Reducing Soap Batch Size

by Liz
(New Zealand)

I have tried again using SoapCalc.

I want to make my castile batch smaller because sometimes I won't have enough EO or FO for my 2 kg batch.

It's my simple castile soap of:

1417 grams olive oil
425 grams water
178 grams lye.

This works perfectly for me. This size and the doubled size that you said I could do.

Now I need to halve it. Have I done this right?

269 grams water
91 grams lye
708 grams olive oil

If I have this right I will probably be sticking to it as I am finding that it suits all my needs and even my sensitive skin.

One other question if you don't mind?

When you total up all the grams in a recipe, is it everything...water, oil and lye??? Or do you include the EO or FO?? Or do they not make that much of a difference to the outcome

I really want to crack this SoapCalc and not let it get the better of me!

Answer:

Your original recipe has a superfat of about 7% and water is approximately set at 30% by oil weight.

If you want the smaller recipe to be exactly the same as the original except in size then you will need to put those amounts into SoapCalc as well.

To make it easier, enter your original recipe into SoapCalc and make sure you come up with the right amount of lye and water on the recipe page.

Once you have it right, you can simply go back to the main page and reduce the 1417 grams in section 2 down to 708 grams and then hit 'Calculate Recipe' in section 7. View the recipe and it should read as follows:

212 grams water
89 grams lye
708 grams olive oil

With all of that said...the easiest method of reducing the size of a batch of soap that does not have any ingredient changes except size of batch is to divide it in half. You only need to use SoapCalc if you change the ingredients such as instead of using 100% olive oil you decide to use 70% olive oil and 30% coconut oil. Then you need to run the recipe through a lye calculator.

As for including the fragrance in the recipe size amount. You can. I don't usually since my soap mould has enough extra size that I don't need to worry about overflowing the mould.

Good luck!

Cathy