Hand Milling or French Milling Soap for Homemade Lye Soap Making

Video Transcript

"This step is called hand milling. Some people call it French milling others call it rebatching. What we are doing is we are taking the soap that we made earlier. It is cured enough to be hard and grate real easily and we are breaking it up any little pieces in the bowl. Once we get as much as the recipe calls for, we will add a little liquid. Now we are going to use distilled water and you can use a variety of fruit juices or milks and we are going to add just enough in this case about 2 oz. to soften the soap. Once we have a bag of soap, we are going to double bag it so if there is any leaks there is no problem. Also that first bag will act as our mixing bag later and now I just pop it into my pot of simmering low water and it will take about an hour. Here’s one that we started much earlier. I have two bags in it and you can see that after about 45 minutes it is nearly all ready to be melted. I am going to turn this over and give it a couple more minutes and we will be ready to mix in our decorative elements. I have a variety of molds here to select from today. We are going to prepare one with a little Vaseline or you can use a skim of spray. You can use a variety of things; heat is not a factor this level. PVC pipe and this deli bucket or ice cream bucket is nice. This you can make nice bars from, just releasing the whole thing and cutting them up and then we have these pretty commercial molds. Here is a pretty one with little feet in them. They are all flexible. It is very easy to get soap out once you cured it a little bit. "