Just some guy's soaps

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52 bars of cocoa butter, shea butter, palm kernel oil, castor oil soap scented with bramble Berry's oatmeal milk and honey fragrance. .5% Sodium gluconate added. No ZCS. They're huge😳

Slab pour:
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Loaf cut:
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Curing rack (there's an upward bulge in the middle):
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What do you mean about the bars being huge? The cuts look very neat and even. Did you cut with a multi-bar cutter?

I hope the recipients will be appropriately appreciative of these butter-rich soaps.
 
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High oleic sunflower oil soap. Made with Zany's faux seawater, .5% sodium gluconate, and 1.5% sorbitol.

Shockingly white soap. The batter turned light pink initially though😱. Oils at 92°, lye water at 110°. Got to emulsion but wouldn't go to light trace even after way to much stick blending.

Turned the oven on to 125° (it has a dehydrate setting 🤯), turned on the light, and plopped the mold in. Left the oven on for 1 hour so the oven steel would hold the temperature all night long. This morning it was ready to cut while the remnants in the tub is still not hard yet.

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The homemade slab cutter (my paper folding sucks)
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Edit: changed % to °
 
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@justsomeguy -Wow, that is really white soap!! Do you think it was the high oleic sunflower oil that made them so white?
I'm always trying to get a whiter soap without adding too much TD. I haven't been that successful.
 
Probably Zany's no slime bastille soap.
Ding-ding-ding, Survey Says.... that is the correct answer! :)

There is a popular recipe on this forum called Zany's No-Slime Castile, which uses faux sea water, low superfat, high lye concentration, and high soaping temps to create a castile bar soap with less of the normal stringy, snotty slime for which castile soap is known, and doesn't require as long of a cure as typical Castile soap.

We usually refer to the 100% veggie oil version as ZNSC (for Castile).

The version that is mostly-veggie oil, plus some CO and maybe castor oil for more bubbles, is referred to here as ZNSB (for Bastile). It's a play on words in that the original meaning of Castile was 100% OO, so if other oils are used, it has been bast***dized.
 
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Like @justsomeguy, I can attest that ZNSC–Bastille version with olive oil (the plain "pure" kind, not extra-virgin) makes a very white soap!
This picture is of a test I did with 3 oils, but using a different recipe that contained more ingredients, including quite a bit of shea butter. You can see that even here the pure olive portion is quite light. Both ZNSC & ZNSB come out even whiter. I love them both!


Oil color comparison copy.jpg
 
We usually refer to the 100% veggie oil version as ZNSC (for Castile).

The version that is mostly-veggie oil, plus some CO and maybe castor oil for more bubbles, is referred to here as ZNSB (for Bastile). It's a play on words in that the original meaning of Castile was 100% OO, so if other oils are used, it has been bast***dized.
@AliOop , I have actually made ZNS Bastille - I just didn't know that it had its own special abbreviation. But, it makes perfect sense to distinguish the two recipes. But, I would not say my ZCSB came out particularly white. It was more like a pale yellow. Over time, I would say it's gotten a little darker yellow :( I don't mind the color, but one of these days, I'd like to make a WHITE bar without using alot of TD.

@A-Polly , that's a great experiment you did. Is Olive Oil without extra virgin or virgin written on it the same a Pomace Olive Oil? I don't get a very white bar with olive oil, except that I've only used extra virgin because that's what's in the store.

The whitest soap I ever got had lard, low oleic sunflower oil and olive oil (plus castor and shea butter). When I bought it, I didn't realize it was low oleic or that it was an 80/20 blend ( 80 sunflower and 20 olive). I stopped using it due to concerns re: rancidity. It has never gotten rancid, but it's only 5 months old. So, it could still happen. I have bought some high oleic sunflower oil but I don't want to open it until I've gotten rid of some of my other oils. Guess I'll have some yellow soap for awhile....
 
My whitest soap was a blend of lard, HO sunflower, and CO.

Extra virgin OO and pomace OO are both pretty green in color, so you won't get white soap using either of them.

A light OO used at 100% gives me a pale cream soap that lightens to almost white as it ages.
 
@A-Polly , that's a great experiment you did. Is Olive Oil without extra virgin or virgin written on it the same a Pomace Olive Oil? I don't get a very white bar with olive oil, except that I've only used extra virgin because that's what's in the store.

Although I've never bought pomace and don't know a lot about it, I don't believe it is the same as "pure" olive oil. My understanding is that pomace is the last bits of oil from the olives that has to be extracted using solvents instead of just crushing. I wonder if it is even used as food — perhaps that's why I've never seen it in a grocery store. The olive oil I mostly use for soap is the Sam's Club store brand (Members Mark) that comes in a 3L jug. It is fairly yellow in the bottle, and I recall being surprised the first time I tried ZNSC and the bars were pure white instead of yellowish.

The absolutely whitest soap I ever made was a salt bar with 100 percent coconut oil and 50 percent fine sea salt.

[edited to add the name of the Sam's Club store brand oil]
 

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