The "One Recipe" Theory - Question

[Microchick]

I will give it a try. Read so much of Deanna's stuff on Classic Bells about the chelators so would have to decide whether to go with citric acid and deal with adjusting the lye or go the easier route and just use sodium citrate. Seems cheap enough to just buy sodium citrate and have one less calculation to deal with.

The lye calculator on this site, soapmakingfriend, will do the math for you if you select citric acid as an additive.

 

[violets2217]

whether to go with citric acid and deal with adjusting the lye

Most lye calculators I've used adjust the lye for you when citric acid is added to the ingredients... Classic Bells is bookmarked on all my electronic devices!

 

[Arimara]

The lye calculator on this site, soapmakingfriend, will do the math for you if you select citric acid as an additive.

It didn't always do as good a job with that, however. It's good to know how to do the math to double check, even if you suck at math like some of us do.

 

[MickeyRat]

I'm hobbyist not a pro but, I have settled on a few recipes I use for different purposes. I played a little with exotic oils, goat milk powder, etc. I have to be honest. This is just my opinion but, unless it's a very special purpose soap, I don't feel the slight change you get from the exotic ingredients is worth the cost. I do use some exotic oils in my charcoal face soap but, that's a special purpose soap. If I was selling it, they might make sense from a marketing standpoint. The only ingredients I use in most of my soaps that I can't get at the grocery store are castor oil and soy wax and those are relatively cheap.

I always use a lye calculator on a new recipe no matter how I come up with it. I keep recipes in a spreadsheet with notes about what I'd like to tweak next time till I get them where I want them. Once I get there, that's the recipe I use for soap for that purpose. Any changes to the oil weights or lye (sometimes I use mixture of KOH and NOH) go through a lye calculator.