FA Profiles in Soap Calculators: Who Copies Whom?

[ResolvableOwl]

(…fixed link)

How can an oil comprised of 80% oleic acid have an IV that is 60% of pure oleic acid? INS exactly 0?

 

[ResolvableOwl]

A teensy detail for SMFriend bugs me out, though absolutely harmless (my eye got caught by a recipe that @Professor Bernardo exchanged with me): a PDF recipe (print view) is structured with categories, one of which is “Liquid and NaOH”, regardless if you're actually using (only) NaOH, or KOH as well. KOH does appear in this category, but the title doesn't change.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Murumuru butter: SAP
0.196 – SoapCalc, Soapee, SoapMakingFriend, WSP
0.180 – From Nature with Love
ETA: 0.170 – Mendrulandia
0.164 – Handmade by Kathrin, TheSage
0.192…0.249 – Manske

It's a bummer that SAPs from sellers are grossly vague; this just annoys me, but it doesn't surprise me any more.
Soap calculators, though, disagree in SAP by some 20% for this oil! I only noticed since murumuru appeared top on SoapCalc's oil list when sorted by SAP, and that didn't fit to my expectation of low MCT = low SAP (particularly SAP should be lower than CO and PKO, with their higher MCT and lower myristic levels). I. e. I find the lower numbers more plausible than the higher. (ETA: It might also have played a role that it's not long since I read Kathrin's FAQ entry about coconut oil SAP – tl;dr for the non-German speakers: from anecdotal experience of some soapmakers, the “international standard” CO SAP = 0.183 appears too high, and she provides 0.1768 as a less tightly calculated SAP.)

Too high SAP can be dangerous because it eats up the mathematical superfat reserves, and the soap might end up lye-heavy.
I've used murumuru up to 25% (using SMFriend's SAP value) without zap yet, but I'd prefer to not rely on sheer luck.

 

[lianasouza]

You should also check this calculator: https://calc.mendrulandia.es/

In this one the sap number for murumuru is 0.238.

And here are Mendrulandias's fatty acids profiles of some other oils mentioned in this thread:

Cottonseed

Cupuaçu

Mustard

Coconut (only one option)

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Yes. I had had a look on Mendrulandia and somehow forgot it in the list, K-SAP=0.238 is Na-SAP=0.170.
I also like this calculator because they obviously have done the work to compile a different oil data base, that includes more of the “minor” FAs.

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Walnut oil: linolenic failure
In the confined world of the common SoapCalc-Soapee-SMFriend data basis, the FAs of walnut oil only add up to 87%. What about the remaining parts of the FA profile? It turns out that the highly important (not even particularly exotic) linolenic acid (C18:3) is completely missing!
Scientific literature agrees that walnut oil contains 11…16% of this acid, and other calculators do include it – for the sake of saving soapmakers from DOSsy surprises!

ETA: I'm on the verge of systematically searching for discrepancies in this database. I'm tired of finding them by chance.

 

[Dan9250]

I'm not sure if this will help but I came across this chart sometime ago.
https://www.fromnaturewithlove.com/resources/sapon.asp

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Soapers Choice, which is a subsidiary of a major edible and cosmetic oil distributor in the US, provides the SAPs for their oils in a downloadable pdf that is linked from the home page. It hasn’t been updated since 2020. For coconut oil, their numbers for NaOH SAP are:

coconut EV Organic .182
coconut organic rbd .178
coconut 76 .178

Perhaps the shift is due to processing?

 

[ResolvableOwl]

The SAP values of SoapCalc/Soapee/SMFriend for nutmeg butter are WAY off the chart.

Nutmeg butter is listed as NaSAP=0.115…0.116 / KSAP=0.162…0.1624, but when you recreate the FA profile from the same database, you end up with NaSAP=0.172 or KSAP=0.242.



It seems as if someone mixed up NaOH and KOH based saponification values???

ETA: I found an older, independent source that references some SAP values and the difficulties to determine them. There they mention KSAP=0.1746, but with the caveat that ”[t]he nutmeg fat […] contained a high proportion of the volatile oil found in the original nutmeg”. Another source mentions a 3:1 ratio between fatty and essential oils. They referenced another technique that found a much higher KSAP=0.2518 from the fatty oils alone.