Green Papaya Soap with Lard

We almost ran out of cold process soaps in my household.  Finally, I got a chance to make a new batch of soaps at 11/28/11.  My oldest daughter really loves green papaya soaps.   These soaps can reduce skin blemishes and are mild on skin.

When I was preparing the ingredients, I found out not only I ran out of shortening also did sweet almond oil.    It was easy to replace different oils with recalculation for lye and liquid.   I also wanted to use some houttuynia cordata tea (good for eczema skin) I brew a while back with some milk which was about to expire.

This is the revised receipe for this batch :
coconut oil    400g
palm oil      400g
lard             600g
olive oil       600g
evening primrose oil   80g
houttuynia cordata tea   472g   milk  194g
bee wax   120g
smashed green papaya  320g
Lye   315g

 I got to work on this batch at 10pm after children were in bed.  I finished the batch around 10:30pm.
1.  I started with heating the hard oil (lard, coconut oil, palm oil and bee wax) to 85℃.  The oil temperature was too high so I used ice bath to bring down the temperature to 70℃.
2.  I proceed to mix the liquid with lye.  I also used ice bath to bring down the lye mixture to 52℃.  
3.  I put in the soft oil (olive oil and  evening primrose oil ) to further bring down the oil temperature of step 1 from 70℃ to 62℃.
4.  At this point, I started to blend  oil with lye.  Until the soap traced, the temperature I monitored was 54℃.

In this batch, I mixed in all the remainder soap pieces  in.    Soap making is such a green way to reduce waste.

                                  After the soaps cure, pH test is around 9-10.