superfatting?

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tomrip

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hello. my wife and i made our first batch of cold process soap, and decided to try a hot process. i looked around and found one we had the ingredients to make.i read a blog post with pictures, and theirs came out dark brown. ours came out beige. the recipe is below, and i followed it to a t. the one question i don't know is the super fatting. it says lye with 5% superfatting,. does that mean i am supposed to do something, or just saying that's what it is?
Kaleb's HP Oat-N-Honey Castile
(great for crock pot HP)

32 oz. olive oil (not pomace)
3 oz. castor oil
4.50 oz. lye (about 5% superfatting)
12 oz. water

Add your oils to the preheating crock pot. Go ahead and dissolve your lye in the water. After the lye is fully dissolved, go ahead and add it to the oils. Stick blend to thick trace. Turn the crock up on 'high' and cover with a lid.

Check on the soap about every 10 minutes and stir well. Recover with lid.

After the soap has gone through the separation stage, then has gone through the rising up and turning in on itself stage (and looks like a cross between veseline and mashed taters) go ahead and do the knife test: stick a clean dry butter knife into the soap... if the soap looks waxy, go ahead and do a tongue test... if it still zaps, add an additional 1 teaspoon more of olive oil, stir it well and let it cook for about another two minutes.

Next: add the following:
3 tablespoons honey

Stir the honey into the cooking soap. It should immediately start to change colors, and will ultimately turn dark. It should sizzle a bit. Go ahead and turn off the crock.

Next: add the following:

3 tablespoons oat flour, mixed with about 3 or 4 tablespoons cold water to get all the lumps out (use your fingers to feel-out all the lumps).

Stir-in the oat flour mixture VERY WELL. Now you can go ahead and mold-up the soap. This amount of soap will fill a quart milk carton and a pint (half quart) milk carton.
 
Howdy and welcome to the forum!

I ran your recipe in the SoapCalc lye calculator (you'll want to do this for all recipes you make regardless of where you got them from - typos happen).

32 oz. olive oil (not pomace)
3 oz. castor oil
4.50 oz. lye

It does have a superfat of 5%. Basically that's the amount of unsaponified oil left over. Most folks do 5% for Castille. Other soaps vary with 4%-8% being common. It really depends on the recipe and skin type.
 
Oh, honey soaps do darken a bit for me, but mine don't go to an incredibly dark brown. Are you using 100% honey (a lot of supermarket "HUNNYS" have "honey flavoring" with corn syrup).

Another oh... Castille soaps are olive oil only. Adding that castor made it into a "bastille" soap... the illegitimate child of a castille soap ;)
 
thanks, i was just making sure i didn't miss a step. i bought soapmaker software, i will add recipes i find into it. where do you guys recommend for recipes?
 
Another oh... Castille soaps are olive oil only. Adding that castor made it into a "bastille" soap... the illegitimate child of a castille soap ;)

ROTFL!!!! I've never heard that definition of a bastille. You slay me, snappy!

Back to the topic at hand.... Tomrip, you'll want to get used to using an online calculator to make sure all your measurements are right. It looks confusing at first but there's "SoapCalc Directions" at the top of the page to help. Here's the link:

http://soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp

Good Luck!

ETA: I meant to tell you the bastille soap you made will need a long cure, like months to a year, before it's decent soap. That's the way of it when using all soft oils. There's a thread now about people making their New Year's Day Castile - so it's ready for Christmas.

Recipes are really personal preference so you'll have to start with a basic one and go from there based on how you like it after cure. A simple recipe is:

50% Lard or Tallow or Palm
20% Coconut
25% Olive
5% Castor
 
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wow. i did not know that. i was under the impression that hot process soap was ready right away. lol, that's what i get for not doing more research.
 
There's a lot of misinformation about curing out there, and that HP soap doesn't need a cure. HP soap is saponified, but not cured after unmoldin. But don't take our word, try a bit every week for 6 weeks or more and see. It will gain lather, mildness, and the ability to not melt immediately in the shower.
 
Don't feel too bad tomrip. I thought the same about hot process when I first started. Hang around here and you will pick up all kinds of good information. As for recipes, I prefer to make my own. Just play around with a soap calculator (soapcalc.net) until you get the stats you want.
 
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