If you are a soaper who loves to talk about all things soap, this blog entry is for you. If you like to see what we are making, then this will probably not be very interesting for you. Look at the next blog entry for today, because it is VERy interesting, and thanks for reading our blog!!
We have come to rely on palm oil quite a bit. Do other soapers use it too? It seems to be pretty common given how much we find written about it, and how often we find low quantities or "out of stock" from some suppliers. Of course, we are still relatively new soapers, so maybe our experience is an anomaly.
We have ordered from Bramble Berry, and from Soapers Choice; we have ordered from J. Edwards (yesterday's Red Palm), and we have ordered from Bulk Apothecary. Everyone has something different in their product or their packaging.
BrambleBerry offers microwavable, boil-able bags, but if you use it in large quantities, those bags aren't economical. Also, as much as we love BrambleBerry and their great ideas, support, and products, orders simply take a long time to get to us. Maybe we're impatient, but it just seems like it takes much longer than other places from which we have ordered.
Soapers Choice had some larger packaging and containers that were easy to handle, but we didn't like the idea of microwaving the same plastic bottles over and over again. Plus, the bottles are too tall for the microwave so we have to lay them on their sides which leads to leakage all over the microwave as they are heating.
We finally came upon a good price for a large bucket of palm oil but it is a pain in the bucket to deal with. We could buy a pump lid (and if we continue to use palm oil so much we probably will) but remember that Kathy and I both have the same middle name - "Thrifty." Wait - we both have the same last name, too. Weird.
The reheating issue with palm oil is that it solidifies in between uses but as it hardens, the particles in it settle toward the bottom of the container. If you do not reheat it and mix it evenly between uses, you will end up with very different soaps using the oil from the top of the container and the bottom. (Or so we've learned from our research. We have not experienced it ourselves because we haven't taken the risk.)
There is a homogenized cube of palm oil that we could purchase, but the suppliers all warn that they are not responsible for melting that could occur in transit. We just can't risk losing money on melted palm oil, so it will probably be winter before we try that. The cube sounds like the way to go, if you can get it because you don't have to melt it. You can just cut off what you need.
We would sure love to get comments from anyone who has tried it to hear what you experienced and what you think!
The palm oil we are using right now is the 40 lb bucket from +Bulk Apothecary. It is different from any other that we have used in that it has never completely solidified. It is very watery, but we can see solid particles suspended in it. We spend a lot of time stirring it before each use, then when we measure out what we need for a batch, we still heat it until it is melted to ensure that the particles are evenly suspended and combined throughout the portion that we use. Does this really matter since we are not completely melting the entire bucket each time? Do we even need to worry about it with a bucket that never seems to return to a solid state?
Below are pictures of this bucket of oil, just to give you an idea of what we are talking about.
We use a drill attachment paint stirrer to mix up the oil,
but we stir it by hand because the drill just seems like overkill.
Notice that the oil is not clear? Once we melt it, it does become a clear oil, not colorless, but clear.
We like to use palm oil because it is rich in Vitamin E (the red palm oil we used yesterday can be used in cooking) but also because it produces a harder bar of soap with a nice, creamy lather.
We would love to hear about other soapers' experience with palm oils!
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