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Our Recipe - See how we put quality in every bar.
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We have a lot of fun at Hidden Valley Farms, but actual soap making is serious business. We use nothing but the finest ingredients, no animal products of course! We use a
soap making process known as “cold process” soap making or “cp soap”. There are other processes available and we have investigated some of them, but we prefer this process.
Our soaps are very mild and pleasing to the senses. We also make a soap for very sensitive skin. This soap has no scent to it and is extremely mild. It can be used safely by people with chemical sensitivities.
Our soaps include such skin friendly ingredients as olive oil, shea butter, apricot kernel oil grapefruit seed extract and liquid silk. Some of our base oils we use are coconut oil, palm kernel oil and
soy. This formula makes a very hard soap and if allowed to drain between uses will last a long time. It also gives a very high lather and is gentle to the moisture properties of the skin.
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How We Make Soap
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Mixing the Ingredients
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The first stage, the actual mixing of the soap - this is done in regular canning kettles where we add and subtract ingredients for the various types of soap that we make. We actually make about 60 different types of soap that are wrapped in hundreds of different wrappers. The soaps and wrappers you see in these
pages are just a small sampling of all the soaps and wrappers that we make.
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Hardening the Soap
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When the soap comes to “trace”, a soap makers term that means that it has thickened to a gravy consistency, we then pour the batch into the molds as seen here. These molds are stacked up and allowed to go through the saponification process for about 48 hours. This process is the actual chemical reaction which turns all the ingredients into
soap.
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Cutting the Bars
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Next, we drop the soap block out of the mold and cut it on the cutting rack into long “loafs” - what you sometimes see in shops where you can cut your own soap. Next we cut these loafs into individual bars and they go into a curing cabinet to dry out and shrink.
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Wrapping It Up
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Finally, they go into the inventory to be wrapped. All the wrapping is done by hand in partially recycled paper. The wrappers are printed on our computer printers (14 of them).
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All our soaps are guaranteed unconditionally, so don’t be afraid to try them! We have a lot of fun on the wrappers poking fun at various activities but we take soap making very seriously!
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