How to Store Liquid Soap Paste

There are many great recipes for making your own natural liquid soap - here on this site - and in books like Catharine Failor's Making Natural Liquid Soaps. While most of the recipes differ in the mixture of oils they use, one thing seems pretty consistent - they all make a lot of soap! Failor's recipes make 6 pounds of paste, which dilutes down to about 18 pounds of soap. Even the smaller recipe I have for making basic liquid soap makes almost 6 pounds when diluted. Unless you use liquid soap every day for bathing, that's a lot of soap! If you fragrance and dilute the whole six pounds of paste, you're stuck wtih the same blend of oils and fragrance until you've used it all up.

But there's actually an easy way to divide up the soap paste into more manageable batches - divide it up into pre-measured plastic bags and store the un-diluted, un-neutralized, un-fragranced paste in the back of your refrigerator.

Here's how to do it:

1. Make your soap paste as you normally would. (making basic liquid soap]basic instructions for making liquid soap[/link])
2. When the soap paste is done cooking and has completely cooled, scoop and weight out even amounts of the paste into plastic zipper freezer bags.
3. I generally measure out the paste in amounts that will be easily dilutable. For the jojoba/olive/coconut recipe, I use about 10 ounces of water to 8 ounces of soap paste. So each of my bags has 8 ounces of paste in it.
4. Then, when I want to make up some liquid soap (I usually make up a pound of paste at a time,) I pull out however much paste I need and put it into my soap pot.
5. Add the measured amount of boiling water you need to dilute the paste (per your recipe or preference.)
6. Neutralize the soap per the instructions in your recipe.
7. Add whatever fragrance or color you want.
8. Let the soap sequester for a week or two.
9. Enjoy your manageable amount of liquid soap.

The soap paste will last for well over a year in the refrigerator, as long as the bag is well sealed. Diluting the paste this way is more work, but it allows me test new fragrances in small amounts of soap, and just plain change out the fragrances I use every day.