Found this "plant fat" brick in my supermarket... Palm oil and Canola mix.... but no idea what %

[saddigilmore]

Three ingredients.... Palm oil, Canola (rapeseed) oil, and air... .
but they don't have any ratio...
but something tells me this would make some good soap.

How would you all work with this, in regards to a lye calculator? short of contacting the company and asking them their recipe

 

[ResolvableOwl]

Had a similar one before (from a different brand, but probably the same manufacturer, just from another supermarket). I did some math back then and somehow decided it's 9:1 palm:canola with a NaSAP of 0.141, but don't nail me down on this … natural variation of FA profiles and palm oil fractionation are likely distorting everything. In any case, in a soap calculator the fatty acid profile is close enough to pure palm oil to use it as such (at <20% to add some hardness to a bar); some offer “Walmart GV shortening” that is close as well.

It's easy to get and it's dirt cheap. But I found it doesn't quite add as much hardness (and in particular not longevity) to the final soap as one would expect from the tons of palmitic acid it brings. Proper palm oil, palm stearin (both FFA-style from “rustic” candles, and fractionated palm oil from cheap “sustainable” tea lights), hydrogenated soy/sunflower/canola do a better job than these frying fat bricks. But when on a budget, they'll do the trick, like hard fat in Basic Trinity recipes.

 

[saddigilmore]

somehow decided it's 9:1 palm:canola with a NaSAP of 0.141... some offer “Walmart GV shortening” that is close as well.

I don't even know what to say :0 Thank you so much!! You always have an answer to the questions I have!! It has helped me so much. I really can't thank you enough.

Aldi man... I really love this store. It really sounds promising, this plant fat block. I'm on a budget It's almost a curse, because now I have to try another batch or two of this, to test as a new ingredient ) I can see why this hobby is so addicting too, there's always a new ingredient... always a small tweak to make, some improvement... I wish I started earlier!! And I wish Aldi had these fat blocks, they weren't around last month!!

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

My favourite method is to look at the amount of saturated fat Vs unsaturated in the product and compare that to the two ingredients. A bit of math work will allow you to calculate what mix of the two fats would result in that final ratio of saturated: unsaturated

 

[ResolvableOwl]

That's roughly what I did here too, IIRC. But I somehow lost confidence into it when I realised that palm oil is a troublesome ingredient in this respect. Not only does its natural sat:unsat ratio vary by several percent, but also you can't say how much fractionation they did. Obviously it is not natural-composition RBD palm oil, otherwise it would be softer at room temperature (doubly so with added canola).

Palm oil is usually fractionated into olein and stearin and their subsequent superolein, hard stearin, mid-fraction products etc., since they have vastly different properties for most varied applications, hence prices, but also different fatty acid profiles, sat:unsat ratios, and saponification values.