Substituting Palm Oil for current recipe

Airlea · Oct 5, 2013

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to soap making (have only made one batch!). I took a class and the teacher gave us a handout with a bunch of recipes. I'd like to try the following recipe but without palm oil. Is there a straight substitution I could try? like olive oil? It's for a moisture bar....

70 gr vegetable shortening
75 gr sunflower oil
25gr cocoa butter
452 gr coconut oil
380 gr palm oil
26 gr beeswax
148 gr lye
385gr distilled water.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Obsidian · Oct 5, 2013

Lard works really well for a substitute and makes a nice bar of soap. Make sure you run the new recipe through a lye calculator anytime you sub a oil.

lsg · Oct 5, 2013

For any substitution you will need to run the recipe through a lye calculator such as SoapCalc. Beef Tallow is usually figured to be the closest to palm oil. You might want to take a look at the Soaping Oil/Butter Properties to decide what oil or butter to substitute.

Saswede · Oct 5, 2013

Olive or rice bran oil could work, or perhaps even soy oil. And you could also consider slightly increasing your cocoa butter ...... (But definitely use a lye calculator like soapcalc to check the amount of NaOH you need.)

Sent from my iPad using Soap Making

judymoody · Oct 5, 2013

To answer your question, the best substitute for palm is lard if you are looking for something that is chemically similar.

I ran the recipe through soapcalc and the good news is that the lye amount is accurate for 8% superfat

If you want a conditioning bar, however, I would change this quite a bit. Soapcalc indicates a hard bar that is high for cleansing and low for conditioning and with good bubbly lather. You said you want something that will moisturize. Soap doesn't moisturize but it can be conditioning and not drying to the skin.

Coconut is nearly 44% of your recipe. This is pretty high at 8% superfat. I would reduce it to 30%

Cocoa butter is only about 2.5% which isn't enough to be meaningful, I'd increase it to 5%

Beeswax is difficult to work with as it requires you to soap at pretty high temperatures; I'd get rid of it.

You could get rid of the palm altogether and substitute olive oil which is very conditioning.

I recommend the following modifications for a 1000 gram recipe (yours is 1028 grams of soaping oils)

Coconut oil 300 g
Cocoa butter 50 grams
Vegetable shortening (I used Crisco to calculate this recipe) 75 grams
Sunflower oil 75 grams
Olive Oil 500 grams
138 grams lye (8% lye discount/superfat)
300 grams water

This will give you a nice conditioning bar that still has decent cleansing and lather.

Hope this helps!