I am hoping someone can clear some things up for me. To start with, I have never made soap and my knowledge was pretty much limited to what I found in the soap isle. After a week of browsing the internet, I now know a lot less. What I am trying to do is find a good baseline for a fulling soap. From what I understand, the main difference between a fulling soap and a hand soap is the alkali level. For a start, I have the following recipe:
50 lbs potash
5 gal (50 lbs) water
20 gal cotton-seed oil (per US Dept Agriculture, crude oil weighs 7.43 lbs)
20 lbs tallow
Add potash to water and let sit until cool. In separate container, mix cotton-seed oil and tallow then add potash/water.
So...
1. How does the ingredient ratio compare to what is normally used for hand soap?
2. To make a pure tallow soap, can I replace the 20 gal of cotton-seed oil with tallow (148.6 lbs) ?
and
3. Are the ratios literal - meaning if I only wanted to use 1 lb of tallow, do I decrease the others in direct proportion?
50 lbs potash
5 gal (50 lbs) water
20 gal cotton-seed oil (per US Dept Agriculture, crude oil weighs 7.43 lbs)
20 lbs tallow
Add potash to water and let sit until cool. In separate container, mix cotton-seed oil and tallow then add potash/water.
So...
1. How does the ingredient ratio compare to what is normally used for hand soap?
2. To make a pure tallow soap, can I replace the 20 gal of cotton-seed oil with tallow (148.6 lbs) ?
and
3. Are the ratios literal - meaning if I only wanted to use 1 lb of tallow, do I decrease the others in direct proportion?