Soapmaking part 2 - scenting and forming

Now that the giant slabs of soap have solidified and mellowed some, it's time to scent it and form it into bars. We're going to grate it with a cheese grater, mix in scent and use a home-made soap press to make bars out of it. These look like they're carved out of stone.
Why not just add scent when you're first mixing it? Because scented oil is expensive and is not the best soap making oil. Chemically, soap is a salt formed from fatty acids and a strong base (lye) bound up together. Essential oil is volatile - meaning it floats around in the air until it hits your nose and you can smell it. If you bind up the essential oil as soap, it's not floating in the air and you don't smell it as much. You wasted your money. We are waiting until the soap is already formed and all the lye is tied up before we add the oil so it sits on top where you can smell it.


The soap press is basically some 2x4s hinged together. The two parallel boards have 3-inch diameter plastic disks (made from a polyethylene cutting board) screwed to them to act as pistons that will push from opposite directions into a piece of 3-inch diameter PVC pipe (the Compression Cylinder) to form a 3-inch diameter puck out of a ball of grated soft soap. I also have cut two thin 3-inch teflon inserts (you can use milk carton plastic for this if you want) to keep the soap from sticking to the pistons. When you remove the soap puck, just peel off the plastic inserts for re-use.

When you construct the press, make the dimensions so that when the pistons are fully pressed all the way into the disk, the faces of the pistons will be parallel to each other, about an inch apart. It takes about 125 grams of grated soap to form a 1-inch thick soap puck.



For this batch I am going to color the soap with powdered sandalwood and add Himalayan cedar oil and Chinese cedar oil for scent - this is guy soap. The process is pretty simple. Just grate the soap first, being careful not to mush it together. Sprinkle on the sandalwood, dribble on your oil and toss lightly. It will take on the texture of buttered noodles. With parmesan.


At this point it is helpful to engage the services of one's 13-year old niece, who is SO not a brat, to help with the totally awesome part where you form the soap into balls in order to grate them a second time. I do this because if you shred it only once and form it the first time, it comes out looking like hamburger. If you grate it twice it has more of a granite texture, which is what I am trying for. Have your niece play with it and mush it and stuff until it's the way you like it.



Then weigh out 125-gram balls of it. Rub the inside of the PVC pipe and the plastic inserts with emollient oil to keep it from sticking. Put the PVC pipe over the bottom piston, drop in a plastic insert - oiled side up, drop in a ball of soap, put the other insert on top - oiled side toward the soap, and push the top piston down into it by putting your weight on the top board for a few seconds.

Open it up, take off the tube and push out the soap. Peel off the inserts. The forming and pressing process takes about a minute or two per bar once you get the system going.

Da-daaa.

I press a Chinese seal into it as kind of a signature while the soap is still oily and soft. You can get a stone (soapstone, actually) seal with a kind of Chinese phonetic transcription of your name hand-made by stone carvers in Hong Kong by going to fun alliance.

Use a potato peeler to champfer the edges of the soap bars.


Let the bars dry for a month or two at least. They are oily when you first make them but after a few days that oil will just become part of the superfatting of the soap and they will dry up.




I wrap them in wrapping tissue so they can keep drying out some more while waiting to be given away. I put the list of ingredients on the label in case somebody's allergic or vegan or something.