Making Soap Hardwood Ash

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Making soap hardwood ash.

Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap. This is then the lye you would use to make soap. Once you concentrate the lye water you can turn it into soap by cooking it with fat. Collect the ash.

In this episode i go over how to make home made soap the old fashioned way. You can harden the soap you make with the addition of salt but soaps made from wood ash always tend to be softer. Learn how to render your own lard tallow here. What you ll need to make lye.

Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. The supplies for making your own lye are few. This is a 1 minute 26 second video on the making of liquid soap paste from hardwood ash lye water and lard. The idea for soap had to come from somewhere and as the story goes soap was discovered when rain combined with cooking ashes and animal fat drippings resulting in primitive soapy water.

When the mixture is dry you have soap. Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. Making soap out of wood ash and fat tallow lard is kind of a fun project but d. The soap making process.

From mixing of lye water and lard to trace took about 1 hour 40 minutes in a uncovered. When you make your own from wood ash it produces a slightly different lye which will leave soap softer. To make this type of lye you need the white ashes from hardwood fires. Ash soap is made from lye derived from hardwood ash.

Softwoods such as pine spruce or fir do not contain enough potassium which is necessary for making lye. The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap. Collect ash from fires that burned wood such as ash hickory or beech. Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too.

Any type of fat will do for making wood ash soap. Obviously the process has been refined since then but you can still make soap with wood ash lye and fats. Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye.