Great thread, thank you for sharing! I am a long time lurker (well, about 1 year, after i started shaving with straight razors) on this forum but now i signed up just for thanking you. I make my own shaving soaps, but never got a very good soap, just ok ones. I will your recipes and give a feedback, now i need to order some more butters Why the long cooking? I observed that the soap pass the zap test after about 30 min of cooking... I can't get fragrance oils in my country, only essential oils. Any info about scents and proportions for essential oils would great, as those aren't cheap to experiment with
Ben - it's great being able to read your full thoughts regarding what you're working on. Thanks for continuing your adventure. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Absolutely, one of the best ways to play with essential oils (EO) is to make an unscented soap in bar form and then cut off a 1 oz slice and grate it with a cheese grater. Mix in your EO mix and then reform into a puck. You now have a 1 oz soap puck that is scented with EO to your taste without wasting a lot of expensive EO. If you used 4 drops of lavender per oz and your finished hot process soap is 23 ounces you just multiply 4 drops per oz X 23 ounces and you get 92 drops of lavender EO. Thanks! Thanks! I have a lot of comments regarding the later versions soaps and what I find to be beneficial to new soapers. Some of my first soaps were a Tabac clone but the triple milling aspect is what I am missing. I was hoping the vacuum process could replicate the milling process by removing all the air bubbles and moisture but so far I have not had success with that experiment. Tabac is a simple recipe: Stearic Acid Tallow Coconut Oil Glycerin KOH NaOH EDTA and other water modifiers like Tetrasodium Etidronate Ingredients: Potassium Stearate, Sodium Stearate, Potassium Tallowate, Potassium Cocoate, Aqua, Sodium Tallowate, Parfum, Sodium Cocoate, Glycerin, Potassium Hydroxide, Tetrasodium EDTA, Tetrasodium Etidronate, Sodium Hydroxide, CI 77891, Limonene, Hydroxycitronellal, Linalool, Citronellol, Coumarin, AlphaIsomethyl Ionone, Benzyl Salicylate, Geraniol, Cinnamyl Alcohol, Isoeugenol, Benzyl Alcohol, Citral, Eugenol.
The first two soaps I have very little of to review but will definitely get around to it this month. The last soap beta 1.7 I am completely out of and must make again as it was very popular around the office.
How much clay do you put in your soaps? Does it change from a recipe to another or it has a standard interval you should stay in? I presume it's kaolin clay. Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
I use 3.9% Clay to saponifiable material on average so if you use 100 ounces of saponifiable oils and butters you would add 3.9 ounces of Bentonite. You can use white clay, Bentonite, kaolin excetera and they all have different properties you can choose based upon what your face likes but I have only had the opportunity to use bentonite. It is known as being one of the slickest but also known for being drying. I think I can reduce that to around 2% but if you go by the common formula of 1 tablespoon of clay per pound of oils you come up with 3.9%
I ordered some kaolin last night, with some butters for expermineting your recipes. I have yet to decide what is your best formula I choose kaolin because that't what OSP soap from UK uses. Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
It looks like Squirrel & Nut has reallly gone off the deep end, and has ceased to be a serious wetshaving forum. Not to worry, because The Shave Den is still keeping it real. Thank you very much for your interesting and informative posts!
One more question if i may. In your first versions of tallow (1.0-1.3) what butters would you let for superfatting at the end of the saponification process? Tomorrow i should receive my butters order and i will try either tallow 1.2 or 1.3 recipe. Judging by the recipe sheets i believe that at that time you mixed in all the oils and butters without selective superfatting.
It depends on how much money you have to blow and how much time you really want to devote to this but I would probably start with 1.0 and then proceeded to 1.2 where you can add your clay. I would personally skip the 1.1 Thank you brother it is nice being able to review these Soaps in the open because I had forgotten what I thought about each one of them and I keep most of my records online instead of on paper. I have already made the mistake of spilling coconut oil on my data sheet and then all of my information is lost if I don't post it online. Well brother you're already way ahead of the game! All of the 1.X soap I saponified the oils and butters at the same time. I didn't start to do soap in stages until I got to the 2.0 stage which I have not even documented here yet. You're really ahead of the game so I guess I better show you what I did for 2.0. Actually I think my picture of 1.0 shows some writing on it showing the stages I went through. I'm on my phone so I can't go back and look but my 2.0 is exactly the same as 1.0 but done in multiple stages like you were talking about. If you don't have the time to wait around you can go to my thread on Badger and blade and it is heavily detailed in there but it's X number of pages and I'm not sure where in there it is. I'll make it a priority to get the recipe up today or tomorrow for you though so you should be able to find all your information on TSD instead of having to bounce between shave sites.
Well i supose it's better to select which oil to be the superfat. Only once i made a soap where i did put all in from the start. It was a lard soap and it turned out kinda greasy. I will look up the 1.0 recipe. It would be better for the thread if you document it chronologicaly, i believe. Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
Are you still using lard or are you now using beef tallow? I can tell you a couple things up front though. If you have a traditional 5% super fat and add all of your superfat Butters and oils in the later stages it's going to feel more like 20% super fat. When you throw all the oils and butters in together at the beginning your getting a much more homogeneous super fat profile than when you do it in stages so my recommendation is to saponify the stearic acid, coconut oil, shea butter Exedra first and then super fat only extremely selective Superfats such as kokum butter and mango butter in the second or third stage. When I superfatted avocado oil in the 5% range I got a really sticky tacky soap so I threw that in with all the saponified oils and that solved the problem but I can also add only 1% avocado oil in the third stage and come out with a similar but not identical outcome even though the recipe looks significantly different. Let's face it though, even with all the help you can get your looking at 24 + batches of shave soap to become extremely proficient. I started to get confident when my third batch started competing with some of the common Tallow shave soaps but it wasn't until 20 + in that I thought I was achieving that super 1% status. I probably haven't even achieved that 1% status yet but normalcy bias and whatnot... it's hard to maintain a clear objective ranking when everyone you're sending it to says its the best soap they've ever had. The problem is they've only had 12 soaps and yours is the best. I'm looking for people that have tried 300 soaps and rank mine in the top 10. I still have not achieved that and have a long way to work to even get close to that
Now i have some tallow to play with. That's what i was thinking, retain 5% of the oils and add them at the end to mantain them unsaponified. So i should avoid avocado oil as SF and focus on kok and mango. For clarification with "when you throw all the oils and butters im togheter" you are refering at the 95% of the oils, so minus the ones for superfatting. For now i am not really looking to get into that 1%, i only want a good soap to start with. As for the many batches needed i hope to get away with smaller batches than yours, maximum 250 g. I don't have a crock pot so i am doing bain marie. Don't know how much this can affect the quality of the final product. It seems that everyone is using a crockpot... How you doing three stages, what are you adding in the second and third stage after the stearic, coconut, shea etc? Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
Bain Marie first 5 batches at least I would throw all the ingredients in at the beginning instead of doing saponification in stages. Don't try and control the superfats until well into your soap making adventure. Superfatting after the primary fats have saponified is much more difficult than I could have imagined. Avocado oil is sticky, Shea butter isn't as nice as it is when saponified... kokum butter IMHO is better as a superfat only but it is an outlier.
I will follow your advice, thanks. Maybe that's one of the reasons my soaps weren't very good. Almos in every one i superfatted with Shea butter at the end and never used any in the saponification stage. Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
I made the same mistake superfatting shea butter but in fact it is so much better saponified. It creates a hard white bar with extreme moisturizing properties. In super fat form it is pretty greasy above 1 or 2% and like I said I learned that the hard way but if you look at Caties Bubbles they have stearic acid, coconut oil and Shea butter as the primary saponified ingredients. I think Catie's bubbles is a simple but very nice and easy to replicate recipe. Perhaps you should start with that one if you enjoy it?
Didn't tryed it yet. I live in easthern Europe, it is pretty hard to get soaps from America, the shipping is expensive. The best soap i used by now is OSP from UK. I olso had some samples from Strop Shoppe, La piere Lucien, Stirling, etc. In the past i made the MdC clone recipe with stearic and coconut, but i find it very drying and not mosturizing enough. Would the simple addition of Shea in the saponification make a difference? Sent from my A5_Easy_TM using Tapatalk
If you're still looking for this 300 soap guy, that's me . In the last few years I finished 29 soaps and used at least 10 times more soaps than that. Enviado de meu XT1225 usando Tapatalk
