Fresh Garden Rosemary Infused Soap

If you are new to soap making, please ensure you visit this page and view my soap making safety essentials video for all the information you need to start making soap yourself at home.

I also highly recommend learning to calculate your own soap recipes (and check others’ recipes before you use them). I am a self-taught hobby soap maker - please use my methods and recipes at your own risk.

These videos/articles will get you started with the basics of soap recipe formulation and calculation:

• How to Calculate Your Own Soap Recipes

• Choosing Oils for Soap Making - Oil types and fatty acids, balancing recipes and Soapcalc explained 

• Calculating Water in Soap Recipes and Clarifying 'Lye Concentration'

• Superfat Explained - Understanding 'Superfat' and 'Lye Discounting' in Handmade Soap Making

• Calculate Soap Recipes to Fit Any Size Mould

Fresh Garden Rosemary Infused Soap - Elly’s method

This video and blog post are just one example of how fresh garden rosemary can be used to make hand crafted soap at home. I made this soap with two base oils - palm oil and extra virgin olive oil - but you may want to use another recipe or calculate your own oil combination for the infusion. I wanted to share this as an example of one method you can use, not as a recipe to follow exactly, per se.

If you want a really simple way of making this kind of soap without doing any calculations, just use another recipe that has a good amount of olive oil in it and infuse that oil with rosemary, on its own, to use in your recipe. I have plenty of olive oil based soap recipes on my YouTube channel and here on this blog :)

If you want to use more than one oil type for the infusion and create your own recipe, I recommend keeping it simple (3 oils or less). Take extra care with your measurements and calculations, and use the method outlined below.

What about dried rosemary?

You can make rosemary soap with a dried rosemary infusion. Use the same method however your soap will have a less pronounced green colour compared to a fresh herb infusion.

I am not a herbalist but simply followed what I felt like doing with the fresh rosemary I had available. If using dried rosemary I would use a third of the volume of fresh rosemary that I used for the video.

Note that rosemary and other fresh herb infusions - fresh or dried - don’t add much scent to your soap. You will need to add essential oil to your soap for a noticeable fragrance. This video can show you how to calculate a nice essential oil blend for your soap recipes. For this soap I used rosemary and tea tree essential oils for half the batch, they are a lovely combination.

PROCESS AND CALCULATIONS

1. Prepare the rosemary on the plant
   Wash/hose the fresh rosemary bush if you can, if it’s dusty. If you don’t have sunny weather, do it a day or two before harvesting to ensure the plant is as dry as possible.
   

2. Harvest
   Harvest as much rosemary as you think you’ll need for your recipe. I wanted to half fill my small crockpot and cover that with oil for the infusion. If using dried rosemary, you’ll only need to quarter fill your pot (it’s more concentrated).
   

3. Night before soap making, start the infusion
   Use a double boiler to warm your oils if you do not have a crock pot. Heat the oils and rosemary to about body temperature or slighty higher (around 40°C/100°F is fine). Once the oils have reached temperature, turn off the heat. If it’s wintertime, you can turn the heat back on for brief periods to re-warm the oils, but do not overheat! (or you’ll lose the green).
   

4. Record oil amounts used for the infusion
   This is a reverse engineered soap recipe! Normally we’d start with the end in mind and work back using a soap calculator to determine the exact oil amounts to use. But for this recipe I wanted to start by approximating my base oils first (mainly to use up the palm oil I had), then create my soap recipe from that starting point. If you’re following this approach, zero your scale and accurately weigh/record each portion of oil before adding them to the crock pot.
   Eg. I started with: 424g palm oil and 1018 + 517g extra virgin olive oil. I wrote those amounts down and completed my calculations the next day before making the soap.
   

5. The next day, strain out the oils
   I strained my rosemary infused oil into my soap making bowl and caught the leaves with a colander lined with a light cotton cloth. Gather the edges of the cloth, twist together and squeeze out all that goodness! Make sure you weigh your bowl before straining the oil and write that number down, it will make it easier to determine the weight of your oil afterwards.
   
   *Note that oils infused with fresh herbs need to be used without delay. Fresh herbs contain water and can promote spoilage and bacterial growth in oil infusions. Oil infusions made with dried herbs can be stored in a cool, dry place for longer periods of time, fresh herb infusions should not be stored.
   
   

6. Time for the calculations!
   
   ◽ First, work out what the percentages are of each oil you used for the infusion.
   Eg. I started with 1535g of olive oil and 424g palm oil = 1959g total oil before infusion and straining (what I added to the crock pot).
   To get the percentages, divide the total starting oil amount by each individual oil amount.
   Eg. Palm: 424g divided by 1959g = 0.216 x 100 = 21.6% (I rounded up to 22%)
   Eg. Olive: 1535g divided by 1959g = 0.783 x 100 = 78.35% (I rounded down to 78%)
   
   ◽ Next, work out your total amount of infused and strained oil.
   Weigh the bowl and strained oil together, then subtract the bowl weight from the total to determine the weight of the oil.
   Write that number down. That is your total oil weight that you’ll enter into the soap calculator.
   My total strained oil amount was 1894g.
   
   ◽ Then calculate your soap recipe. This video demonstrates the process I use with SoapCalc.
   My recipe specifications were:
   Total oil weight: 1894g
   Water amount: 1.7 : 1 water to lye ratio (I used sea water for my recipe, which makes the soap extra hard!)
   Superfat: 4%
   Optional sugar syrup: 2% of total soap oil weight (this video explains why and how to make it)
   Optional essential oils: 3% of total soap oil weight (I scented only half my soap with a combination of 1 part tea tree and 1.5 parts rosemary 40/60).
   I used two large bamboo drawer inserts for my moulds, lined with non-stick baking paper using this method.
   
   ◽ Finally, I took the total soap batter weight from the recipe and divided that by two so that I knew how much soap batter to pour into each of my moulds. I only wanted to add essential oils to half of the soap, so I put one mould on the scale and weighed half the soap batter directly into that before adding essential oil to the other half.
   
   ◽ The rest of my process is demonstrated in the video. I insulated my soap in my cooler for 24 hours before cutting as that was the only time I had available, but ideally this soap would be cut in 8-12 hours, once it is hard enough to cut (mine was very hard by the time I cut it!). Cutting time will depend greatly on the recipe and oils you choose to use.
   
   ◽ As with all handmade soap, cure it for six weeks and do a pH test before first use to ensure it has fully saponified and is mild enough to use. You can use the Zap Test or pH test strips to check the pH of your soap.

That’s it folks, have fun!

If you are new to soap making, please visit this page and check out my many other complete soap recipe videos (details for each are in the description below each video).

If you would like to support my work you can ‘buy me a coffee’ here (big thanks to all of you who have 🌼)

Enjoy your soap making!
Elly 🌸

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