High Olive recipe

[KiwiMoose]

I'm thinking of trialling a high OO recipe so that I can have more time for swirling. I'd love a really runny batter for once in my soaping life! I get so envious when I see them on you tube pouring batter that looks to be the consistency of olive oil itself.

I still want some CO and castor for bubbles, and tad of my precious Soy Wax for hardness/stearic.

I'm thinking of maybe a @Zany_in_CO's no-slime castile hybrid? I don't want to wait a year for good cure, and I don't want slime.

50% OO
20% CO
15% SW
10% RBO
5% Castor

Plus sea water 0r faux equivalent. Keep a low superfat 1 or 2% to help reduce slime.

Thoughts and/or recommendations?

 

[TheGecko]

I get so envious when I see them on you tube pouring batter that looks to be the consistency of olive oil itself.

A few things to remember about the soapers on YouTube:

1. They are often making 5 to 10 lbs of soap and so it takes more blending and stirring, and they are often blending at a lower speed.

2. Many of them only blending their oils/lye to emulsion, not trace.

3. Many of them soap at room temperature (or lower).

After dishing up a lot of pudding, I finally figured it out.

I haven’t made a Castile Soap (or facsimile thereof) yet, though I plan to. Just need to figure out when I can store it for a year.

 

[Dawni]

@KiwiMoose I'm curious about how long it takes you to hit light trace with your current favorite recipe? I'm sure you must have mentioned it somewhere but I'm lazy to look for it lol.

Have you tried not using a stick blender at all? Lol I did with my Castiles.. Took forever, even if it was pomace. But I was trying for medium trace, not emulsion.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I think you should give it a try! I’m not super experienced with OO, but here’s what I learned from making a series of soaps with OO (virgin) in the 45-55% range this past summer (late July and early August). The recipes are similar for the series and all have 10-15% Shea and 20% AvO, with 2-3% SF. My recipe with 55% OO took 10 minutes of on and off SB just to come to trace with a starting oil temp of 90F. They were all relatively slow, but I did not try making swirls for any of the batches. The biggest difference I notice among the soaps at the 2-3 month mark is how much they bubble, which aligns with how much CO I used, anywhere from 10-20%. They all feel like OO soaps and lather like OO soaps. By that I mean they feel slicker than my lard and palm soaps of similar age, the lather is less dense and creamy, and the bubbles are smaller. I also have one soap from early July that’s a tweak of the Genny shampoo bar recipe (40% OO, 30% AvO, 10% HO Saff, 10% Shea and 10% castor). It’s not at all drying, lathers less than the others and seems just the tiniest bit on the sticky/gummy side to me when I’m using it. Moving ahead I will probably use 50% OO and 15% CO and try RBO instead of the AvO to get a little more linoleic in the recipe. I think that will help with bubbles while keeping the cleansing factor down.

 

[KiwiMoose]

@Dawni - Probably about a minute or two maximum for 1kg oils? That's very slight on-and-off stick blending combined with stirring - not a minute of stick blending. I did try just a whisk once - it took about four or five minutes to get to emulsion. I know I have successfully made a 'runny' batch before because I have photographic evidence of the resulting soap.

I think you should give it a try! I’m not super experienced with OO, but here’s what I learned from making a series of soaps with OO (virgin) in the 45-55% range this past summer (late July and early August). The recipes are similar for the series and all have 10-15% Shea and 20% AvO, with 2-3% SF. My recipe with 55% OO took 10 minutes of on and off SB just to come to trace with a starting oil temp of 90F. They were all relatively slow, but I did not try making swirls for any of the batches. The biggest difference I notice among the soaps at the 2-3 month mark is how much they bubble, which aligns with how much CO I used, anywhere from 10-20%. They all feel like OO soaps and lather like OO soaps. By that I mean they feel slicker than my lard and palm soaps of similar age, the lather is less dense and creamy, and the bubbles are smaller. I also have one soap from early July that’s a tweak of the Genny shampoo bar recipe (40% OO, 30% AvO, 10% HO Saff, 10% Shea and 10% castor). It’s not at all drying, lathers less than the others and seems just the tiniest bit on the sticky/gummy side to me when I’m using it. Moving ahead I will probably use 50% OO and 15% CO and try RBO instead of the AvO to get a little more linoleic in the recipe. I think that will help with bubbles while keeping the cleansing factor down.

Thanks Soap sister! I was wondering about adding Shea as well - but what would I reduce to include it? I think I'd rather have the SW. I looked back at my other fairly fluid recipes and discovered that I was using 28% lye concentration previously, which i have gradually increased during 2109 to between 30 - 33%. SO maybe for this recipe if I keep it down at 28% that would help too. As you know, I don't want to stop too cool with having the Soy Wax in there.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I don’t think you need Shea with the GW415 and OO. The calculators don’t account for how hard OO makes soap. As for the soy wax and lye concentration issues, I don’t know what to recommend. I used 33% lye concentration for my first three GW 415 trials because 33% or higher is what I use for my other recipes. I haven’t tried to swirl the recipe yet, but had more than enough time to split the batter, color it and do a drop pour.

 

[Dawni]

I was wondering about adding Shea as well - but what would I reduce to include it? I think I'd rather have the SW.

The RBO. I like it more than olive but I think in this case you don't need it almost as much as you don't need shea.

I also looked back at my only CP soap with soy wax, too..

30% lye concentration, 3% SF, no fragrance
Soy wax/lard 40%, pomace 27%, coconut oil 18%, grapeseed oil 10%, castor oil 5%

I hand stirred both - stirred, checked on the napping baby, stirred again, washed a couple of containers, stirred again. Didn't take that long.

I can't say how long trace took me but I wasn't stirring continuously. It was still pretty fluid - I was able to separate some batter to mix with cocoa powder and make a swirly top that dried flat, not the pillowy raised tops that to me indicate thicker trace.

Note that my soy wax was at 40% here, higher than yours, and I also had pomace though much less than yours. I can't tell you temps, but the containers were only warm to the touch when I mixed the lye with the oils.

Maybe it'll help you decide.....

 

[KiwiMoose]

OK - I'm going in! Watch this space.

 

[KiwiMoose]

Here it is - I used 5% Shea and reduced the OO to compensate. White tea FO which is a non-accelerant. Added a little Ho Leaf and May Chang EOs just coz. It's an 'Eve's Garden' type swirl - I always love her swirls. I hope my hanger does as good a job as her gear tie - being a lot thinner. Anyway, as we know, there's not such things as mistakes, just a different soap to what we planned...

ETA - the actual photo - LOL

 

[KiwiMoose]

I don't think it's going to gel . Hope it doesn't get crumbly ( my soaps usually do if they don't gel).
I put it out in the sun for about 3 hours - it's spring here and about 21 degrees and sunny. When I checked it, the mold was not warm on the non-sunny side, indicating that it probably is not gelling. Luckily Rog had just baked a tea-cake, so I've just put it into the warm oven to see if that will give it a little boost. Fingers crossed!

 

[Mobjack Bay]

OMG, that’s one pretty top! Did you end up using brine?

 

[KiwiMoose]

OMG, that’s one pretty top! Did you end up using brine?

Yes I did.
For the 477g of liquid required I used:
90g aloe juice/puree
150g New Zealand sea water ( from the east coast)
100g 25% sea salt solution, and
137g distilled water
If anyone's good at maths, maybe you could figure out what percentage of salt is in that 477g?
The reason for such odd amounts of things is because that's all I had in the freezer of each.

ETA - I reckon about 5.5% salt in the entire 477g?

 

[Zeb Lisik]

Thats a lovely soap top. have you tried an electric blanket to force gelling?

I'm not 100% sure but ill take a crack at it! haha ... Granted there's a margin of error for the aloe, since it has solids I assume.

150g ocean water, which is about 3.5% salt = 5.25g salt and 144.75 water
100g salt water solution at 25% = 25g salt and 75g water

total salt: 30.25g
total water 90+144.75+75+137 = 446.75g
which yields 6.77%

I didn't do any % math.. .I used https://percentagecalculator.net/

 

[DeeAnna]

You can gel a soap after it's saponified, @KiwiMoose, so there's a fix if your soap is soft and/or crumbly due to not gelling. Here are my tips for this -- https://classicbells.com/soap/rescueOP.asp