Goat Milk Recipe Recommendations?

[Dani13563]

Hi everyone! I was wondering if any of you experienced soap makers had a better recipe that what I have been using. My current recipe works alright, but the bars are a bit softer than I’d like after eight weeks of curing, and they seem to be a bit oily? Anyways, this is my current recipe! (I would like to keep the same ingredients. Maybe just different amounts of each? But I am open to any advice and/or recipes!):

Lye solution-
200 g Lye
400 g Frozen goat’s milk
Oils:
400 g Coconut oil 76
300 g Shea butter
800 g Olive oil pomace
100 g Castor oil
Other:
40 g Fragrance oil

P.S.- My goal is to have a bar that doesn’t dry out the skin and lasts a long time!

 

[AliOop]

Hi there, and welcome! First off, consider making 500g batches instead of 1600g. That way, you only have a few bars of something you may or may not like.

Second, when I plug your recipe into the soap calculator, I see four things:

1. Your super fat is 13.5% - and that's without accounting for the extra fat from your goat milk. That is super high, and almost certainly why the bar feels oily. All that unsaponified oil is going to create a lot of soap scum, and will probably clog your pipes, too. Consider reducing your superfat to 3%, or at the very most, 5%. This ties in to the next observation...

2. Your cleansing number is 17 due to the 25% CO. That's pretty high for someone who doesn't want to dry out her skin. Of course, if you live in a humid area, maybe you need a higher cleansing number. Just remember that "cleansing" really means "stripping the oil from your skin." Soap with a cleansing number of 0 will still clean you! And the lower the cleansing number, the less superfat you generally need to keep the bar from drying your skin.

3. Your recipe is pretty low in palmitic and stearic acids, both of which would make the soap harder and longer lasting. An easy fix would be to reduce the OO significantly and replace that with some lard, tallow, palm, soy wax, or a combination thereof.

4. Your FO is only 2.5% - that is going to be very lightly scented. Maybe that's what you are going for, but typically it takes more than that for the scent to stick around and be noticeable.

I hope that isn't discouraging to hear all of that! You can make a few tweaks and end up with something that you really like, maybe:

30% lard or palm oil (not palm kernel oil)
25% olive oil (considering using light instead of pomace so it doesn't trace so fast)
20% coconut oil
20% shea butter
5% castor

After plugging in those numbers to the soap calculator, do the following:

Set your batch size to 500g, which makes about four bars, or 750g for five to six bars.
Set your lye concentration to 33% (not water as percent of oils)
Set your superfat to 3%
Use your goat milk as full water replacement

Tip: to get more bubbles despite reducing your CO, dissolve 1 T sugar PPO in your goat milk before adding the lye solution. You won't see any change to the "bubbly" number in the soap calculator, but your soap will be more bubbly!

Have fun, and let us know what you end up trying!

 

[Dani13563]

Thank you for the reply AliOop! I gifted some soaps to my grandmother today, so I could get a second opinion on what I should work on in my recipe. My super fat level was something I thought was high, but I never actually calculated the exact number . I do live in an area with high humidity (81% last time I checked.) I have another question though. Would I add the 1 T of sugar PPO to the milk before I freeze it into cubes or once I’m actually making the lye mixture? Again, thank you so much for the response and I am already looking for some suppliers to purchase some lard or palm oil!

 

[KiwiMoose]

Ali has given you all the advice you need. I will just reply to your sugar question: If the goats milk is already frozen then there is no reason why you can't dissolve some sugar into distilled water and add that to the lye solution.
E.g. - if your water amount is 300g for example, use 250g frozen goat milk and 50g water with already dissolved sugar in it. Be aware that the sugar can cause the lure solution to heat up, and you don't want to scorch the goats milk, so keep an eye on temp and use an ice bath to prevent overheating if need be.

 

[AliOop]

And now @KiwiMoose has closed the loop for you.

I actually lived in northern Dallas County, Texas for a few years - not as humid as Houston, and I don't know how either compares to where you are, but it was plenty humid enough to get immediately damp when walking outside. My low cleansing, low-SF soap worked just fine to remove all that "glow" and "glisten" on my skin, lol. Granted, I wasn't working out or doing manual labor outside, but I was often outside at the Rosemead Rec Center with the grandkids, or out grocery shopping, etc.

 

[Dani13563]

Hello again! I got the feedback from my grandmother as well as a friend of my mother’s (who is in charge of several annual fairs!) My grandmother said that she loved them (she has really sensitive skin and only uses goat milk soaps.) Her only complaint was that it only makes a really good lather with a loofa. The friend said that she loves them and has no complaints! And that her husband and kids use the bars as well! Now I am a bit conflicted on whether or not I should change my recipe. I am assuming that the high super fat is canceling out the cleansing number from the coconut oil? Or am I wrong? As always, all advice and opinions are appreciated!

 

[KiwiMoose]

Yes, just keep the recipe the same but increase the lye amount to reduce the superfat. Always use a soap calculator to help you figure how much lye you need to reduce the superfat to 3%.

 

[ScentimentallyYours]

High superfat can reduce lather/bubbles in soap.

 

[xuledywo]

Hi everyone! I was wondering if any of you experienced soap makers had a better recipe that what I have been using. My current recipe works alright, but the bars are a bit softer than I’d like after eight weeks of curing, and they seem to be a bit oily? Anyways, this is my current recipe! (I would like to keep the same ingredients. Maybe just different amounts of each? But I am open to any advice and/or recipes!):

Lye solution-
200 g Lye
400 g Frozen goat’s milk
Oils:
400 g Coconut oil 76
300 g Shea butter
800 g Olive oil pomace
100 g Castor oil
Other:
40 g Fragrance oil

P.S.- My goal is to have a bar that doesn’t dry out the skin and lasts a long time! Unlock the door to your dream home in Lebanon. Explore this beautiful house for sale here BeiTeck, offering the perfect blend of comfort and style in a charming location.

Most of the recipes I stumble on, that feature Goat's Milk, always have the milk frozen. They either combine it with the sodium hydroxide in place of water, or add the frozen milk with the melted oils. I've only used this milk a few times and I've never frozen it and only added it to the oils. After curing a batch for a minimum of 4 weeks, I tried the bar and it was a very creamy soap. I was really happy with the result. Can anyone tell me what advantage freezing the milk has over not freezing it? I assume the high temperature will affect the quality of the milk but are there any other reasons?

I've made over a dozen batches of soap and I've never measured the respective oils and lye solution temps. Why is it important to do this? Does false trace have something to do with this (i.e. decreasing the likelihood of it occurring?)

 

[Dani13563]

Most of the recipes I stumble on, that feature Goat's Milk, always have the milk frozen. They either combine it with the sodium hydroxide in place of water, or add the frozen milk with the melted oils. I've only used this milk a few times and I've never frozen it and only added it to the oils. After curing a batch for a minimum of 4 weeks, I tried the bar and it was a very creamy soap. I was really happy with the result. Can anyone tell me what advantage freezing the milk has over not freezing it? I assume the high temperature will affect the quality of the milk but are there any other reasons?

I've made over a dozen batches of soap and I've never measured the respective oils and lye solution temps. Why is it important to do this? Does false trace have something to do with this (i.e. decreasing the likelihood of it occurring?)

Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near experienced enough to give you an answer, but I am definitely interested in whatever replies you may receive! I have never heard of adding milk to the oils, but it seems like a fun little experiment to try! Especially since you got good results. May I ask what your recipe was?

 

[Marie_with_an_e]

I second (or third or fourth) the advice to lower your superfat. I add fresh GM to every batch and superfat at 6% with a liquid:lye ratio of 2.33:1. I use 50% distilled water and 50% fresh GM for my liquid and always add the GM to the oils after I’ve added the lye. Recently, I experimented with using frozen GM and adding it at different times: lye into frozen GM, frozen GM into the water-lye mix (very carefully, encountered no issues), or to the warmed oils before adding lye and I really didn’t like the results at all. Doing things my usual way, the color of my bars is usually a light cream/off-white when I don’t use EOs or colorants. The lather is abundant, stable and creamy without using a bath pouf but is absolutely insane when a bath pouf is used.

I don’t usually share my recipe but I will say my hard oils/butters equal 65% and soft oils equal 35%.

 

[Dani13563]

What soap calculators do you guys recommend? I plugged in my recipe to the Bramble Berry lye calculator and the soapcalc calculator and both said that for 5% super fat I need 220 g of lye, which isn’t too far off from what I am already using. Also, I did not create the recipe I am currently using. I originally found it online, and it said it had a super fat of 7%.

 

[KiwiMoose]

What soap calculators do you guys recommend? I plugged in my recipe to the Bramble Berry lye calculator and the soapcalc calculator and both said that for 5% super fat I need 220 g of lye, which isn’t too far off from what I am already using. Also, I did not create the recipe I am currently using. I originally found it online, and it said it had a super fat of 7%.

What you need to consider is that the recipe may be, say, 7% superfat, but adding milk of any saturated kind (coconut, goat) adds an additional fat not already calculated. For this reason, I always use a low superfat (2-3%) when making soap with coconut or goat milk so that the overall superfat with the milk does not go over 5%. There are better mathematicians than me on here who go so far as to calculate the exact superfat amount with the milk included. But I'm a bit lazy in that regard.

I tend to use Soapcalc or Soapmaking Friend as my calculators. However I just tried to link the latter on here for you and now it seems the link is broken. It does still exist so you may have to google search it. It was created as a subsidiary of this forum.

ETA: LOL - I see it has automatically inserted the link when i posted.

 

[2lilboots]

I use room temp goats milk and add it to my oils before adding the lye solution. I divide my total liquid in half, half distilled water to dissolve the lye, and half goats milk that I stick blend in my oils. My temps are usually below 90 degrees F.

 

[Dani13563]

I have always known that goat milk would add extra fat, I just didn’t think it would add enough to drastically affect the quality of the bars. I was mainly just wondering how my super fat is at 13.5% (not counting fat from the goat milk) if my lye amount is fairly close to the amount required to have 5% super fat. Soapmaking Friend doesn’t seem to be working for me for some reason. I might try with a different device later. Some other threads say that goat milk only adds about 1% of super fat, some say that they reduce from 5% sf to 3% sf when using GM, and some say they don’t bother taking goat milk fat into account. I guess this is just going to take some experimenting

 

[AliOop]

@Dani13563 Just in case I miscalculated something the first time, I just ran the numbers again. To figure out the SF, I entered the amounts of oils that you listed, as well as a 33% lye concentration (based on your 2:1 milk:lye ratio). Then I kept increasing the superfat until I saw that the amount of liquid and the amount of lye also matched your recipe amounts. And again, I ended up at 13.5% SF, per the first pic below.

However, if I up the lye to 220g (the amount you said you are now putting into the calculator), the SF does go down to 5%, per the second pic, below. I think where you are getting confused is that 220g of lye is a 20% increase over the original recipe - not exactly a small change! That's why you are seeing such a dramatic decrease to the SF between the two recipes. Make sense?

Recipe with 13.5% SF:

Recipe with 5% SF (due to adding 20% more lye!):

 

[Dani13563]

@AliOop Oh wow! Thank you for double checking! I guess I must be doing something wrong on the other calculators.

 

[AliOop]

No worries, it's good for me to double-check myself, too. And I edited my post since I had the pics in the wrong order.

Also, per my second pic, above, I don't necessarily think you were doing anything wrong. In the recipe with 220g of lye, you got to 5% SF by adding 20% more lye than the original recipe - that's a LOT more lye.

 

[Dani13563]

@AliOop Thank you so much! You have been so very helpful.

 

[AliOop]

Happy to help, @Dani13563 - lots of folks here helped me when I was just getting into CP after years of HP. We got each other's backs!