Making Soap Hardwood Ash

Collect ash from fires that burned wood such as ash hickory or beech.

Making soap hardwood ash.

Ash soap is made from lye derived from hardwood ash. In this episode i go over how to make home made soap the old fashioned way. Traditionally pioneers would use lard or tallow to make soap. Making soap out of wood ash and fat tallow lard is kind of a fun project but d.

Softwoods such as pine spruce or fir do not contain enough potassium which is necessary for making lye. When the mixture is dry you have soap. 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.

Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. Collect the ash. This is a 1 minute 26 second video on the making of liquid soap paste from hardwood ash lye water and lard. The supplies for making your own lye are few.

You can harden the soap you make with the addition of salt but soaps made from wood ash always tend to be softer. The soap making process. Traditional colonial recipes used animal fat but you can use other types of fat too. When you make your own from wood ash it produces a slightly different lye which will leave soap softer.

Because of the unique type of lye used to make it ash soap does not produce much lather. Any type of fat will do for making wood ash soap. This is then the lye you would use to make soap. Soap making in the woods can be almost automatic.

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. Obviously the process has been refined since then but you can still make soap with wood ash lye and fats. 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.

Originally published as soap making in the bush in the january february 1972 issue of. The reason for this is that the end product is closer to potassium hydroxide which is used to make liquid soap. 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.