Seeking advice for first recipe

[sharnofshade]

Hi all, I'm laying plans for my first ever batch of soap! I've just finished rendering 1kg of suet into beef tallow, and now I'm trying to work out what proportions I want for other oils.

So far, I think I've hit on a workable recipe, but I'd love some outside opinions! (Please excuse my notation if it's non-standard - I wasn't sure whether percentages or weights would be more useful):

For a 50g batch:
Tallow Beef - 35% - 17.5g
Coconut Oil - 25% - 12.5g
Olive Oil - 40% - 20g
Lye - 27.261% - 7.121g

Does this look like it would work out okay?

And a side question: Is there an easy way to make tallow-heavy recipes while still ending up with a nice soap? I'd love to make a batch that's almost entirely tallow based, but from playing with SoapCalc, it looks like such a batch would be very hard and not very 'cleansing' or lathery? Is there something that balances out tallow better than my choices above (coconut and olive oil), which would allow for a larger percentage of tallow overall?

And... while I'm asking questions while researching, I've seen a bit of dissent on olive oil. Should I be aiming for high-quality stuff (EVOO or better), or cheaper, less processed stuff?

Thanks for reading, and for any advice you can give me!

 

[dagmar88]

Your recipe looks fine to me.
I think some people make 100% tallow soap; but I've never tried that.
You can use cheap olive oil'I personally use the lightest OO available.

 

[nattynoo]

50grams?????
Is that right.

 

[sharnofshade]

50grams?????
Is that right.

Oops, no, it was meant to be at least 500 grams! Thank you for spotting that for me (though I like to think I would have noticed once it came to weighing things for actual soap-making )

 

[nattynoo]

Laugh...I thought that must of been a typo as 50gms is like 1/2 bar of soap.
Hope your recipe goes good for u.

 

[shee]

please update on your recipe when you try it, I am getting ready to do my first batch as well after I get my suet next week and I render it. I was looking for an easy recipe like this

 

[honor435]

add some castor about 10%, it adds lots of bubbles!