vjbakke said:
6 oz coacoa butter
6 oz palm oil
3 oz castor oil
2 oz lye
4 oz milk
3 oz water
I hope I didn't buy a crap book! The other recipes seem ok.
I just entered the recipe into SoapCalc. Provided that I entered everything in properly (y'all might want to check it in case I screwed up), this is what the recipe looks like when translated into percents:
40% cocoa butter
40% palm oil
20% castor oil
3% superfat
22.2% lye solution
One potential problem I see is the amount of total liquid in this recipe. That's
a lot of liquid. It goes even beyond a normal 'full water' amount. Although it doesn't pose a danger or anything like that, too much liquid will cause your soap to be very soft at first so that you will have to wait longer to unmold and cut. It will also cause warping of the finished soap as it cures, not to mention a longer cure time than normal to boot.
The recipe itself, i.e. the fat/oil content, looks okay to me. Some soapers will probably comment on how awfully high an amount of castor there is in the recipe, but I've used higher (23%) with no adverse effects. Since there is an 80% content of very hard fats in there, the 20% of castor should pose no problem. I use 23% castor in a soap with 65% beef tallow and 8% olive oil and it makes a beautiful soap.
The 3% superfat needs a special mention, too. A 3% superfat is on the low side of things as superfats go. Most soapers soap with
at least a 5% superfat. The lower you go on the superfat level, the more cleansing/drying the soap is, and the greater the danger is of having a lye-heavy soap. However, having said that, I personally like to use a 3% superfat whenever I'm making a 100% goat milk soap, and
only when I'm making a 100% goat milk soap. It's the only time I go that low, although I know of at least one soaper from another forum who likes to use a 3% superfat in
all her soap recipes. She must have more oily skin than me.
In case you're wondering, my 100% goat milk soaps superfatted at 3% are never lye heavy. They are all tongue-neutral. I like to go that low for my lather's sake, because whenever I use my normal superfat with my 100% goat milk soaps, it cuts down too much on my bubbly lather quotient. I likes me bubbles. 8)
Also, I noticed that the recipe is less than 1 pound in oil weight. That's not a bad thing provided that you have a really good scale that measures accurately down to .01 gram, but if you don't have such a scale (and most soapers don't- they/we for the most part use scales that only measure down to 1 gram), it's best to stick to recipes that are at least 1 lb in oil weight.
If you want a really good book on soapmaking, check out "Scientific Soapmaking" by Kevin Dunn. It's pretty technical, but it's very informative and trustworthy. For something much less technical, 'The Everything Soapmaking Book' by fellow soaper Alicia Grosso is good as well.
Also, as Elly mentioned, Millersoap is an excellent site for beginners (and veterans as well). Another good site is this one by David Fisher:
http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soapm ... e-Soap.htm
Also- you can't beat all the soaping forums for accurate, up-to-date soaping wisdom. Soak up all you can on the forums and in their archives. They are a treasure trove of soaping wisdom worth more than a whole stack of soaping books, and then some.
IrishLass
).
