New Soap maker

[Aotc82]

Hi

I’m brand new to soap making and I’m looking to make a pine tar recipe I’ve found online. I would like to make some soap for my family and friends.

I have brought a 50oz mould and the recipe is for a smaller mold. The size difference is 25%.

How do I increase the original recipe by 25%. Do I just increase each ingredient by 25%. I’ve looked at calculators and im so lost trying to use one.

 

[basti]

Definitely don't increase each ingredient by 25% by hand. Always run a recipe change through a soap calculator. The most important thing is to figure out the percentage of oils (and in this case, also the tar) instead of worrying about the lye and water amounts. The soap calculator will provide the lye and water amounts for you.
Here's a handy guide below that may help explain some things a bit more:



However, I really must encourage you not to make 50 oz of pine tar soap, especially if you've never made soap before. Pine tar soap is finnicky and can very easily go wrong, and if it does, then a lot of raw materials may go to waste. And even if it does go okay, maybe you'll find out you don't care for the recipe and now you've got a ton of soap you don't really like. I've been making soap for 7 months and still make the majority of my recipes using 500g of oil.

I would recommend using your mold as a slab mold and making a smaller batch inside it that is cut into flat bars instead of into the standard loaf cuts.

 

[AliOop]

HI @Aotc82 and welcome to SMF! May I suggest a few things?

1. Pine tar soap is rather advanced, because pine tar makes the soap batter thicken up very fast. I recommend making something simpler for your first few batches.

2. A 50oz mold is very large for a new soap maker. If your soap fails, you will have wasted a whole lot of ingredients. Try repurposing a small item such as a cardboard box, sturdy take-out container, or the like, something that will hold 16oz or so of ingredients. That will give you 3-5 bars of soap if it turns out well, and will not waste many ingredients if it doesn't. Plus, even if you like that soap, you probably will want to try making other soaps long before your 20+ bars of pine tar soap are used up. Ask us how we know

3. Before making any soap, even if you aren't changing the recipe size, you should enter all of the oils in the recipe into a soap calculator. This will confirm the correct amount of lye. Why is this important? You need to be sure that there are no typos or other mistakes that would cause your soap to fail. You'd be amazed at how many online recipes have mistakes in them! If you don't know how to use a soap calculator, there are good online tutorials to help with that. Besides, entering the recipe into the soap calculator will show you the percentages of each oil. You can then use the percentages to scale the recipe up and down.

I hope that helps. EDIT: @basti beat me to it, but I'll leave my reply up so you can see that his response isn't a one-off.

 

[Zing]

Welcome to the forum! Ditto to the above. I'm an experienced soap maker and making pine tar soap was a big challenge for me. Good luck! Keep us posted.