My Perfect Recipe Has No Working Time

[WeaversPort]

I just asked a similar question to this on another thread. Thank you newbie, but the sugar and stuff make me dizzy and as I am sort of new at CP, scared to try those things .....

Does anyone has a good recipe with the Walmart shortening? What percentage would you use in a recipe of it? Would you use it instead of lard? Is it a hard oil? Thanks.

I love lard soap. lenarenee shared her recipe and it was my very first soap. I used it after two weeks just to see what it was like, and even early I love the way it turned out. I'm looking forward to the entire cure and seeing what it is like!

You can find the thread, along with my questions and people's helpful answers here:

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=62902

 

[BrewerGeorge]

I think I've got this problem licked.

Tonight's soap went really well, and except for the heavily accelerating Silky Underwear, I would have had plenty of time for swirls of all kinds.

Here are the fixes.

1) I stopped using the salt (NaCl). Left the citrate, lactic and sugar
2) Switched from 25% shortening/25% lard to 50% lard
3) Got a handle on temp

I've been using my IR gun temp gauge and soaping around 120F, but honestly wasn't being a nazi about hitting 120F every time. If it read 125F and everything was ready, I'd go. Well tonight on a hunch, I checked my IR gun against an instant-read immersible thermo and the oils were reading about 12 degrees lower on the IR than they actually were. Add that variance to the few degrees of fudge I was allowing and I might have actually been soaping closer to 140F instead of 120F. No wonder it was moving fast!

Well, tonight I was careful to soap at an actual temp of 115F - which is about as low as this mix of oils can get without starting to thicken up - and everything was great. Now for completeness, I need to go back to the tallow recipe at the correct temp and see how much time that gives me.