Soap Lily: Wine a Little Bit and You'll Feel Better

on left Wine by Candlelight, on right Merlot

Monday, August 18, 2014

In my kitchen hangs a plaque that says "Wine a Little Bit and You'll Feel Better." I have it because it amuses me, but I think that maybe today it is true. Kathy and I did "wine" a little bit - we made wine soap with a very nice Malbec that my friend Mike made. I did taste it first, and if it is that good in a bar of soap, then everyone will love it.

I decided to use a different recipe today, so this soap will have avocado oil and shea butter in it in addition to coconut, olive, sweet almond, and sunflower oils.

mixing and melting the oils

all measured and mixed, just waiting on the melt

To use the Malbec wine in today's soap, I simply replaced the water in the recipe with wine. Easy peasy! Only, I did have to freeze the wine first. The reaction with the lye creates such a high temperature that it is safer and easier to work with the wine/lye in a frozen or slushy form. I did have to add a small amount of distilled water to meet the full amount of liquid needed in this recipe as I had not quite frozen enough of the wine.

I did say that I tasted it first.

I added silk to this batch of wine soap to create a more luxurious "silky" bar. Kathy and I have discovered that if we cut the silk into very small pieces and add it to the liquid before adding the lye, then the silk dissolves easier. I usually try to add it to one side of the bowl, then add the lye to the other and slowly incorporate the two into the liquid. There is no scientific reason for doing it that way. It just makes me feel better.

adding the silk to the wine/water

adding the lye to the wine/water/silk

stirring to melt the wine, dissolve the silk and the lye, and incorporate

all into one mixture. Notice how the first picture shows a reddish-purple hue in the wine?

Once the lye is added, the chemical reaction and heat from that reaction change the color somewhat.

Slowly adding the wine/water/lye to the oils

stirring and mixing to emulsify

now mixing to reach trace

The batter is getting thicker.

and thicker. Interesting color, isn't it? It does have a lot of yellow in it

from the sunflower oil and the shea butter. I wonder if the addition

of the silk alters the color in any way...hmmm...

Once the batter had reached a medium-thick trace, I put the lid on the crock pot and let it cook.

I took an extra precaution this time and stirred every five minutes for a while rather than waiting for 15 minutes. Why, you ask? Because I was very conscious of protecting Kathy's table top and counter tops from potential disaster. When making soap with ingredients that contain sugar, there is the possibility that the batter could "volcano" out of the container as it goes through the gel phase. I wanted to make sure that I kept it stirred down, and in doing so hoped to avoid the volcano.

The first time I soaped with wine, I boiled all of the alcohol out of it before I froze it into cubes. I thought about it at length, though, and remembered that beer soaps are made without boiling the beer (at least the recipes and blogs that I have read), so why boil the alcohol out of the wine? In beer soaps you have to open the beer and let it sit out until it goes flat because the bubbliness of the liquid does not combine well with the lye. Once it's flat, it's fine.

This isn't a bubbly wine, so I didn't need to let it go flat. I also just didn't like the idea of boiling away even part of a good wine that my friend made. So, I decided to just go for it and leave the alcohol in it. That's me - livin' on the edge (and prayin' that the soap doesn't run over the edge of the crock pot!).

the first stir. See the different textures? Some of it is harder

while other parts of it are more like gel. I mixed and stirred

to evenly combine the different parts of the cooking soap batter.

I think this looks kind of like applesauce. Lots of gelling going on here.

WOW! Isnt' THAT pretty?! The batter did indeed begin to rise to the

upper edge of the pot, but I stirred it down before it got any higher.

Almost done!

If I inserted pictures taken every time I took off the lid to stir (every 5 minutes), you might soon grow very bored with this soap - and me. I'll save you the pain of around an hour and a half of photos and just share the high spots.

You're welcome.

Once Kathy and I checked the Ph levels with several test strips, we resorted to the "zap" test. I have been zapped once. Once is enough. At least I know that the "zap" is a real thing; otherwise, I would second guess myself each time thinking that everything might have been a zap.

Today, though might have been worse than the zap. I touched my tongue to the soap and even though it didn't zap, the soap still didn't taste like it was done. It had a saltiness - for lack of a better description - that just didn't seem done to me. I guess that makes sense given that lye is SODIUM hydroxide. If I can still taste that much salt, then the lye is still reacting.

I put the lid back on the crock pot to let it continue to cook, and turned around to get a sip of water. Just as I began to swallow, I realized that a piece of the soap had stuck to my tongue. How in the world did I not notice it? As the water mixed with that small bit of soap, the taste was so horrible that I could feel it in my throat. Have you ever tasted something that was so bad you could feel it? Yuk!

I did not swallow it. I spit. If I hadn't been standing next to the sink, I would have spit all over the floor. I'm sure Kathy was thankful that I was standing near the sink.

It was rather disgusting, not in that "Mom's gonna make you wash your mouth out with soap!" way, but in that "hey this soap really isn't done!" way. Kathy had to listen to me gargle, hack, and spit for several minutes. And now I suppose you're sitting there imagining those sounds, too.

Sorry.

At any rate, we cooked the soap until it was truly done, and then we were ready to add the fragrance oils. I so wish that the saponification process didn't cook off so much of the wine smell. We would probably enjoy the soap just as much if we hadn't added fragrance oils, but it just seems that a wine soap should have a particular smell.

Kathy and I were testing some more sample fragrances today that we had gotten from Rustic Escentuals, so we divided the (completely done) batter into two even parts.

Merlot fragrance oil went into 1/2 of the batter. Yes, I put Merlot fragrance

into a soap made with a Malbec. Aren't blends popular? I like them!

Rustic Escentuals describes this fragrance as follows:

this is an amazing Merlot fragrance oil paying homage to its namesake! Sweet, fruit, and sophisticated. Plums, strawberries, and pears float above a light layer of fresh green leaf, gardenia and Neroli. Middle notes are anchored with a soft and delicate musk. No perfumey or overwhelming notes, the result is just fun!

Stirring and stirring until the Merlot fragrance is completely

incorporated into the batter.

We scented the other 1/2 of the batter with Wine by Candlelight. This fragrance from +Rustic Escentuals smells like a fruity wine but with a darker layer. I almost want to say smoky,

but it isn't quite that heavy. I think it must be the Amber. Their Web site describes it as follows:

The most realistic, sensuous wine scent you'll ever use! A bountiful, heady merlot with notes of red berries and a hint of sweetness with amber. Strong seductive.

Stirring in the Merlot. Look closely in the upper left corner just

underneath my wrist.

Part of the reason we buy sample bottles, is so we can test the fragrances before we invest a lot of money in a larger amount. We aren't just testing the smell, although that is part of it. We are also testing how the oil reacts to and with the soap. Sometimes the oils will cause the soap to harden much too fast, sometimes the oils will cause the batter to rice (it will slightly separate so that it really does look like there are little grains of rice in the batter), and sometimes the oils will discolor the batter.

Ricing doesn't really hurt the soap, and discoloration doesn't hurt the soap, they both just keep the soap from looking as pretty as its makers would like.

Merlot, strangely enough, turned bright yellow when I mixed it with the soap. Could it be the vanilla content in the fragrance oil? Could it be because of all of the yellow colored oils in this recipe? Could the silk have caused anything?

Kathy is a great photographer, but he above picture really doesn't do it justice. I was UPset when I started mixing the oil. The color was UG-LY.

No need to panic, though. Kathy and I got to work to make it work. In 1/2 of that batch we mixed in titanium dioxide to whiten and lighten, and in the other 1/2 we mixed rose clay. We then swirled the two colors together, then pressed the soap into the mold.

The Wine by Candlelight half of the batter looked very pretty all on its own. We decided not to add any colorants to that loaf of soap.

The following three pictures are of the Merlot wine 24 hours after we placed it into the mold. It turned out very nice, and it smells nice, too!

The following three pictures are Wine by Candlelight. The two soaps look very similar, but their fragrances are different. I love how the color of the wine was able to come through in the soaps below.