Teach Soap

I found a recipe for a combination of bees way and honey. Other ingredients: olive oil, vegetable shortening, grape seed oil and shea butter. Followed the recipe exactly. The top of the loaf is still pretty tacky after two weeks of curing. Should I re-batch this and if so could you provide directions for re-batching.

How much water did you use in your recipe? What are the percentages of each oil and lye? Also, what type of vegetable shortening did you use? There is one with palm oil, and one without. Did you run your recipe through a soap calculator?

It may just need a longer time to dry out. Before rebatching try to figure out what the issue is so you know if it's worth it to keep.

Grape seed is a soft oil with a short shelf life. Did you run the recipe through a lye calc? If the soap is soft, rebatching won't make it harder. At this point, I would give it a long cure time.

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Here is the recipe I used that came out soft and with liquids pooling on top of bar:

15 oz. Olive Oil
15 oz. Coconut Oil
13 oz. shortening (primary ingredient palm oil)
3.5 oz. shea butter
1.5 oz. Beeswax
6.73 oz. NaOH (5% superfat)
12 oz. distilled water
6.02 oz. goats milk
1/2 cup ground oats
8 tsp. honey

It wasn't a total train wreck but close. After two weeks of cure it was still tacky and had liquid on top of loaf.

What do you think? Thanks for your feedback.

For a 3 lb. batch, I would use 3-4 teaspoons of honey, not 8. It's possible that your soap overheated with the natural sugars and you had some of the oils seep out. I would cut back on the honey. 2 week old soap should not have any liquid on top.

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.