If you’ve been making soap for awhile, or sometimes it can be one of the first mistakes a new soapmaker makes, you’ve done this. You mix your lye solution, prepare your oils, bring your soap to trace, pour it into your mold…but wait! It fills your mold about an inch short.
Or, maybe you didn’t notice the shortness of soap batter, but you cut your soap and it is crumbly when cutting.
You weigh your soap and it weighs 50 ounces. You look at your recipe and all ingredients (oils, water, fragrance, additives) add up to 58 ounces! OOOOOPS! You forgot to add 8 oz. of olive oil!
I know that the recipe I used for this soap should have filled it to the top. I forgot to add the olive oil, a whopping 16 ounces! It is probably hard to see but I’m about 1/4 inch below the top of this mold.
Here it is unmolded – the same day! Yep, it turned this beautiful red color.
I weighed it and new exactly what I had done (or not done!). I didn’t add the olive oil.
When something like this happens, don’t toss your soap! You can rebatch it! Here’s how.
Every soapmaking should have a salad shooter in their arsenal. We’re going to grate the soap down and that is just not something that I want to do by hand.
Chop your soap into pieces that will fit through the salad shooter and grate!
Add the oil that you forgot and toss it to mix it good! Get your hands in there! (This one happens to look a bit like hamburger meat.)
Dump it into a Crockpot.
Turn your Crockpot on and let it heat up. Stir every 10 minutes or so. I set mine on high, but soon had to turn it down as it was a bit too hot. The oil will separate out at some point. Mix, Mix, Mix.
Cook it until it has all gelled.
Glop it into your mold!
It is not the prettiest soap but it is a soap with a story!
Unmold and cut the next day. Cure for at least 3 weeks.
Prevent it!
- Mark off each oil as you add it. Sometimes we forget what we measured out!
- I will sometimes setup my workstation with all of my oils to the left of my scale. As I measure, I move the oils to the right of my scale.
A few considerations:
If you don’t rebatch your soap right away, then you might have to add water, as water evaporates as you let your soap sit. Add 1 teaspoon per pound of soap shreds and mix well.
You might have to add additional fragrance. If the cooking process evaporated out much of your fragrance, you can add some at the end before you glop into your mold. Add 1/4 oz. per pound of soap shreds.
Happy SOAP REBATCHING!
-Amanda
Im new soaping, only about 5 batches in. I had separated my batch 1 Bach into 3, since I was doing 3 different olive oil infused colors. My first time attempting colors, measured and poured everything exactly, spent so much time alternating the colors into the mold, then swirling and pretty decoration on top, covered it and started cleaning up. When I noticed the castor oil and avocado oil sitting there!! I hurried and dumped the batter out of the mold into a bowl and mixed in the castor and avocado oil. Poured back into the mold,’now it’s just orange. I wanted to cry! Someone please tell me if this is batch is going to be ok?
I tried goat milk soap three different ways of adding the milk, but they all turned out sticky after curing! The longer I let it set, the stickier it became! Does the type of goat make a difference?
Based on everything I am reading, in order to rebatch, you need to know what oil you missed. What happens if you don’t? I make about 3 or 4 full batches of just my oils and store in plastic bowls until it’s time to use. One of the batches turned up short in my mold. I “think” it may be the castor but I’m not sure. The soap is done, looks fine but bars are obviously smaller and I tested and they are lye heavy. Should I try rebatching and adding castor or just ditch and chalk it up to lesson learned?
Happened recently with a new FO. Instantly hardened when I added the FO! Was using two colors-brown and gold,(a Mens’ soap). I scrambled and globed the brown smashing it down in the mold and then adding the small amount of gold on top. Lots of holes the next day but it is sooo ugly! It looked like a brownie with peanut butter on top! Ugh Smells great though!🤣😂
My disaster happened yesterday. I bought you hubbys’ recipe book and decided to try out the rosemary soap bar. I had just opened the olive oil and measure it out before adding the shea coca butter and castor oil. When I opened the castor oil I realized I had already measured the castor oil as though it were olive oil. SO I just measured the oilive oil for the castor amounts and switched up the oil. I also thought the lye was more than I was used to and not sure if I may have confused the amounts and added the lye in the amounts measured for water. Anyway, after waiting til 110F I mixed the two and instant sieze. I had the stick blender and pushed the glop into a loaf mold. I have unmolded and am trying to decide whether I can rebatch a heavy castor oil mix that may be lye heavy too. IF anyone can suggest whether this will be worth trying to save I’d appreciate it. I love the scent and color!
hmm i just made a 55 oz loaf of cold process soap. I was supposed to be 57 oz. I left out 2 oz of castor oil. oops. I recalculated and instead of a 5% super fat its now a 1%, Should I now hot process this soap or leave it as a 1% super fat?
I just did the exact same thing! I don’t know what my soap will turn out like now. It’s a 3 colour decorated top soap so I’m not rebatching … eek! By the way Did u get an answer to your question please!
Hi.. I’m new and haven’t added enough EO to two batches… Real bummed as I left the Jojoba and honey out of the first batch as well… It set fine and looks great so that isn’t an issue… However they both just smell like oil… Not unpleasant but sad, figure they’ll still be nice soap to use just won’t have a pretty smell… Rebatch or not… That is the question… I’m not selling the soaps… Just making for the family… Down here is Australia the price of EO’s is horrendous (although knowing the process, understandable)
Hi mi did just that yesterday…I forgot 32oz olive oil….you said add the forgotten oil then u said add water…I m a bit confused.
I left out Shea butter in a recipe today, so mad at myself! And so already I think it is lye heavy! It is drying so quickly with a crack on top only 5 hours after I put it in the mold.
I want to rebatch and add the Shea butter. Do I hve to wait to rebatch?
my most tragic soap accident was I made a soap for valentines day and did not like the way it came out . So I did rebatch it and made a much better looking and smelling soap. I love doing rebatch I purposely buy fresh soap base and rebatch it to make beautiful soaps much easier for me when i don’t want to work with lye !
How would you add lye? If not enough in beginning. Water/lye ratio when soap isn’t hardening
btw, Amanda… your soap truly looked like sloppy Joe for a crowd.
laur
omy, there have ben so many panicy moments.
I had just poured 4 drop swirl colors into a lovely bucket of soap batter when I hear, ” Mom, Auggie is on the roof !” Well , of course I had to go rescue the boy ( 4 years ) and when I got back, that soap was rock hard in that bucket. I left it, thinking I would just deal with a delicious smelling bucket shaped soap pie, but the next day I COULD NOT unmold that soap. In the end , I had to cut off the bucket with a sawzall… Goggles have many uses in the soapmaking field !
BTW, The soap was fine, after I trimmed all the overheated, wierd , convoluted, cellulitey overheated edges .
But, the colors? very ploppy and blobby. I had a ball cutting this soap into useable bars… Kind of reminded me of cutting a rolly watermelon
laurie
I made a batch with Dead Sea mud and activated charcoal, a recipe which I had made before. However, I misread the recipe and for two of the four oils put in the percent instead of the amount. So the bars had a crazy superfat and were very soft. I let them cure for several months hoping they would harden up, but they didn’t. I had figured out what I had done wrong and played around with soapcalc to come up with a new recipe where I could add more oils to the rebatch. The result was a wonderful facial soap!
I just made my first mistake. I forgot to add 2oz of oil in a recipe of 3 oils. I guess I will re batch my soap.
Near the beginning of my soapmaking career, I made a 8 lb batch of “Peppermint Patty” soap with cocoa powder for color and peppermint EO. I made a beautiful swirl (for those days) and after I poured it into my slab mold, I turned around and there sat my pyrex cup with my melted cocoa butter! I quickly poured the beautiful swirly soap back into the soap pot and added the cocoa butter. Stirred it up and re-poured. I came out with a wonderful smelling BROWN peppermint soap. LOL Since then, I have had a couple of batches that didn’t turn out like I wanted and I put them through my trusty Salad Shooter. Rebatched in the oven with a bit of milk added for moisturizing. I didn’t know about using crock pots back then. But next time I have a disaster I will whip out my crock pot and have a go at it.
My soapy disaster put me on the road to HP. I was making a Lavender-Mint CP and when I added the EO-FO blend it riced and seized before I could even stir in the rest of the fragrance! Luckily, I had melted my oils in a large stockpot so I immediately put the yucky soap into the pot, added some water, cooked and voila! semi-rebatched-HP soap (my first). It came out beautiful with a country-rustic look and heavenly smell! Lessons learned: I thoroughly research the effects of the fragrances I use and I also found out I like doing HP!
I made shampoo bars from a NG internet recipe,25% for 4 oils including castor! that came out sticky and way too soft. Not enough lye? Too much Castor? Perhaps i rushed the scale? I just don’t know……I HP’d the batch, adding sodium lactate, but they were still way too soft. I just didnt want to throw them out. They smelled amazing with super huge bubbles,and were soooo moisturizing so i chopped them up and added it to your salt bar recipe! Awesome and thank you for those salt bar recipes!
The worst thing that ever happened to me happened early on in my soaping career. I carefully weighed out my oils and melted them in a Pyrex cup in the microwave. Then, for some reason, I didn’t feel confident about the weight so I poured the hot oils back into the weigh bowl to check the weight… then watched in horror as it melted and oil spilled all over my counter top. The scale was a cheapie kitchen scale with — you guessed it — a plastic weighing bowl! Dumb!
PS: I love my Salad Shooter!
Was a cucumber/nopal soap with honey. I got a volcano tunnel..was very sad so i rebatched, added a little bit of milk, zap tested, and it turned ok…no so grate but i could sell it…
Thank you for this important information. As a brand new shaper, I will be printing this out to keep for future reference ( if needed! ).
The fourth batch I ever made was a goats milk soap, with coffee ground from a local coffee roaster. It looked ok, but I didn’t put any fragrance in. So I rebatched it with some Turkish Mocha FO and it came out AMAZING!
Mmmmm, that smells amazing!
I’m I just made my first tri-coloured Taiwan Swirl loaf. It looks great, but I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t filled my mould. It’s now 3am & it has just dawned on me that I forgot to add the sunflower oil – that’s a full 25% of my oils! If I rebatch it, it’ll go a nasty brown colour, so I think I will just bin it and start again.