The Leftovers

 

What do you do when you send The Mister to the store for some buttermilk to make soda bread and he comes back with a half gallon of the stinky stuff? 

I could have baked more things with it but I didn't want to so what I did was make soap with it. The only problem was that the table in the craft room I use looked like this.

I didn't want to clear it off and put it all back for one day of soap making so I turned the downstairs bathroom, that no one ever uses, into a makeshift soap workshop for the day. It was a little cramped but having running water in the tub was pretty sweet. I might have to do this again in the future.

Every time I post about soap making I get a comment on how great my house must smell. Not yesterday. I made two of the stinkiest soaps imaginable. The buttermilk soap had an odor I can't even describe. It wasn't good.  Before that I had made a batch of Laurel Berry soap formerly known as Sludge Soap. It smells like dirt.

It's an acquired taste but one I happen to like. Don't worry. None of these soaps are for public consumption. I had an itch I needed to scratch to see if I could pull these off using a weird assortments of leftovers and a very expensive bottle of laurel berry oil. 

24 hours later and the Buttermilk soap smelled like.....nothing. It's unscented and that nasty burnt milk smell that came from the chemical reaction with the lye was gone. I was also very happy to see I didn't get a gel ring in the center that you can get with milk soaps if they get too hot. I even dared to add a dollop of honey so I was really taking a risk with the sugars heating up on me. I did keep the lye solution in an ice bath and soaped when it as at 56 degrees. I had my doubts but it seemed to have worked. 

And......the Sludge soap seemed to have also turned out better than expected. The original Aleppo/Laurel Berry recipe calls for all soft oils but it takes a 6 month cure. This time around I used my regular hard butters and some extra hard kokum butter. It's already a rather hard bar so I'm hoping 6 weeks will be long enough.