Making Soap Hardwood Ash

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.

Making soap hardwood ash.

Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap. When the mixture is dry you have soap. The soap making process.

From mixing of lye water and lard to trace took about 1 hour 40 minutes in a uncovered. Once you concentrate the lye water you can turn it into soap by cooking it with fat. To make this type of lye you need the white ashes from hardwood fires. The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap.

Ash soap is made from lye derived from hardwood ash. When you make your own from wood ash it produces a slightly different lye which will leave soap softer. You can harden the soap you make with the addition of salt but soaps made from wood ash always tend to be softer. In this episode i go over how to make home made soap the old fashioned way.

Learn how to render your own lard tallow here. Because of the unique type of lye used to make it ash soap does not produce much lather. 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. The supplies for making your own lye are few.

This is then the lye you would use to make soap. 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. Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye.

Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. Collect the ash. If you want a nicer smelling soap you might try using other oils such as coconut olive oil cocoa or shea. This is a 1 minute 26 second video on the making of liquid soap paste from hardwood ash lye water and lard.

Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too. You can also buy quality grass fed beef tallow on amazon. Any type of fat will do for making wood ash soap.