, come back later, stir and walk away again. But it can take a half day to reach "trace."

After the lyes and oils reach trace, colorants and fragrances can be added, again using the stick blender.

Because the lye and fats are mixed at 110 to 115 degress F., the "gel" phase occurs here and eliminates the need to insulate the soap for 24 hours. This means it can be used almost immediately after molding.

The cold method

In brief, the way you make soap using the cold method is to measure out the required amount of lye, add the water, and stir the two together until all the lye crystals have dissolved. The required fats (some combination such as tallow, oil and cocoa butter) are weighed and added to the stainless steel pot, and then heated until liquefication occurs.

The lye mixture is then cooled so that, ultimately, both it and the fat mixture are at a temperature of 90 degrees F. When they both reach this temperature, you slowly drizzle the lye mixture into the fat mixture and stir gently.

The final step is to add colorants and fragrances and pour the soap into molds.
In this cold method, the soap reaches "trace" in 10 to 20 minutes or sooner. However, it must be incubated by being wrapped in blankets or towels for 24 hours. The soap will continue give off heat for many hours after being molded. During this time, it goes through the "gel" phase. The soap may be removed from the mold after 24 hours.

Melt and Pour

If either the hot or cold method seems a bit much, but you'd still like to make homemade soap, there's a simpler process called Melt and Pour.

To do this, you will need to buy some soap base - available at many craft shops and online - along with whatever colorants, fragrances and other additives that tickle your fancy. You will also find these at most craft shops and online.

To make the soaps, you simply melt the soap base, pour in the colorants, fragrances, etc., then stir, pour the mixture into your molds and presto!

You have soap.