Teach Soap

I have no means here in Norway to get access to this sodium lactate that everyone is raving about. We don`t have any soaper suppliers here, or anyone that carries it anywhere. I don`t know why that is.

Yes I know I can order it from BrambleBerry, but seriously, I can not afford their crazy shippingprices ($50 for just 4 oz - to Norway. Yeah...)

I know I can use salt, and I have disolved it in the water before adding the lye when I make soaps.
But I just was thinking, I had a bottle of Molkosan in the fridge, and it is states:

Made from whey obtained from organic milk, Molkosan® is rich in a substance known as L+ lactic acid which is now known to support the growth of good gut bacteria. In this way, it acts as a prebiotic.

I know Sodium Lactate is a salt, and lactic acid is not, but could this do anything similar I wonder? Or benefit the soap in any way?

Just throwing it out there.

I haven't tried this ingredient, but I don't see why not. People use buttermilk which has similar properties. I'm just not sure if it would make your soap harder. Try it.

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

You can add salt water to the recipe to harden it up! We did that in this tutorial; http://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body- ... -tutorial/

Try food suppliers for meat9butchers )etc as apparently they use it too. As for what you have for sure add it as I use yoghurt all the time as well as kefir and doe help with fluidity and adds a creaminess to the soap too. If you ferment any vegetables you have made sodium lactate. I do not know how concentrated that is but sodium lactate is made by fermentation of vegetables. I am going to try adding some of my juice from my ferments and shall post the results. Certainly worth a try .

Lactic acid plus sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) creates sodium lactate, plus water and CO2.

If you have access to brewing supply shops, many will sell pure (well, 80% strength) lactic acid. If you can find that, you can add baking soda to make your own sodium lactate. If you can't find that, you might start with the whey left over from straining yogurt, but you'll have to experiment a bit to get the lactic acid concentration.

If my chemistry calculation is right, to get the typical teaspoon of sodium lactate (about 6.6g) that you would add to a pound of oil, you should combine 5 grams of baking soda with 5.3 grams of lactic acid (pure), or about 6.7 mL of that 80% strength lactic acid solution. (If you find another concentration, just divide 5.3 by the percentage and you'll get the correct mL of solution to add.)

Whatever you do, make sure you do this combination separately from the soap and that it is finished bubbling before adding to the soap. The lye is a much stronger base than the baking soda and will interfere with the reaction.

Been thinking about this some more and if you can't get that pure lactic acid commercially, you can boil down acid whey drained from yogurt to a relatively reliable 80% strength.

Lactic acid boils away at a higher temp than water, so it's like the opposite of distillation. Just put whatever amount of whey you have in a wide, stainless steel or teflon (no aluminum or cast iron) pan and gently simmer it while monitoring the temp. At a gentle simmer, it should hang out at around 100 C for a while as the water boils off and leaves the lactic acid behind. As the solution concentrates, the boiling point will go up slowly. Once the temp reaches 120-121 C, you should take the heat away. At 122 C, the lactic acid itself starts to boil away, and we don't want that. Let cool, uncovered, and strain to remove any coagulated proteins (though there shouldn't be many from yogurt whey) and you'll have a pretty good approximation of 75-80% lactic acid.

You can then take 6-7 ml of that solution and add the 5 grams of baking soda (each, per pound of soap) as discussed above. Add the whole thing after trace and you should be good to go.

Finally, the concentrated lactic acid will keep pretty much forever, so you can make big batches. And you don't have to be afraid of the "80% acid" thing. Lactic acid is a weak acid, and while I wouldn't want it in my eyes, I've tasted it without incident other than a fiercely puckered mouth. It's nowhere close to the danger of lye water, for example. Common-sense precautions are all that are required.

Hope this helps.

P.S. If you don't know how to make yogurt, look it up online. It's SUPER easy; I make a half gallon every week. In addition to the yogurt, its byproduct after straining will provide the whey you need for the above procedure. I estimate that my weekly half gallon of yogurt will produce enough whey for lactic acid to treat 10 lbs of soap. (Be sure to choose a recipe that only uses liquid milk and yogurt, because gelatine or powdered milk will reduce the amount of whey left over.)

@BrewerGeorge. Thank you very much for your most helpfull post, I will look into this for sure, your explanation was very helpfull!

The Molkosan I was talking about in my post, perhaps it could be usefull to do the baking powder method you talked about? It states in the information about Molkosan that; Molkosan is prepared with whey fermented with Bioforce’s own patented bacterial cultures, which produce a significant quantity of L+ lactic acid (95%).

Not sure what the difference is between lactic acid and the L+ Lactic acid it refers to though.

Thanks again

BrewerGeorge, thanks for your post. I make my own yogurt (yum) and I've been using the whey as my liquid in my soap. I have a bunch of questions, if you don't mind.

Yesterday, I boiled down the water until the liquid was boiling at about 120 degrees. I started with 2 cups of water and finished with about 1 tablespoon of a carmel-like goo. Does that mean that the whey is 3% lactic acid? Is this close to your production when you boil the whey down?

I had to heat the goo up to make it pliable enough to mix with the baking soda. Is that normal?

There was no bubbling reaction. This makes me think I did something wrong.

Am I on the right path or doing something wrong? Thanks!