Help with water substitutions

[mssheddy]

Hi all, need a bit of quick help if you could. I found a recipe for cucumber soap I want to try and am having a hard time figuring out how much water to substitue with the cukes. Do you simply replace equal amounts of water with cucumber puree? Say I take 8 oz. of water away, do I then add 8 oz. cukes?

The reason I ask is because the recipe I found it too big, I can figure out how to reduce it in soapcalc but when I run it through the calculator it gives me the full water amount. This will be my first time replacing water with something else, just cant seem to get my head aound it yet.

Thanks for any help!!

[eugenia]

When Bunny was on her food soap roll, she made a batch with 1.2 oz of cucumber to a 1.5 lb batch of soap. Yes, you would subtract the amount of cucumber from the water amount.

To use her ratio, 8 oz would be for a 10 lb. batch. If you post your batch size and recipe, I will help you scale the cucumber amount.

e

[BLSoaps]

Basically, you need enough water to fully dissolve the lye. I know once I use just slightly more water than lye. So if I've got 7 oz of lye, I usually use 8-9 oz of water to dilute it. Then I usually add at least 6-8oz of cucumber puree. But I like a lot of cucumber in it. I have my actual recipe somewhere in my hordes of paper stashed around this house, but unfortunately, my computer decided to play hide-n-seek with nearly all of my work files. We've tried some recovery programs, but it keeps pulling up nonsense. So we're now resigned to simply "re-creating" all my files. But I digress....quite a bit! LOL!

So enough water to dissolve your lye, then cuke to make up the water from there. I usually don't do a water discount, which allows me to use more cuke, and instead I give it a longer cure time instead. Speaking of which, I need to make some of this soap again. I'm waiting for my new mold to show up first!