Rebatching

I often have lots of soap scraps around - from trimming large batches or sometimes from damaged/crooked bars. Last week I thought I would rebatch some of the scraps. For those of you who may not know, rebatching is basically grating up the soap scraps, adding a little water, and cooking them down. They will never fully *melt* but will be about the consistency of mashed potatoes, allowing you to glop them into a mould to make fresh soap.

For my batch, I used 1.2kgs of scraps - mostly from my latest batch of Unscented Goatsmilk soap but also from Charcoal Complexion, Honey Bee Mine and Ginger Blossom bars. I grated all the scraps, put them into a large stockpot, sprinkled them with about 1/4 cup of water, put the lid on and cooked them in the oven at 100 degrees, for just under 90 minutes.

These are the bars I cut this morning. You can still see some specks where the soap hasn't completely melted down. They remind me of granite slabs ... not going to win any beauty contests are they? Lol. That's ok, these are just for personal use or to give away. They actually smell great - I added some vanilla fragrance and a hint of cinnamon and clove to the mix (most of the scent from the original bars disappeared after cooking).

At the moment the bars are quite soft - I think I added a little too much water. I'll put them on the curing racks for a few weeks to let them harden up before using them. The batch yielded about 7 chunky bars (cut thick to allow for shrinkage). Not bad for scraps!