Teach Soap

I read that you can (or this soaper did) add their hot lye into their cold butters, which melts the butters, so there was no need to wait for the Lye to cool, or to melt the butters?
In all the hours on the net and all the books I have read I have never heard of anybody doing this?
Is there any reason why this wouldn't work?

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Diane

It might work, but I prefer to melt my oils and butters first, let them cool, then add the cooled off lye water. The problem that I can see with this is if the butter(s) cools off too much after adding the lye, you could get a false trace or it could start to solidify and the lye won't be able to interact with all of it.

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

I've been experimenting with hot lye & room temperature oils. I have to melt my shea butter at least partially before adding the lye, but I haven't had any issues. It doesn't substantially affect trace times, but not waiting for everything to cool means soapmaking doesn't take me quite as long.

i don't use a microwave to melt my butters either. Try melting your butters first in an improvised double-boiler. I use my big pot that I mix the oil & lye in, the big pot sits on top of a frying pan that's boiling water, so acting as a giant double boiler. The butters melt very quickly but keep temp low so oils don't get too hot...

I soap this thermal transfer method all the time and love it! My recipe is 60% solid oils so I pour the hot lye solution over them and stir until they're melted and then add my liquid oils.

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!

I've been using this method for the past year and it's working very well for me. I put my liquid oils and my solid oils/butters in my soaping pot, then mix up the lye water and add the hot lye water to the soaping pot to melt the solid oils/butters. I have not had any problems with it so far. It saves time and there is not as much clean-up afterwards since I'm not using extra containers for each ingredient.