Milk fat anyone ?

[Happysoap]

I could not sleep last night. I woke up at 4 a.m. and just like any good soaper I decided to continue on my quest for a perfect soap recipe. Lately I have been trying to figure out how to make the soap bubble without coconut oil - I find it drying at anything over 7-8% and I dont have PKO or babassu oil available to me. I was reading the properties of each oil that the SoapCalc has listed and I came across some interesting properties that milk fat has. Has anyone had any experience with soaping with milk fat? What percentage to use and how?

Is milk fat the yellow fat that is rendered with corn flour? Ghee? Sorry for this question but I am a city girl. The last time I saw a cow was on a wrapper of a Milka chocolate bar and it was purple ()

 

[lsg]

I am a farm girl, and to me milk fat means cream. Milk does not come from the cow naturally homogenized. In raw milk, the cream rises to the top and can be skimmed off and used for making butter and other delicious goodies. I use cow's cream as part of the liquid in some of my soaps. It makes a lovely bar that feels so rich and conditioning.

 

[DeeAnna]

Milk fat is not just cream or butter, because cream and butter also contain whey (water). Milk fat is just the 100% fat portion in cream, butter, or any other dairy product. It can also be correctly called butterfat or ghee.

I have used 20% milk fat (as cow's butter) in soap. The butter I used contained 21% whey (get that from the nutrition label), so every 100 g of the butter in the recipe contributed only 79 g of milk fat. The other 21 g of whey went in the water category.

Milk fat contains butyric acid. That is the fatty acid responsible for some of the odor in cheese and the strong odor of rancid butter. Butyric acid adds a distinct warm cheesy-bready-beery scent to the finished soap. The scent fades with time, but your fragrance (if you use any) should be chosen to blend well with the butyric odor. The soap I made was scented with mint and that worked pretty well.

Bear in mind, SoapCalc does not consider any fatty acids smaller than lauric and myristic, so it under-reports the solubility and cleansing properties of milk fat. A 100% milk fat soap should be somewhat more water soluble and at least as strong a cleanser as coconut oil soap, so formulate your recipe accordingly.

 

[Happysoap]

wow... that is interesting... i will have to give it a try... thanks for your answers