Alright, I now have two glasses of pretty decent Bordeaux in me, so I'm in full blown "thinking outside the box" mode.
I question a lot of what the "experts" in this field say. I'm not saying they're wrong, many make some fantastic points. But there always seems to be some hole in the theory's/practices. Like the big bang theory. Sounds great, giant piece of mass that blew up and is constantly expanding outward. So....where did the giant piece of mass that exploded come from?
That leads into, the problems with diagnosing DOS. We're tying to inject the scientific theory into a process with unknowns and constantly variable parameters.
Consuela and Rogue, as well as others on here, have all brought up the point of freshness/expiration of oils. One thing to note is the expiration date of oils is dependent upon proper storage. Drop a 55 gal drum of any oil in a hot Texas warehouse for 3 weeks, and it's going to be aged more than a 12 month old oil stored at proper temperatures. How can we know, when running tests, exactly how "old" the oil is. We really have no idea how long that oil sat in a a warehouse at the wrong temp while at the manufacturer. What happened to it during transport? How long did it sit in the suppliers warehouse after it was opened? Truth is, unless we picked the olives, pressed the oil, aged and stored the product, we have no idea what the oils true age is. Therefore, we are running experiments with flawed materials, unknown variables and the results should be ignored.
It's one of the problems with the Dunn experiment. How old was the oil? Was it really 100% olive oil, or one of the many counterfeits we read about? Can you take one batch of OO and one batch of CO and run a single experiment and determine, I've found the answer? I would say not a chance, and it really doesn't follow the rules of scientific theory. But it sounded good at the time, so most people just accept the answer.
Here's another one. Superfatting doesn't contribute to DOS.
Accepted standards.
1) you cannot designate a superfat oil in the CP process. The lye takes what it wants. Unknown oils remain unsaponified in the makeup of the superfat.
2) Because of the chemical reaction with the lye, the saponified oils are no longer free fats and have become salts of the different oils.
Lets look at these two standards, utilizing a true Castile soap.
So what is going rancid in the soap. Is it the Sodium Olivate? Since it is no longer an oil, how is it going rancid? If number 1 is correct, we don't have to guess which oil is superfatted. It has to be the Olive, since it's the only oil. But wait, the experiments all say the superfatted oils go rancid at the same rate as the saponified oils. How is that even remotely possible? If that were the case, then the shelf life of any soap would be equal to the shelf life of any oil used in the soap. Yet here we have a batch of Castille soap, over a year old, that exhibits no signs of DOS. How do the saponified oils react in the same manner as the unsaponified oils? To me, that just doesn't follow basic logic. It's like saying that salted beef is only going to last as long as raw beef, after exposure to the air.
Call it " fermented grape juice logic",
but to me the only answer that qualifies all the variables of vegetable oils, animal fats, etc. is the "actual" freshness of the fat, when beginning the process. In simple logic, this would be an easy answer, in regards to the varying results you see posted in regards to "which fat causes DOS". If it in fact is just fat going rancid.
That and if the unsaponified oil in a superfat is somehow affected by the surrounding saponified oils, which keeps it from being affected by rancidity, then someone needs to do a better job of explaining that process to me. It doesn't even remotely sound scientifically possible.
