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.

What you ll need to make lye. The supplies for making your own lye are few. Making soap out of wood ash and fat tallow lard is kind of a fun project but d. Learn how to render your own lard tallow here.

Once you concentrate the lye water you can turn it into soap by cooking it with fat. Any type of fat will do for making wood ash soap. Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. Softwoods such as pine spruce or fir do not contain enough potassium which is necessary for making lye.

If you want a nicer smelling soap you might try using other oils such as coconut olive oil cocoa or shea. 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. Collect the ash. The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap.

Because of the unique type of lye used to make it ash soap does not produce much lather. Obviously the process has been refined since then but you can still make soap with wood ash lye and fats. To make this type of lye you need the white ashes from hardwood fires. Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too.

The soap making process. Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap. Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. Collect ash from fires that burned wood such as ash hickory or beech.

From mixing of lye water and lard to trace took about 1 hour 40 minutes in a uncovered. You can harden the soap you make with the addition of salt but soaps made from wood ash always tend to be softer. 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 also buy quality grass fed beef tallow on amazon. Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. When the mixture is dry you have soap.