The Best Cold Process Soap Recipe (extra moisture and lots of lather)

Hi, I'm Katie from the Blackhearts Content Farmhouse, and today I want to share my very favorite recipe for making cold processed soap at home. So this is a great all-purpose recipe. I keep it in the shower, we use it as a hand soap sometimes, my kids use it, I even use it on my toddler, so it is safe for kids. It's not tear-free, so it's going to sting if it gets in their eyes, but it's perfectly safe for their skin. It does require a lot of different oils, so if you are a brand new soap maker and you don't want to invest in a lot of oils, I do have some other videos you can check out about soap making with fewer ingredients, but the process is exactly the same as it is for those other videos. It's no harder to make the soap, it's just a question of whether you want to get different oils. Now, one important thing to know about soap making is that the oils in the soap bring different properties to the finished product, and what I was looking for when I created this recipe was something that was going to be a super high lathering soap. I wanted to duplicate what you find in a commercial body wash, so it is a little bit of a softer bar at first, it's going to harden up really well over time, so it does need a little bit of a longer cure time than some, but you are going to get awesome lather, and that is what I focused on, that is what I got. So if you're not familiar with the basics of soap making, I'm going to link in the description some great safety articles that you can look at. Basically, you just want to make sure that you are wearing eye protection, because if you get lye water in your eye, it can blind you. Also, you need to make really sure that when your lye water is cooling, it is not accessible to children, because if they drink it or knock it over, it's going to cause serious problems. So make sure you do this in a quiet place, free of distractions, without a bunch of kids running around. It's not a hard hobby, not at all, don't get me wrong, it's just that if it's unattended, it can be dangerous. It's one of the very few things where you really do need to be distraction-free. We are going to start by combining our lye and our water and setting that aside to cool. We're going to use 5.83 ounces of lye. Water is the one thing in a soap recipe that is somewhat flexible. We went between 10 and 15 ounces. In this particular video, I used 12 ounces, but again, it can be anywhere between 10 and 15. So mix that up, make sure your lye dissolves, and then set that aside to cool again in a safe place out of the reach of pets or children. While that is cooling, you start melting and heating your oils, and then they are going to be time to cool. So, like I said, there's a lot of oils in this recipe. We're doing 11 ounces of coconut oil, 9 ounces of olive oil, 9 ounces of palm oil, 2 ounces of sweet almond oil, 4 ounces of castor oil, that is the sort of secret ingredient to get a lot of lather in your soap, is to go pretty high on your castor oil. I'm really pushing the limits here. Four ounces is 10% of this recipe, which is very high. So 4 ounces of castor oil, 4 ounces of avocado oil, 2 ounces of mango butter, which is going to help with the hardness, and go ahead and measure those out. Technically, you should do this individually. I do not. I just do it in my pot, zero it out in between each addition, and go slowly. So you can heat this up right on your stovetop. Make sure everything is melted. Check your temperature. You want it to be up at around 130. Take that off the heat. Both of your ingredients, your lye water and your oils, now need to cool. You don't need to go crazy about checking the temperature of this. You can come back in about an hour if they're around 110, 120, 120 is a little bit hot. I'd say around 100, 110 degrees, that's good. You want them to be relatively close to one another for the best results. Close in temperature, I mean. Before we combine, we need to prepare everything. Have your mold ready. I am using a 10-inch silicone mold, and this recipe will fill it up to the very top, and then some. I'm going to get a really oversized bar. If you're using a longer, more traditional wooden mold, it's going to fit just to the top. If you're using a silicone mold like I am, and you don't like this oversized bar look, I'll put in the description a resized batch that will fit that mold a little bit better. You can also always go use a soap calculator and resize it, but that's a little bit complicated. I'll do the calculations myself and put it in the description, or you can just have, if you have a spare mold, like a bar mold or something like that, it'll make one extra bar. You can just pour it in that and use the extra if you don't want to use the different numbers. We also want to have our fragrance ready to go. If we're going to use color, we want all of that ready to go before we start bonding because it's going to set up, and then the clock starts ticking. Now here, I'm going to add sodium lactate. That helps to harden the bar. It is by no means necessary, but it's very inexpensive, so if you like a harder bar that's easier to get out of the mold, go ahead and add it. You add that to your cool, light water at a rate of one teaspoon per pound of oils. It's a flexible thing. It's an optional ingredient, so you can go a little bit lower. Higher would probably make too hard of a bar, but since I'm using 40 ounces of oils, I'm going to say, okay, three pounds of oils, three teaspoons of sodium lactate. Again, flexible and optional. We pour the oils, I'm going to go ahead and pour the lye water into the pot with the oils and blend it right in there. You really need a stick blender when you use soap. Doing it by hand just does not work well. This recipe comes to trace very quickly, especially when you add the sodium lactate because that helps everything to harden. If you're not familiar with soap making, coming to trace means that your ingredients start to form a batter that is a little bit thick, almost like a pudding. The word trace comes from when you lift up your stick blender, your soap batter will leave a mark that sits on top of the rest of it instead of just sitting in, sinking in. Does that make sense? If you were eating chicken broth and you took a spoonful of chicken broth and dumped it back into your bowl, it would just blend right in because it's pure liquid. If you were eating pudding, took a bite of pudding and then dumped it back into the bowl, there would be a mark where that sits on top of your bowl of pudding. When that consistency has been reached, that's called achieving trace. That means that your ingredients are adequately blended and you can go ahead and pour them into your mold. So, once you've achieved trace, even a light trace, go ahead and add your fragrance at that time. And once you've added your fragrance, I would recommend just stirring by hand because the stick blender is going to make... The fragrance makes things move faster and the stick blender is just going to accelerate that. So once the fragrance is in, stir by hand and then pour and do so quickly because it will start to harden right in the pot and you don't want that. So we pour it in, we go ahead and cover it up and let it cure. You can put this in the oven for a gel phase. That's totally optional. All it does is sort of accentuates the colors in your soap and makes sure that the soaping reaction becomes complete and then it is basically ready to use faster. So, I went ahead and put mine in the oven and I'll show you what it looks like during a partial gel. You should never really take it out of the oven to show anyone this, but I wanted to show you what it looks like while it's starting to gel. That happens completely to the whole bar and then it goes back to its normal appearance once gel phase is over. So once that happens, you still need to keep giving it more time. It needs to harden. It's going to take about 24 hours and then you pop it out of your mold, slice it into bars, and it's not ready to use yet. It needs to cure about four weeks. That's really, it's not like it would be unsafe to use, it's just that the bar needs time to dry out further and harden even more. So after that, it's ready to use. It is a super high lathering soap, people. This is really great for people with dry skin, like I said, for kids, a great gentle recipe to use every day. It's my favorite one and the one that I make all the time. So I hope you like the recipe too. If you have any questions about this particular one or about soap making in general, please leave me a comment and I will do my best to help you out. I do love making soap and it is a great productive hobby that I think everyone should give a try. Okay, thank you for watching and have a good day. Bye.