We’ve been making quite a bit of soap lately. Since we loved our 100% goats milk soap, we thought we’d substitute coconut milk and see what happens.
We are really happy how they turned out. It’s still too soon to try them (It’s not been four weeks yet) but they look good but smell a bit strong.
One difference we found with coconut milk is that the mixture comes to trace real fast. We couldn’t believe how it was already ready to pour into the mold.
If you want to make cold process soap for Christmas, it’s a little late unless you want to tell your recipient to wait for it to cure. We were really pushing to get all of our done so they would be ready before Christmas giving.
Here is the recipe. Please refer to the cold process instructions here. To make the process go a bit smoother, we measured all of the oils ahead of time.
Olive Oil (40%) 360 grams
Palm Oil (25%) 225 grams
Coconut Oil (30%) 270 grams
Castor Oil (5%) 45 grams
Coconut milk – 342 grams (half frozen, half cold)
Lye – 129 grams
2 tablespoons of coconut lime fragrance oil added at trace
4 tablespoons castor oil added at trace
This makes 2 lbs of soap or 10 bars. (We use a 4 lb mold.) As with any recipe you get off of the internet, please run this through one of the calculators. This is my favorite calculator.
Regarding the coconut milk, we poured half of the amount into an ice cube tray to freeze it while the other half was put in the refrigerator. When we were ready to soap, we put the cold coconut milk in the lye container and added a little lye. Then the cubes were added and more lye added carefully.
As I mentioned earlier, this was probably the fastest trace we have seen so far. The coconut milk is supposed to add moisturizing properties and extra lather. Sounds wonderful. I’ll let you know how this soap feels soon!
UPDATE: 3/23/2013 – We finally tried this soap this month, over a year from when we made it. We didn’t like the smell and thought maybe the process was flawed. However, when I finally tried this a couple weeks ago, I found it to be a wonderful soap. We decided that we don’t like the Coconut Lime Fragrance Oil. It smelled good in the bottle but terrible on the soap. We also decided to freeze all of the coconut milk into ice cubes. Works much better.
Please don’t use palm oil!!!!!!!!!! Palm oil production world wide is responsible for deforestation of natural habitats of gorillas and orangutans. Beautiful unique forests of plants still unknown for their health benefits are ripped down removing habitat for millions of animals, birds and insects. The forests are burnt down creating enormous world wide climate change in exchange for unimagined wealth for third world populations. Then a monoculture of palms are planted as far as the eye can see and the promises of riches turn out to be just the one off payment. the mono culture is controlled by toxic sprays which leach rapidly into the waterways and kill off everything further downstream making life impossible for neighbouring populations of humans animals plants burds and insects. Corporate greed to provide cleaning products and makeup constituents we do not need! Please say no to palm oil in every product you buy.
Jo, We know about the problem. We only buy palm oil that is cultivated and pressed in an environmentally sustainable manner. When we first started making soap almost two years ago, we met Mary and Tracy from Soap Solutions who I ended up writing a column about their business. They were the ones that told us all about sustainable palm oil. Thanks for dropping by and commenting.
Looks yummy and I know it smells divine!
By ‘ coconut milk ‘, did you mean liquid content of coconut or crushed coconut meat?
Sheriff, It’s the coconut milk that comes in a can. You can buy it at most grocery stores. Hope that helps.