Doubling the Recipe

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LyeDown

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I have made a few batches of goats milk soap and would now like to double the recipe. Is it OK to do that with soap recipes? I'm not confident enough to use a soap calculator as yet to check. My recipe has 500g SOLIDIFIED vegetable oil, 250g copha, 750g rice brain oil; 400g frozen goats milk and 204g caustic.
Would appreciate some help/advice! Thanks.
 
Many thanks for replies. Thanks also for link. That one looks a little easier!
 
Love your screen name!

Lye calculators aren't scary. They look a bit intimidating but it's just plug and play.

It's okay to double a soap recipe. Some things to keep in mind -

1) Make sure your soap pot will COMFORTABLY hold the batch. I don't like mine to be more than 2/3 full.

2) The lye water will take longer to cool. The oils will take longer to heat...and if you get them too hot, longer to cool back down.

3) Make sure you can comfortably handle that weight - the soap batch and the soap, which is hot and caustic.
 
SoapCalc can look kind of intimidating at first, but once you've used it once or twice it's very, very easy and you can use it to craft any recipe you want, and always gets an accurate lye amount! I use it for every batch I make.

All you have to do:

Go here:http://soapcalc.net/calc/soapcalcwp.asp

1. Type of Lye: NaOH is the scientific name for lye/caustic soda. KOH is potassium hydroxide. For most cold process soaps, you'll use NaOH only.

2. Weight of Oils: Choose your preferred unit of measurements and input how much oil you plan to use.

3. Water: The default here is "Water as % of Oils", but many soapers prefer to use one of the other two options. I like to use "Lye Concentration". An average recipe would use about 30% Lye Concentration. A "soft" recipe like Castille would benefit from a higher Lye Concentration like 35%-40% to help it trace and solidify faster.

4. Select your superfat - that means the extra fat left over after the lye has worked its magic. A higher superfat results in a less skin-drying bar, but too much can cause softness. 5% is normal. In most cases, you will want at least 3% superfat just to account for any measurement errors to ensure you don't end up with a lye-heavy soap. This section also includes fragrance - if you're adding fragrances like fragrance oils or essential oils, you can add them here.

5. List of Soap Qualities. You do not need to input any information here! After you submit your recipe, you can see what qualities it will have.

6. Add your oils! Select an oil from the list, press the "Add" button to add it to the list. Then you have the choice of whether you want to work with percentages or pounds/ounces/grams. Add each oil you plan to use for your recipe.

7. After you've completed everything above, click on "Calculate Recipe". SoapCalc will make the "Soap Quality" calculations for you to review.

8. To view your final recipe, click on "View or Print Recipe". A new window will open with your recipe, which includes the amount of water and lye you should use.

Good luck, let me know if you have any questions! We're all here to help!

I took the liberty of running your recipe through SoapCalc. I assumed that Solid Vegetable Oil = Crisco (also known as vegetable shortening), and I googled and saw that Copha is Coconut Oil with a small percentage of soy lecithin in it. So that's what I inputted.

So you'll see in the images that you now have percentages for your recipe. 33% Vegetable Shortening, 17% Copha and 50% Rice Bran Oil with a 5% superfat. Now that you have the percentages, it will be very easy to scale this recipe to any size you want. You can also see that SoapCalc provides "Soap Weight Before CP Cure or HP Cook" - it adds up your oil amount, lye amount and liquid amount so you know if it will fit inside your mold or not. Very useful.

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Not sure what country you are from but the solidified veg oil here in Australia is palm oil. I noticed you had copha down, that's why I thought I'd tell you.

Also, if you are only learning I suggest making only 1 kg oil batches, that way if anything goes wrong you are not wasting too many ingredients.
 
thanks so very much everyone for the replies. Much appreciated. Thanks for the tip on the solidified veg oil Relle - I'm in Australia. Toxicon - thank you so much for the tips on the calculator!
:)
 
Much appreciated. Thanks for the tip on the solidified veg oil Relle - I'm in Australia.
:)

Thought that was the case when I saw that you put down copha. You will also need to change the first oil of 'Crisco' to palm oil on the recipe. Would you like to go to the Introduction Forum and tell us a little about yourself. We need more Aussies here.
 
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