Porridge Soap

I don't mean the soap looks like porridge, I mean I used it to make soap!

Asian calls it porridge, we eat it for breakfast; western people call it rice milk, I guess it looks white, smushed out just like milk.  Almond blended in water is called almond milk; soy bean blended in water is called soy milk; so of course rice in water is called rice milk, make sense?  I'm Chinese, I call it porridge.  I used brown rice to make porridge using 1:4 rice:water ratio.  It is much harder to cook brown rice into porridge than white rice.  The rice bran refused to soften up even after blending with a stick blender and double cooked.  I debated on filtering the bran out or keep it to soap.  The bran layer is what makes brown rice far more nutritious than white rice but it's also very chewy.  If I included the blended bran in soap it might look like ground oatmeal.  Personally I don't like ground oatmeal in soap, it swells up and becomes mushy in shower.  If I want the benefit of oatmeal I would rather use colloidal oatmeal, which is oatmeal flour.  Anyway, I decided to filter the bran out but was only successful in removing maybe 80%, good enough.  As soon as the lye hit cold blended porridge it burned and curdled into lumps.  It took forever to break all the lumps up and dissolve the lye, it looked yellowish and thick gel consistency.

   

Then as I tried to cool it down with ice bath it clumped up big time! Does that look like pudding or what?!

I was worried that I would have a hard time blend it into the oil so I added some more water to thin it down to at least pourable consistency.  Surprisingly I had no problem blending it with oil, no idea if the slow trace was caused by the extra water I added.  I had plenty of time to look for my colorants and fragrance; my initial plan was to make it unscented and uncolored afraid that the porridge would gel up the oil too.  I split it into 2 small batches to make 2 different looks.  I had one done with embeds and simple drizzle top and mica sprinkles.  That was ruined in10 minutes...  My husband came into the kitchen area and accidentally dipped his finger right into the soap... sigh.  This is the fixed version.

The other batch I tried out water mica swirl on the top.  Water mica swirl is similar to oil mica, the difference is using water as the medium instead of oil.  Water mica is way too fluid, hard to control the drizzle to me, ended up with just puddles of water micas on top.

 

Usually oil mica swirl would leave indentation on the soap top once the oil is absorbed into the soap.  I noticed the water version doesn't make any indentation, just looks like I took a brush and painted it on.

The lather of rice porridge soap reminds me of shaving soap made with bentonite clay.  It doesn't produce pile high foam,  but it's dense and lotion like, slippery almost slimy.  Well, just like the porridge puree!  This could very well be incorporated into shaving soap recipe.