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I'm trying to make a Marseilles "homage" soap, and the hydroxides just aren't gettin' 'er done for me. One traditional Greek olive oil soapmaker (Patounis) says he finds 5 days to be the optimal cook time, so I'm guessing he's using sodium carbonate. That's the max cook time I will shoot for...

I want to try making a 100% olive oil soap using sodium carbonate as the "lye". Can anyone give me a rough estimate (or better yet a specific amount) of how much to use per unit EVOO? I'll be salting this out, so some excess is ok. I just have no idea how much to use and don't want to go too...

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll probably start a new thread asking if anyone knows a ballpark amount of sodium carbonate to use with olive oil. Also, thanks for the links on the previous page. I had seen that one page about making Marseille's soap once before, but actually thought the...

Sorry, I have no idea who makes the WalMart EVOO. I just bought it because it was cheap. That's kind of hard to say. I keep rotating them, using a different soap every day or two. I really like them all, even the Papoutsanis and KMF. The only one I'm not using is the Aleppo, but that's...

I can personally attest that Nablus soap does use salt. I did a lick test for each of the soaps in this thread and it was one of the saltier ones, if memory serves. Extremely interesting about the sodium carbonate! I'll have to give that a try.

I made a few hot process soaps from olive and laurel oil back in Dec-Feb. The laurel oil scent came through in the finished product, but smells nothing like the Aleppo soap I bought. My 25% laurel oil soap started out a dark green and has become a bit lighter colored after 6-7 months, but it...

Nice! You can even see the imprints of where the other bars were stacked on top of it to dry when it was still soft. Can you comment on the smell? I'm curious if most all Aleppo soap has the same smell. If you can find some Kiss My Face olive oil soap, that's about what mine smells like.

I like both of these bars. As far as sudsing goes, they are both about average for these types of traditionally made olive oil soaps. They are on par with the Nablus, Aleppo, and Marseilles soaps (the Marseilles is the highest sudsing). I have a water softener though, so I usually don't have...

For the record, I ended up cutting the olive oil bar in half as well, and its inside was lighter than the outside, with just barely the slightest hint of green. I should add that the soap savings you see in the picture above are from when I cut the pomace bar - I probably should have reversed...

My latest traditional olive oil soap acquisition comes from the Patounis family factory, which has been making soap for over 100 years on the Greek island of Corfu. The US distributor (oiloflife.com) sells two kinds of Patounis soap, one made from olive oil and the other from pomace oil. There...

Thanks for the input. That's kind of the conclusion I'm coming to as well.

That's interesting. Just curious - can you comment on the smell, and have you made your own olive/laurel soap? I'm curious as to how others interpret the scent. I have a water softener, so soap scum usually isn't so much of a problem. I'll watch this one. I don't think it's any added scent...

Recently I started thinking that it's a bit odd that I've tried to make Aleppo style soap, but have never actually tried any of the real stuff. So last week I bought some from a Canadian seller via ebay. I ordered the 30% laurel oil version, and it arrived yesterday. I immediately cut the bar...

A minor update if anyone out there is still reading this... I bought some Nablus soap from a seller in Israel over ebay before I found the stuff locally. I received the ebay soap this week and it is a bit different than the locally bought bar. The main difference is that it has no fragrance...

For a comparison, I dug a chunk of savon de Marseille olive oil soap out of the bathroom closet and snapped a pic. This piece has to be about 5 years old. When it's new, the color is a nice olive green (go figure), but a few months of aging turns it a brown/green color.

I stopped by a local international food shop the other day and was surprised to find an assortment of MIddle Eastern soaps. I bought a bar of Nablus soap, and a bar of Turkish olive and laurel oil soap. The first bar pictured is Nablus soap, which is made in the city of Nablus, in Palestine...

I believe that solvents are used to extract the oil only after the first or second pressing. Not speaking Spanish, I'm not sure why that guy boiled the olives. Maybe to make the oil easier to squeeze out by hand? If you search youtube, you can find other videos of people cold pressing fresh...

If you can get fresh olives locally, you can try making your own olive oil. I don't speak/understand much Spanish, but this how-to is fairly self explanatory. Not any olive trees where I live though... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBQezlMmIRs

In the past I've searched the internet for pictures and sources of raw olive oil, and also raw pomace olive oil, trying to find the thick dark green oil that looks like what is in the popular video of Aleppo soap making. I've never been able to come up with much of anything though. One thing I...

Thanks for posting the video - I have never heard of this soap. I liked the fact that they showed the olive oil before they put it in the cooker. It looks like what you can buy in a bottle in the US, and the soap it produces is light colored like a castile made with US olive oil. I've often...