Bagaudae said:
What I would like is for it to be a bit more rich and "heavy". It lathers so easily that I am willing to sacrifice some of that for a bit more creamy thick lather.
To add more of a creamy oomph to your shaving lather, keep the stearic where it is, but reduce the coconut to make room for more of the 'creamy' fats/oils. Some excellent candidates for creating a creamy oomph to your lather are castor oil, avocado oil, lard, butters such as shea, cocoa, mango, etc... (especially the shea).
For what it's worth (to give you an idea of how low you can go on the coconut and still make a shaving soap with great lather), my shave croap contains only a total of 10% of the bubbly oils (a combo of coconut oil and PKO). Although adding lots of coconut oil will definitely make a shave soap that's very easy to lather, you can get by with reducing it way down by increasing your ratio of KOH to NaOH (or just by using 100% KOH).
Problem is I can't find tallow from a reliable source. Seems like all the online shops for soap making supplies are into the full vegan wave and animal based ingredients are hard to come by. I don't say this with any intent to depreciate, it's just what it is.
To kinda/sorta mimic the qualities that tallow brings, a ratio of 18% stearic acid to 82% lard just might do the trick.
I can get lard easily though. Is culinary lard OK? If so, I can grab it at any supermarket. Sometimes I even have it laying arround the house.
Culinary lard is actually pretty much the only kind we soaper's use, so you're good to go.
I will try to cut the CO in, let´s say, 10% and substitute that for lard.
By doing so will I need extra care as for the SuperFat goes? I mean is it OK to end up with some lard unsaponified?
Unsaponifiable components aside, it's actually very hard for specific "whole" fats, or only the fatty acids from an individual fat, to remain as a superfat. It turns out from experiments done by Dr. Kevin Dunn that things are much more complicated than that....
The following is a rough description, but basically, when fats are mixed with lye, they are broken down into their individual fatty acids, in effect turning your soaping pot into a big mishmash/smorgasbord of mixed fatty acids from all of your combined fats for the lye to feast on.... Although the lye has its preferences for what fatty acids it likes to eat first, it will eventually gobble down everything that agrees with it's digestive system (i.e. saponifiables vs. unsaponifiables), and as much of it as will fit in its stomach (i.e., however much of a percent you discounted the lye in your batch).
What this all means in the end is that if your recipe has a built-in/up-front superfat/lye discount of 5%, and you add all your oils/fats together up front (or even leave some out to add later at heavy trace when the lye is still very active), your resulting soap will have roughly 5% unsaponified fatty acids in it that are a generic mixture/mishmash of the fatty acids from all your fats combined (plus however much unsaponifiable material that the lye is normally unable to digest).........
If you are into Star Trek at all, you can basically think of lye as being the Borg- i.e., there is no more individualism- all the individual fats have been broken down into their basic components and have become part of the Borg (lye) collective......or something like that. lol
Many try to manipulate which fatty acids or which specific oils/fats will remain as a superfat by adding that specific fat/oil after the cook when there is no more zap, which will certainly give you the best chance at it, but it's not an 100% ironclad guarantee since soap does not exactly remain a static entity fixed in time and space. Microscopic changes continue to go on inside the soap to help it to maintain equilibrium, especially when it's lathered with water when you bathe/shower.
Your best bet, if you ask me, is to add some oils fats to your formula that are made up of a good amount of unsaponifiables, like shea butter, for example.
IrishLass
