Making Soap Hardwood Ash

From mixing of lye water and lard to trace took about 1 hour 40 minutes in a uncovered.

Making soap hardwood ash.

Because of the unique type of lye used to make it ash soap does not produce much lather. Collect ash from fires that burned wood such as ash hickory or beech. This is then the lye you would use to make soap. In this episode i go over how to make home made soap the old fashioned way.

Obviously the process has been refined since then but you can still make soap with wood ash lye and fats. What you ll need to make lye. Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap.

The soap making process. Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too. Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. To make this type of lye you need the white ashes from hardwood fires.

Ash soap is made from lye derived from hardwood ash. If you want a nicer smelling soap you might try using other oils such as coconut olive oil cocoa or shea. Learn how to render your own lard tallow here. 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.

Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. You can harden the soap you make with the addition of salt but soaps made from wood ash always tend to be softer. The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap. Softwoods such as pine spruce or fir do not contain enough potassium which is necessary for making lye.

Once you concentrate the lye water you can turn it into soap by cooking it with fat. This is a 1 minute 26 second video on the making of liquid soap paste from hardwood ash lye water and lard. When the mixture is dry you have soap. Making soap out of wood ash and fat tallow lard is kind of a fun project but d.

The supplies for making your own lye are few. In a nutshell soap is made with lye leached from wood ashes soaked in water and mixed with hot fat like lard until it cooks down and is poured into molds. Collect the ash.