Hot Process Soaping - Instant Soap!
Author: Tammie Thomson Published on: July 15, 2000

Hot Process Soapmaking
Making soap is all fine and dandy, but then you have to wait for the stuff to cure before you can use it, and seeing and smelling the blocks of soap curing on your shelves while you wait is torture! Your hands just itch to take that lovely creation and rub it all over your body…you pick it up, run your hands over it, put your nose to it and breath in the smell…aahhhh…bliss. Then you have to put it back on the shelf until the days are crossed off your calendar.

There is another way…

Hot process soapmaking is the practice of using external heat to cook the oil/caustic mix. This increases the speed of the chemical process of saponification, and results in soap that is useable within hours rather than weeks.

Most commercially-made soaps are hot processed.

Methods

There are many methods of hot processing soap. Some involve the use of direct heat and some don't.

The first method I tried was direct heat. See http://members.tripod.com/allcrafts/inde... for an explanation of this process. Also see http://www.lis.ab.ca/walton/old/soap/soa... .

After dressing up to resemble a Chernobyl clean-up crewmember I put the oil/caustic mix into a stainless steel pot and put it on the stove. I stirred constantly so as to prevent the 'volcano thing' happening. 'The volcano thing' is where if you aren't stirring quickly or thoroughly enough the mixture rises up and suddenly spurts and splats all over the place. This is the reason for the Chernobyl suit. Boiling fat mixed with caustic is not a good thing to get on your body.

Because I was using a tallow-based mixture it all came together very quickly, and went from the 'apple-sauce' stage straight into the 'dried mashed potatoes that have been sitting in the pot outside for a day or so waiting for the dog to polish it off' stage. Hmm.

I gave up and left it in the pot overnight, chiseled it out the next day and grated it up for laundry soap. (Incidentally, tallow-based soaps are reputed to be the best for laundry purposes because of enzymes in the tallow.)

The next method I tried was the 'oven bag' method. Having read on lists of the technique of putting the mixture into and oven bag and boiling it in water, with the added bonus of simply cutting off the corner and squeezing it ala icing technique into the moulds, I went and bought some oven bags and tried it.

Nobody had thought to mention that the oven bags in the US are totally different to the ones here in Australia. Apparently the US ones are heavy, thick plastic. The Aussie ones aren't. In fact the Aussie ones are quite flimsy, thin, crackly and as I found out, they melt if you put them in boiling water for too long. Hmm.

I have to admit I was originally a bit dubious considering the build of the Aussie oven bag, but I figured an oven-bag was an oven-bag was an oven-bag.

I read of the crockpot technique of hot process soaping (see http://hometown.aol.com/pjdxxxwa/page1.h... ) but didn't have a crockpot, so gave that a miss. Since then I've heard that some people have found the glaze on their insert is affected by the caustic, so I don't think I'd use a crockpot that was used for food.

I'd also heard of the double boiler system, and had decided to try this out when my work commitments became much heavier and I was unable to make soap for some time.

Then by serendipity, Diane, a member of the Aussie Soapers mailing list ( http://www.egroups.com/group/AussieSoape... ) came up with the double boiler enclosed hot process (DBEHP) system ( http://www.ziggurat.org/soap/infobase/CS... ), which is a variation on the double boiler method.

This would have to be the easiest hot process method ever of making soap! No stirring, just get it to the boil and leave it for an hour or two, come back, test it. If it's done you add your scent and colour, mould it then come back the next day and unmould it, and if desired, use it.

No more waiting for endless weeks to use your creation!