Making Soap Hardwood Ash

Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too.

Making soap hardwood ash.

What you ll need to make lye. When the mixture is dry you have soap. From mixing of lye water and lard to trace took about 1 hour 40 minutes in a uncovered. Collect the ash.

The supplies for making your own lye are few. Obviously the process has been refined since then but you can still make soap with wood ash lye and fats. Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic. Making soap out of wood ash and fat tallow lard is kind of a fun project but d.

The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap. The soap making process. 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.

In this episode i go over how to make home made soap the old fashioned way. 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 you make your own from wood ash it produces a slightly different lye which will leave soap softer. This is a 1 minute 26 second video on the making of liquid soap paste from hardwood ash lye water and lard.

Learn how to render your own lard tallow here. Ash soap is made from lye derived from hardwood ash. Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. If you want a nicer smelling soap you might try using other oils such as coconut olive oil cocoa or shea.

To make this type of lye you need the white ashes from hardwood fires. This is then the lye you would use to make soap. Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap.

Softwoods such as pine spruce or fir do not contain enough potassium which is necessary for making lye. Any type of fat will do for making wood ash soap. You can also buy quality grass fed beef tallow on amazon.