I thought I’d make a bunch of soap busts to mail out along with the chocolate donuts and cookie-soaps that I just made. But, I managed to get a problem known as “soap seize.”
It’s not entirely certain what causes soap to seize but when it does, you know it: it goes from smooth and creamy to globby unmanageable stuff very quickly. One thing that’s useful to have standing by are some silicone baking trays you can just shove the stuff into with a spatula.
The thing that is weird about soap-seize is that it’s not entirely the oils. If you’re using something like beeswax and palm oil, you need to warm it to melt it, so it’s going to be hot – and it appears that means your lye solution should be about the same temperature or else. But that’s not always what does (or doesn’t do) it. There are also certain scent oils that will make it seize fast and reliably: cloves, cinnamon. Black pepper does not. Vanilla does. If you’re going to use anything that is a “spice oil” google around to see if it causes soap-seize often.
Having some bread molds handy is good – it’s still fine soap, I’ll just have to slice it like bread instead of having it cast into cool busts of Marx and Lenin. (That is lemon balm, lemongrass, lemon verbena-scented soap) It’s frustrating.
One thing not to do: do not conclude that the problem is simply a matter that the lye was cooler and it made the oils congeal, so you put it in your microwave….
… then you get a “microwave soap volcano” as the air in the soap expands rapidly, and the soap along with it. One soap-maker I know has a simple get-well strategy for soap seize: toss it in a big pot and add some water, then heat it up and now you’re making liquid soap. Have fun!
This batch was seizing before I added the scent, so I know it’s not the scent. Besides I have never had trouble with those scents before. I think I used too many solid oils and should have relied on at least half of the oils being something very liquid, like almond oil. Look at all of the awesome molds I had sitting there, unused, because: damn it!
Soap loaf! Lemon scented! Anyone want a slice? (Those of you whose addresses I already have, are already doomed to get some of this unless you tell me not to.)
Next week I am going to LA to keynote the ISSA World Conference on the 4th. Before that I am going to a day-long meeting in Herndon, VA. So I may be a bit quiet. We shall see.
“Seize” is one of those “I before E except after C” rules-breakers.
Bad! Bad soap! No! No!
“Seize”. Weird. LOL.
I am glad to know what this is called, because if I ever make soap I am sure it will do this and now I’ll know what it is. Must be so aggravating… and you were so well prepared, too… I am trying to think if I have a similar problem when making cheese, but not usually. There you are depending on things like PH, bacterial growth, correct heat etc. and there are sure times when it goes wrong (serious cheese makers measure PH; I don’t so I must not be serious) but you can usually get it to comply with you fairly well. Although once, a very long time ago, I got milk from a friend and it refused to form a curd. Turned out that goat had a very mild case of mastitis and apparently the bacterial colony causing the mastitis changed the milk enough that it just would not work. Some antibiotics solved the problem and future milk from that goat was just fine once she was treated and cured.
Congrats on the speaking engagement! Sounds very cool!
Soap is an emulsion. Your soap “siezes” when the aqueous and oil layers separate. Keeping an emulsion emulsified is the bane of home cooks, chemists and I guess soap makers as well. Accomplished bench chemist that I am, I have no words of wisdom to offer. (I once got three different layers to separate out in a separatory funnel. That’s not supposed to happen.) Oil and water don’t mix. Just be happy whenever they do in the way you desire.
And thank you for the magnet and sundries! The cookie is in the guest bathroom.
The exceptions to “i before e except after c” are: Neither has leisure to seize the sheik.
@brucegee1962: At least one word is weirdly absent from your sentence.
Raucous Indignation@#3:
Soap is an emulsion. Your soap “siezes” when the aqueous and oil layers separate. Keeping an emulsion emulsified is the bane of home cooks, chemists and I guess soap makers as well.
What is the opposite of an emulsifier?
(Perhaps we can call it a “!*!&^!*!-er”)
It’s a really interesting reaction – your soap crystallizes into a great big blob on your whisk or spatula, in seconds. Boom.
kestrel@#2:
I am glad to know what this is called, because if I ever make soap I am sure it will do this and now I’ll know what it is. Must be so aggravating… and you were so well prepared, too…
It is really frustrating because it’s so mysterious. I feel like I need some kind of soap-making ritual that will propitiate the gods of salt and oil or something.
Marcus@#7:
The I wish the stuff I try to crystallize in the lab would do as your soap did.
Raucous@#3: Chloroform/water/diethylether with something productlike shared between them did that to me as well. All three layers had a different shade of pi… [manners] … urine yellow. :D
Marcus, chocolate does the same thing, sieizei. There is a way to rescue a chocolate sieizzureiei, but I can’t recall what that is.
Avalus, this was during a sophomore organic chemistry lab. I doubt they gave us access to chloroform, what with the student body’s reputation for enthusiastic and wanton consumption of chemicals, organic and not.
Making soap is so weird. As an activity, it’s as though it’s not sure if it want to be crafts or baking.
Callinectes, why cannot it be both?
When making buttercream the trick is to mix quickly and if it dares to separate, add some drops of very hot water, so maybe hot oil could help?
OK, so I just realized/discovered I was spelling “sieze” wrong. I’ve been spelling it like the French “sixteen” – yaaaah, that’s what I meant.
I’ll leave it uncorrected in the OP so you can all laugh at me.
By the way: I was severely dyslexic as a child and was exposed early on to an experimental training program that one of my dad’s friends at Columbia was working on. Apparently, it worked, because I am now very right-hand dominant. So, if you want to make fun of me for being dyslexic, go ahead. I’m probably just bad at spelling when I am tired.
Hey, fun thought: if someone is dyslexic and can train themselves to overcome it to a certain degree, does that tell us anything about whether IQ tests are measuring something inherent in us, or simply how we have been taught?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/11/are-dyslexia-and-iq-related/247809/
Raucous Indignation@#10:
Marcus, chocolate does the same thing, sieizei. There is a way to rescue a chocolate sieizzureiei, but I can’t recall what that is.
Butter and Rum! Rum for the cook, and put the butter in the chocolate.
Callinectes@#12:
Making soap is so weird. As an activity, it’s as though it’s not sure if it want to be crafts or baking.
It is. And don’t get it wrong and mix your lye with the ingredients for your muffins.
You learn really quickly not to do anything else in the kitchen when you have lye solution around. It does not mix well in the other things.
Another point about soap-making: it leaves your hands so soft! (probably because residual lye in your clean-up dissolves the outer layer of skin or something)
kestrel@#2:
There you are depending on things like PH, bacterial growth, correct heat etc. and there are sure times when it goes wrong (serious cheese makers measure PH; I don’t so I must not be serious) but you can usually get it to comply with you fairly well.
PH meters are really easy to obtain and use, FYI. I have one that I used to use to check my silver nitrate bath for my wet plates (before I decided, “screw it, add a drop of nitric acid is a sovereign remedy”)
Raucous Indignation@#13:
Callinectes, why cannot it be both?
It’s a floor wax and a bundt cake!
Gilliel@#14:
so maybe hot oil could help?
If you try soap-making and experience this rapid set-up, you’ll see what I mean… It’s pretty nonlinear.
Within about 10 seconds of starting to “sieze” the soap is unstirrable and is usually a gigantic ball attached to the bottom of your spatula or whisk. There’s no way to get oil in between any of it; I suppose you could grind it up or chop it up.
The full rule is “i before e except after c when the sound is ee“, which gets rid of most of the exceptions. There are still exceptions, of course, but fewer of them.
Can’t help with soap. Chocolate, though, is a mixture of fats that need to be kept together, but they really want to separate as they cool down. They don’t just want to come out of emulsion, they also want to separate by melting point. To fix the chocolate, you warm it up slowly and gently to the point where all the fats melt (actual temperature depends on the type of chocolate), then slowly cool it down to working temperature while stirring continuously. (The process is called tempering.) Then you pour, dip, drizzle, whatever. Then you eat it, and it tastes good.
I remember the rule from grade school as “I before E except after C, or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh.”
Remembering the rules seems like more work than to plain remember the spelling…
Lemon soap? Yes, please!
I love all the scents in the lemon category. Lemon thyme, lemongrass, lemon verbena, lemon. Sometimes I run my fingernail over the rind of a lemon just enough to release a bit of the oils, just for that burst of scent. It’s like a little shot of coffee for the – I forget what the sensors in your nose are called. It can’t be nose buds, can it? Scent receptors! Most of the herbs, when fresh, it’s hard not to crush a bit of leaf for the scent, but really only mint is refreshing like lemon. Maybe black pepper a bit too, but hard to get the smell without accidentally taking in some of the dust.
Depends how your brain works, I guess.
ledasmom@#25:
I do not understand it but apparently citrus oils can break down into something toxic when exposed to UV. So they say in soap-making forums, so it must be true. Something something “phototoxic” mumble something.
However, why take a chance? I have found that lemon balm, lemon verbena, AND lemongrass oils smell lemony-er than lemons and the scent does not fade.
I do have John Lennon soap bust mold and a V Lenin soap bust mold – just so I can make “lemon lenin lennon” soap.
My upper hay field has a small population of lemon balm, and it’s intoxicating in August.
Maybe if I set up a camera and tried to capture what a soap-seize looks like, then I’d never have another soap-seize.
My answer: simply how we have been taught. People seem capable of overcoming or just compensating for all sorts of brain quirks.
I know a guy who’s been diagnosed with autism, and he ended up working as a public speaking teacher. When I met him, he was an excellent public speaker, so I just assumed that he must have been one of those people who just have a talent for this. Then I saw some old videos with him participating in debates some years earlier. He was pretty bad there. Apparently he just practiced a lot in order to learn all that stuff people call “communication skills.”
I also know a colorblind artist. His artworks were colorful and had really nice color schemes. If he hadn’t admitted to being colorblind, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. In order to compensate for his inability to see colors, he just learned the color theory. Ridiculously well. His understanding of the color theory was significantly better than mine. He was doing mostly digital art, so for him colors were just numbers on the computer screen. For example, he knew that sky is “blue” and that “C80M10Y0K0” in CMYK color scheme stands for blue, so that’s what he used to paint sky in his digital artworks. He also had very good understanding about which colors look nice together, so he could make great color combinations in his artworks. I got to know this artist on DeviantArt, and there he was open about not being able to see the colors that he uses in his paintings. He never used his real name and, due to anonymity, he felt safe to admit this. In real life he was carefully hiding the fact that he was colorblind. He was employed an as artist/designer by a company, and he feared that he might lose his job if his boss found out that they have a colorblind person among the employees.
And, of course, I also have a few brain quirks that I have learned to compensate for.
This makes me wonder: if you get diagnosed with something, but later learn to compensate for it or outright overcome the problem, do you still have whatever you got diagnosed with?
Speaking of dyslexia, I find it interesting how different writing systems influence people who have it. One of the countless jobs I have done was working as a text editor. I had a regular client who had dyslexia. His Latvian texts and the mistakes he made in them were pretty interesting for a linguist like me.
Languages have very different writing systems. In some (Latvian, Italian, Finnish) there is a high correspondence between the language’s phonemes (sound units) and its graphemes (letters). In Latvian, the letter “c” stands for only one sound. And, whenever this sound exists in some word, it is always written with the same letter “c.” Linguists call this type of writing systems “shallow orthographies” as they have a close relationship between graphemes and phonemes, and the spelling of words is very consistent.
Compare that with “deep orthographies” like, for example, English or French, which do not have a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters that represent them. For example, in words “cat” and “ice” the letter “c” stands for different sounds. This kind of crap doesn’t exist in Latvian writing system.
With shallow orthographies, new readers have fewer problems learning to decode words. Children learn to read faster and they make fewer spelling mistakes. In Latvia we don’t have anything similar to the spelling bee contests—there’s no point making contests when pretty much everybody knows how to spell every word.
I have heard about research indicating that dyslexic readers of shallow orthographic systems have fewer and less severe problems than those stuck with deep orthographies. More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographies_and_dyslexia
Anyway, what I have observed about my dyslexic client seems to indicate that this might be true. He makes very few spelling mistakes in his texts. And those few spelling mistakes he does make are usually in words where phonemes and graphemes do not correspond due to grammatical reasons. When fixing his texts, I usually end up correcting style mistakes, weird sentence structures and incorrectly placed commas. My client seems to be doing reasonably well with Latvian writing system, but he absolutely hates English orthography. When reading English texts, he simply pronounces words the way how they are spelled (for example, when pronouncing “cat” and “ice,” he uses one and the same sound for “c”). The result is such horrible pronunciation that he generally simply pretends to not understand English. At first I really believe that he couldn’t understand English, but then I found out that he had taken some university courses in English and even managed to get great exam scores there. Granted, those courses were about mathematics and chemistry, so he never needed to write any words in the exams, he only needed to write formulas, numbers and calculations.
By the way, personally I really hate English orthography. I grew up with Latvian orthography, which is nice and consistent. Latvian writing system was made in 1920ties by linguists who actually had some clue about what they were doing. Compare that with many other European orthographies, which were made centuries ago by some monks. I also really like Italian writing system. German and Russian are OK too—they are less shallow than Latvian, but I could at least tolerate them. But English and French orthographies are a fucking nightmare. They just make no sense and are so damn inconsistent that I just have to memorize the spelling of pretty much every word. That’s a huge pain in the ass when learning foreign languages. The truth is, my brain seems to be able to easily memorize all the weird and unusual spellings, so having to memorize the spelling of each word isn’t my main problem. My main problem, when learning foreign languages with deep orthographies, is that whenever I hear some new word, I have no clue how to spell it. And whenever I see some new word in a written text, I have no clue how to pronounce it. Having to always look up word pronunciation in a dictionary is such a pain.
Then there’s also the problem that inconsistencies in a system that attempts to be consistent but fails to do so really bug me. They feel like mistakes that ought to be corrected. I have an innate tendency to want to organize and systematize everything. Having rules with countless exceptions just bugs me. I see them as aesthetically unpleasant.
Lenin balm. Leningrass. Lenin verbena. No way a pun that good could come to pass.