| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| James |
a good hard white bar soap recipe.This makes a firm white soap for general bathroom use.I devised this recipe for 100g of fats so I could scale it up to the volume that I knew worked for my container. To scale the recipe to your needs, divide each ingredient by 100 and multiplying by the total weight of fats in your normal recipe. Lard 48g Olive pomace oil 22g Coconut oil 25g Castor oil 5g Sodium hydroxide 14.2g Water 35g The castor oil gives it a really good lather. |
| gz |
Erm...is there a vege version? 
What do I use instead of lard? |
| sally_in_wales |
yep, use an online lye calculator, plug in the amounts of the fats you wish to use, and it will work out the lye quantities for you. |
| James |
The nearest thing to lard for vege soap is palm oil. It has a very similar saponification value, so can be used interchangeably. It also has a similar density and firmness, so the resulting soap is a similar hardness. The result would be a soap based on palm and olive (aka Palmolive).
Palm oil is often the primary constituent in vegetable shortening (like “Trex”) The only problem is... I wouldn’t use palm oil in a month of Sundays, due to the clear-felling of old-growth South-east Asian rainforest (the only home of the Orang-utan) to allow mono-culture palm production. I've seen this in Malaysia and it's very odd indeed- you’re travelling through beautiful, verdant, complex and chaotic forest then suddenly there's a huge shiny chain link fence and beyond it row upon row of identical palms that go on for miles and miles and miles. Nothing but hundreds of thousands of palm trees. No birds, no orchids, no chattering monkeys, no orang-utans no under-story of vegetation. Just vast numbers of palms to produce palm oil. Due to the lack of undergrowth, the soil is rapidly eroding and flash flooding is much more common in the valleys. In terms of sustainability, palm oil is really not a good product to use. Unfortunately, I don’t know of other vege oils that would give a similar soap. If I was to make a pure vegetarian soap, I’d probably make a different type of soap to the standard ‘hard white bar soap’. Probably a Castile (olive oil soap). Off the top of my head, I might start with something like 70% olive, 25% coconut and 5% castor. As Sally suggests, you’d need to run this through an on-line soap calculator (like SoapCalc to work out how much lye to add. |
| gz |
That sounds a good mix for my our skin types too (mainly sensitive, one redhead (well, he used to be )) 
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