I decided to fix the blender with epoxy resin. Epoxy is really interesting stuff, almost like a plastic analog of concrete (which is my nominee for Most Underappreciated Material, but that’s another story). This page has a nice explanation of how they work.
I mixed the resins together and glopped it onto the housing. I knew I’d have to sand it a bit so the blades could rotate again, but that wouldn’t be too difficult.
J-B Weld takes about 24 hours to set up. I didn’t feel like waiting that long, and I didn’t want to do the Shake-N-Bake thing I did last night, so I looked around my apartment for something else I could use. Cookwares came to my rescue yet again–I had a one-pint Pyrex measuring cup that was just the thing.
But first I wanted to get out of my apartment for a while to let the epoxy set, because the vapors are kinda nasty. I went to Progressive Grounds, in the Mission, and found material for a blog entry on the way.
By the time I got back, I was kinda tired, and I didn’t want to deal with making soap again. I had the next day off, and I figured I’d be able to give my new soapmaking apparatus a workout then, along with finishing up my blender repair. So, the next day, I made sesame-oil soap.
I used TJ’s Toasted Sesame Oil. It had a strong, robust, nutty smell.
The saponification factor was 0.133. Using the hand mixer was harder than the blender, but I think the soap thickened. We’ll see.
The cells in the blue ice cube trays I had moved to were much smaller than those in the white ones I was using before. That’s the sesame oil in the middle; the four rightmost ones have the tail end of the flax soap.
A friend of mine suggested that I try butter, and warned me of the foul smell of butyric acid. Butyric is one of the shorter fatty acids, having only four carbon atoms. Dylan "Just Like Bacon" Stiles has a nice little graph of how the alkanoic acids smell, of which I think Edward Tufte would mostly approve. Anyway, butyric acid is called that because it’s found in butter–it’s from the Greek βουτυ�?ος, meaning butter.
Curiously, while butyric acid itself smells vile, butyric acid esters smell pretty nice–in the case I linked to, like Juicy Fruit gum. (Such nice scents are fairly typical of esters; they’re a very large and versatile part of the artificial-flavoring artist’s arsenal.)
As long as I’m on a food-science tear, let me recommend a book: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. McGee has the heart of a gourmet, the mind of a scientist, the knowledge of a pedant, the curiosity of a toddler, and the expository power of a popular-science writer of the first water. If you dig food or science, you should get a copy; if you dig food and science, you must get a copy. :-)
Actually, he also looks a great deal like my Contracts professor, now that I think about it. Hmm. Anyway, he also has a blog with nice little food-science tidbits–thanks to my little bro’ Jase (who’s quite a good writer himself, come to that) for pointing it out.
What was this series of blog entries about again? Oh, right! Soap! Made from butter!
So I decided I’d use plain butter, and then try clarified butter, or ghee. (When I mentioned this to Dinah, she said "Ghee soap! That sounds interesting!")
Butter is the first soapmaking material I used that wasn’t almost pure fat. There are other significant components, chiefly water and protein.
14 grams of butter had 11 grams of fat in it, so for 100 grams of fat, I’d need to use 100 * 14 / 11 = 127 grams of butter. The remainder would be mostly water, with some proteins (USDA rounding rules let them say zero grams on the label, I guess), cholesterol, and whatnot. (Do you think the label should say things like "Whatnot Ng"? I do.) Anyway, the melted butter looked like this:
, the process of mixing the soap looked like this:
, and the final soap looked like this:
By the way, I got a tripod at Goodwill this weekend, so I’ll be able to make videos of soapmaking–I’ve got a notion in my head about making a short, three-minute instructional piece in iMovie. I haven’t used iMovie before, but hey, gotta learn somehow. Anyway, ghee.
Ghee is clarified butter; butter without those other components I mentioned above. You can buy jars of it at many stores, especially Indian grocery stores, but making it yourself from any old butter is easy. First you melt the butter (driving off the water in the process):
Then you skim off the solids:
Then you pour off the fat:
Then you dispose of the casein:
Quite simple, really. The advantage of using ghee is that it has a much higher smoke point (no milk solids or proteins to burn), which means you can fry foods at much hotter temperatures without burning your frying medium. Grapeseed oil is also known for having a high smoke point.
Happily, I had made almost exactly 100 g of ghee. I didn’t record the starting mass, but I used one whole stick and most of another, which would be just under 200 g. I don’t know whether this yield is typical; it seems a little low to me, but then again, I hadn’t made ghee before. Skimming off the solids was the hardest part; I lost a lot of fat there. The best technique turned out to be "herding" the solids to one side of the container so I could scoop up more of it at a time. Here’s the finished product:
Unsurprisingly, the ghee soap looked and poured a lot like the butter did. I put some ghee soap in the upper left of the top tray, with the butter soap in the right part. In the blue tray, from left to right, it’s ghee, sesame, and flax (remember flax?).
The next night I took some of the soaps out of the trays. The lard soap was nice and hard:
whereas the canola oil was doughy:
The peanut oil was much softer underneath the surface; it had developed a sort of crust:
The grapeseed oil had an even more pronounced crust:
Oh, and there’s the bit of the blender I lost last time!
The flax oil was just kinda weird and grainy:
I also checked in on the other soaps. The olive oil soap was surprisingly hard at this point. The walnut was softer, but it had set up appreciably.
Nothing too crazy to report with respect to everything else. The most–let’s say "distinctive"–one is the sesame oil soap. It reminds me a bit of a lab we had in high school where we dissected squid. As part of this, the teachers prepared calamari over a Bunsen burner. On these days, you’d walk into the science wing and think, "Oh, that smells good." And then about ten minutes later you’d think, "Ok, I don’t want to smell that for a while now." It’s much the same phenomenon with the soap.
The butter and ghee soaps have a slightly buttery smell, and I think it’s a little less pronounced in the ghee soap. We’ll see what happens as they set up.
Prior: Peanut, grapeseed, flax, and a Problem.
Next: Jojoba, Crisco, and lavender-scented massage oil!
September 10th, 2006
