When someone decides that they want to get started making soap, often they want to get started now. And while I'm a big proponent of understanding the qualities of soap making oils in order to create your own basic recipe, it's often times quicker and easier to use someone else's recipe to get started. So I've compiled several of my own basic recipes and some of the basic recipes from my library of classic soap making books. They're all "tried and true" very basic recipes...and are good starting places for learning the art of making your own soap.
1. Basic 4-Oil Soap Recipe
Here is a basic soap recipe with simple ingredients that makes great soap. I've made dozens and dozens of batches with this recipe, and use it as the basic recipe whenever I teach soap making classes.2. Grocery Store Soap Recipe
This recipe features ingredients you can get at the grocery store. It's a great recipe to get started with because the oils are easy to get and inexpensive.3. Basic Olive Oil (Castile) Soap Recipes
Olive oil was one of the first vegetable oils used to make soap and forms the base of most high-quality soap recipes. Whether the recipe is a "Castile" soap using mostly only olive oil in it, or just uses olive oil as one of its many ingredients, olive oil makes great soap.4. Ann Bramson's Castile Soap Recipe
Ann Bramson's book Soap was one of the very first books published on making your own soap. She gives four basic recipes that she feels "should all be experienced." Her first recipe is a variation of castile soap which is a soap that uses all or mostly all olive oil. Hers uses 30% olive and 70% beef tallow, so (in my opinion) it's a bit of a stretch to call this a "castile" soap - but it's nonetheless a good recipe, especially if you don't have any coconut oil on hand. The lather isn't super bubbly, but it is rich and creamy. I've scaled her recipe down to make about 3 lbs. of soap and reduced her superfat to about 6%.5. Sandy Maine's Basic 3-Oil Soap Recipe
I got to hear Sandy Maine of SunFeather Natural Soap Company a couple of summers ago, and did a review of her book The Soap Book, and was very interested to find that the "basic" recipe that she used for all the varieties of soap in her book is just three oils.- 48% Crisco
- 25% olive oil
- 25% coconut oil
6. MMS Basic 3-Oil Soap Recipe
Here is a super-simple recipe (inspired by a recipe at Majestic Mountain Sage) that just uses 3 oils. Would adding some other oils like castor oil or cocoa butter improve the soap? Yes...some. Is this a perfectly good recipe to get started with? Absolutely! It's basically:- 50% olive oil
- 25% coconut oil
- 25% palm oil
