Adam Engelhart

Soap: peanut, grapeseed, flax, and a Problem

September 7th, 2006

First: thanks for the link, MOTD! I hope your readers enjoy the soapy adventures.

Anyway. Now for peanut oil! George Washington Carver and all that.

This peanut oil has vitamin E added to it. No idea how that’s going to change things; I seem to recall something about it acting as a preservative or perhaps accelerating curing. Recipe:

100 g peanut oil
38 g water
13.6 g lye.

By the way, the 0.38 factor I’m using for the water comes from this page on the Walton Feed soapmaking site. People who are more interested in the chemistry of soap should look at this page on that site by James Hershberger, a soapmaker and chemical engineer. Anyway, speaking of that 0.38 factor . . .

I have now twice hit 38 grams on the first try when pouring a glug of water out of my pitcher. This is a little weird.

The soap had a weird sort of greenish cast to it. It was taking forever to firm up . . .

Oh, no! Some kind of weird black goop was seeping out the bottom of the pitcher!

I poured the soap into the tray, hoping it was still good, or at least that I might be able to salvage it later.

It was time for a thorough cleaning of the blender. This is actually the most time-consuming part of the experiment.

I’m not sure what the goop was from. I’m leaning towards soap that somehow leaked out of the blade assembly.

I wanted to get at least one more soap in before I went to bed. I understand that soaps made with grapeseed oil set up faster. A 100% grapeseed oil soap . . . well, we will see.

100 g grapeseed oil
38 g water
12.65 g lye

The grapeseed oil had an aroma between nutty and musty. I’d just bought it a couple days ago, though, so it couldn’t have gone rancid.

The soap did thicken fairly soon for a soap made with such a light oil. It was an encouraging thing to see.

Here it is, at the lower right of the tray. On the left is the lard soap, and then the canola soap, and then the peanut soap:

Substantially less encouraging, though, was more of that black goo:

Most soapmakers who use blenders don’t use the pitcher-based variety I have. They use what they call a "stick blender," which is basically my blender turned upside-down. In retrospect, this makes more sense: you can use the blender in whatever sort of vessel pleases you, and needn’t worry whatever you’re blending befouling the bearings and stuff. "Blinkin’ barnacles! Th’ bloody bearings ‘re befouled wi’ blended beetles!"

I thought I saw a lump of something make its way into the grapeseed soap as I was pouring it into the mold. As I was disassembled the blender pitcher, I saw the source of the lump, and probably, of the goo:

Well, shoot. Maybe I’ll try to do something about that tomorrow. For now, I’d try something different–shaking my soap in a Nalgene bottle. This has something of a modern-hippie aspect to it, but hey, I have something of a modern-hippie aspect myself on good days. And I had a modern-hippie-style oil: flax!

100 g flax oil
38 g water
13.57 g lye

I went a couple grams long on the flax oil, because it said it had a few extra ingredients in it. Also, if you look at one of the larger versions of the picture on Flickr, you can see that they explicitly name-check a bunch of fatty acids: stearic, lauric, palmitic, alpha-linolenic (an omega-3 fatty acid), and linoleic (omega-6), as well as the class of omega-9 fatty acids. You might recognize these roots in the names of some of the salts mentioned on MotD.

Here’s a video of me shaking the Nalgene bottle:

Yes, fully handmade. I even used a bottle from Powells Books.

I had a little extra soap, so I poured it into another ice-cube tray after filling up the old one. It was very, very thin, possibly even worse than the peanut.

I believe the idea behind putting bits of flaxseed in the oil was to implement something analogous to "flavor crystals" by introducing an anisotropy into a usually very isotropic product. Some people like their soap slightly anisotropic (bits of herbs and the like floating around in there–the "Additive Type" mentioned in this page on the types of soapers), but as I understand, you usually add those things after the soap has gotten a bit thicker, and you never end up with them sitting around in the jar after you’ve shaken the soap. Then again, if you’re blending your soap by shaking a Nalgene bottle, you’re not exactly an exemplar of the state of the soapmaking art, no matter how cool your blog is:

The next day, the grapeseed soap had developed beads of some sort of clear fluid, which I wasn’t expecting. None of the other soaps did this, and I have no explanation. If you do, I’d be interested:

Katie was in town from Sacramento, so I went to Café du Soleil with her. Afterwards, we went to 826 Valencia and a nifty bookstore in the Mission.

When I returned, I took a closer look at the blade assembly, and hatched a plan for fixing it. More on that soon . . .

Prior: Lard and canola oil.

Next: blender repair, a new stopgap measure, butter, ghee, and more!

Entry Filed under: Soap