My cousin Ted made me feel a little guilty over using palm oil in my weekend batch of soap. Read his comment on my previous post to find out why. Of course, there are probably a lot of products I use that are grown or harvested in environmentally-destructive fashion.

Actually, I used a little more palm oil than I intended in this recipe. Both the palm oil and the coconut oil are good for the soap’s hardness and its lathering ability, but a soap made exclusively from either (or both) would dry your skin. (Ted’s comment, by the way, explains the difference between the two oils.)

I bought a big bleach-sized jug of palm oil from a mail order house. But it’s solid at room temperature, so when you use it you have to sit the jug in a sink full of hot water until some of the oil melts, then carefully pour what you need. I was measuring into the stainless steel stock pot which I have dedicated for soap-making; it was sitting on top of a scale and I had already added the coconut oil. I went a little overboard. I tried to add enough olive oil to compensate, but by that time it was already the largest batch I’d ever worked with.

I retroactively plugged the oil percentages into SoapCalc, which reports that the soap will be within acceptable values for all the various qualities (cleansing, conditioning, hardness, fluffy lather, stable lather, etc.).