Recipe advice

[JenL]

I have been working on a starter/basic recipe with oils that are readily available to me and won't completely blow my budget. I am not afraid of the experimenting part but also don't want to be wasteful of my supplies so I would value your feedback on any glaring issues that I may be missing or any advice on tweaking the percentages of what I have so far.

My initial recipe was showing to be a soft bar with not much staying power in the shower so I adjusted until the INS was higher but continue to argue with myself over increasing/decreasing the coconut, shortening, and canola trying to balance and given the risks to being too drying, DOS, slime factor and longevity.

20% Olive Oil
20% Coconut Oil, 76
35% Great Value Shortening (the tallow/lard/soybean variety)
25% Canola Oil

2% Superfat
33% lye water

(I believe the canola oil is high oleic from what I have gathered from the nutritional information. It has 9 grams monosaturated to 14 grams total fat per serving, description says good for frying/sauteing/deep frying and states it has high amounts of oleic and alpha-linolenic acids.)

 

[lsg]

You have a lot of soft/liquid oils in your recipe. If you would like to use just olive and coconut oil, you will need to let the soap cure for several months in order to have a hard-long lasting bar. If you don't want to use palm oil, then you can use a high percentage of lard or tallow in your recipe along with Castor oil and coconut oil and olive oil.

Here is a sample recipe
Castor oil 8%
Coconut oil 20%
Lard 50%
Olive oil 22%

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Along the lines of @lsg suggestion, here’s a link to the last recipe I used with Great Value Tallow Lard shortening. I added lard to increase the longevity. Since lard and tallow both have a fair amount of oleic fatty acid, it doesn’t take much liquid oil to get a good conditioning number. You can sub in olive and or canola for the sunflower oil with little change in any of the numbers, but you will want to run it through the calculator first. I left the superfat at 3%, but you can increase to 5%. I created a custom profile for Great Value tallow lard shortening based on the available nutritional information at that time (2020). Others have used the profile for GV tallow palm shortening.

 

[JenL]

Thank you both for the input! @lsg I don't have castor on hand but will definitely look into it for the next batch. I did, however, increase the shortening amount and decreased the canola/olive.

@Mobjack Bay Thank you for sharing your recipe and the information on the GV Tallow Lard shortening, very insightful on the numbers for me. I had not noticed it having the higher oleic acid count per se but that makes sense on those final conditioning numbers now. I will try adding lard or even just exchanging the GV shortening for other batches. I also will be trying one without those for my vegan friends/family and will just see what the difference is there. I may end up liking it better for myself even.

Thank you again for the advice. I'll of course run adjustments through the lye calculator and then we'll see how this first one goes and then adjust from there!