Tallow, distilled water, and lye is the easiest recipe, but it requires some knowledge to develop the exact amount of each to use. How big is your mold, do you want to use a water discount, are you using a hot or cold process, etc.
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i keep on putting it off but i have a kilo of KOH and probably 9kg of belgian refined tallow. i really should pull my finger out. cold process for liquid soap is quite easy. dr bronners is not like it was 20 years ago, and actually liquid tallow soap is better than olive/coconut anyway.
i'm gonna do my research. i can use fresh rain water also. has only spent a little time falling on concrete and running through a vinyl hose into a plastic bucket. probably nearly as good as distilled i figure. the only tricky part is making sure i give it a good margin so it is a little bit superfatted.
soapmaking is awesome. liquid soaps from tallows is something you can literally do without electricity or even anything more than a balance scale, and a pearl lye kiln to make the KOH out of wood.
in my life i have never experienced as good a condition of my skin as when i was using 20 years ago dr bronners.
time to pull my finger out and stop being a baby.
Do it! But if you don't feel like expending the time, that's why I'm here. lol
well, i'll be nice and share the recipe exactly. i have a balance scale with 40g accuracy and i can do cold process with a blender i have sitting here, i think that is the easiest to get right. i think probably actually i want to get gram accurate scales to do it, 40g seems like too much inaccuracy if i want to practise and do small batches that will fit in my blender, which has about 1200ml capacity.
the recipe i'm using will be useful for euros who can get the ingredients off amazon in europe (i am in portugal so spain amazon is what i use).
i'm gonna make myself do it within the week. just have to figure out where i can buy scales from, i think the china shop in sao vicente has it. good excuse to get on the bike and do a day trek back and forth.
Yea, you definitely need a more accurate scale. I always do it by weight, and the cool thing about the metric system is that 1ml=1gr, so it's easy to figure out amounts. You can go to soapcalc.net to use for formulating an exact recipe. It's pretty simple to figure out.
i have used that site before years ago. soap making is one of my minor obsessions. detergents and commercial soaps are garbage. it bugs me more than most people because i have sensitive skin and autoimmune problems.