One kilo loaf, partial gel so there is a distinct ring through every slice, and it is safe and lathers fine. I want it to look like something I could put on a table. I own a slow cooker and about four hours of patience. Is remelting a real option here or am I about to turn a mediocre looking batch into an actively bad one?
Disagreeing slightly, because rebatch has a bad reputation earned by people doing it dry. If you add enough liquid, and I mean more than feels right, and you use a milk or a beer rather than water, the result is smoother than the horror stories suggest. The other trick is to add your fragrance right at the end after you take it off the heat rather than into the hot mass. I have sold rebatched bars in cavity moulds that nobody questioned. It is a technique with a learning curve, not a guaranteed disaster.
Adding it off the heat is the tip that changed rebatching for me too. Still would not do it for a cosmetic problem, but it is fair to say the reputation comes from dry rebatches.
I rebatched twenty bars once and timed it because I wanted to know whether it was worth repeating. Shredding took forty minutes on a box grater. Slow cooker on low with a small amount of liquid took just over three hours before it was uniformly translucent and workable. Pressing into cavity moulds took another half hour because the mass sets while you work and you are fighting it the whole way. Total, well over four hours for twenty bars that still looked handmade in the least flattering sense.
I would do it again for a batch that had a genuine problem. I would not do it for a partial gel ring, which most customers read as a design feature if you do not tell them otherwise.
Fix the next batch instead. Partial gel is a temperature problem, so either force full gel by insulating hard or putting the mould in a barely warm oven and switching it off, or prevent gel entirely by putting the mould in the fridge for a day. Anything in between gives you the ring. I went the oven route and have not had a partial gel since.
The cheaper fix for a gel ring is the plane. Bevel the edges and take a thin pass across each face with a soap planer or a vegetable peeler and the ring almost disappears, because the ring is a surface-visible boundary and the contrast drops once you remove the outer skin. Ten minutes for a whole loaf. Failing that, shred the loaf, and use the shreds as confetti in your next batch, where the ring reads as deliberate colour.
Rebatch fixes unsafe or unusable. Planing fixes ugly. Yours is ugly.
@darning_dot · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Rebatching is not melting. Cold process does not go back to a pourable liquid, it goes to something like hot mashed potato, and it sets with that texture. You can absolutely do it in the slow cooker with a splash of liquid, but you will trade a gel ring for a rustic lumpy bar and most of your fragrance will have cooked off.
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@darning_dot · 5mo ago
That is exactly it. Rebatch is for salvaging soap that is unusable, not for improving soap that is merely unattractive.
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@sourdough_stella · 5mo ago
So the realistic outcome is a different kind of ugly, not a pretty bar.
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