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How to Make Old Fashioned Homemade Soap (Part 3 of 3), by Grandpappy
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
How to Render (Melt) Animal Fat:
Beef fat is called tallow and pig fat is called lard. Poultry fat is too soft
to be used by itself, but it may be used in a ratio of about 10% with tallow
or a tallow-lard combination. Bear fat may also be used but it must be melted
(rendered) quickly after the bear has been killed because bear fat will quickly
become rancid. You may also use the fat from farm animals such as sheep or goats,
and a variety of wild animals, such as beaver, opossum, raccoon, and groundhog.
If there is any lean meat still attached to the fat, cut it off and make sure
you only use the fat to make grease.
Melting animal fat is called rendering. Rendering should be done outdoors or
in a well ventilated area. The smell of melting animal fat will make most people
nauseous. Cut the animal fat into small pieces about one-inch cubed and put them
into a pot with about 1/8 inch of rainwater and cook over low to medium heat.
Gradually add the fat to the pot and stir to keep the hot grease and solid pieces
of fat circulating. As you stir be sure to scrape the bottom of the pot to prevent
any fat from sticking to the bottom and burning. Do not burn the fat or allow
it to smoke. If it starts to smoke then you are applying too much heat and you
are burning the fat or grease.
One pound of fat will yield about 2.25 cups of grease. Most of the fat will melt
into a liquid but some small solid particles will not melt and these are called
cracklings. After melting the fat, allow it to cool slightly, and then strain
it through a clean thin cloth and store it in a sealed container until it is
needed. The cracklings will be on the top surface of the straining cloth. Save
the delicious cracklings for use in other cooking recipes.
(Note: Raw animal fat can quickly become rancid. Therefore raw animal fat should
not be saved and then converted into grease at some future date. The best procedure
is to render animal fat into grease while the fat is still fresh. Rendered animal
fat has a much longer storage life than raw animal fat.)
(Note: You can also reclaim bacon grease (pork lard), hamburger grease (beef
tallow), and other used cooking greases for soap making purposes. The basic instructions
are on my web site at: How
to Clarify Used Cooking Grease.)
How to Make Concentrated Brown Lye Water:
You will need rainwater (or steam distilled water) and the cold ashes from
any hardwood fire, such as oak, hickory, maple, ash, beech, or old fruit
trees. Do not use the ashes from a fire that burned pine tree wood.
The cold ashes from any hardwood fire can be converted into lye. Lye made from
fire ashes is not as caustic as commercially purchased lye. Any large wooden,
plastic, or clay container may be used, such as a huge flower pot. A deep container
is better than a wide container. The container should have a hole in its bottom
center and that is why a flower pot is perfect. Do not use a container made
of tin or aluminum because lye is caustic and it will react with these materials.
(Note: Or you could use a container with a side-mounted water valve, such as
a 5-gallon water jug.)
For example, I use a clay
flower pot that has a 9 inch outside diameter top, a 5.5 inch outside
diameter bottom, and it is 9 inches tall, with sides and a bottom that is 0.25
inch thick. When packed with cold ashes to within 2.5 inches of its top, it
holds approximately 145 cubic inches (about 10 cups) of tightly packed cold
ashes. Ten cups of tightly packed cold ashes will yield one-gallon of average
strength brown lye water. Tightly packed means the loose ashes were pressed
down firmly into the cup. If you use a different size container, then you should
do the math to determine how much average strength brown lye water you will
get from your container.
Caution: Lye water is caustic and it will burn your skin. Be extremely
careful and wear rubber gloves and wear goggles when handling lye water. If
possible, lye water should be made outdoors.
Firmly pack a layer of straw, or brown
pine needles, or sand about one-inch deep in the bottom of the container
to help keep the ashes inside the container. Firmly pack cold
ashes from any hardwood fire on top of the bottom layer. Slope the
top surface of the ashes slightly from the sides of the container to its center
to help direct the water flow to the center of the container. Tightly pack
the ashes to within two to three inches of the top of the container, depending
on the size of the container. This empty top space is necessary to receive
and hold the hot rainwater when it is first poured into the top of the container.
Place the large container on top of concrete
blocks, bricks, or any other type of support so a second smaller
container (at least one-gallon or four-quarts) can be placed beneath the center
of the upper pot to catch the brown lye water as it drips through the hole
in the bottom of the upper pot.
Rainwater is the best water for making brown lye water because it is soft and
it contains no minerals or chlorine. Several easy ways to collect large quantities
of rainwater can be found on my web site at: How
to Find Water and Make It Safe to Drink.
(Note: If you do not have access to rainwater, then you may use the steam distilled
water sold at most grocery stores. Steam distilled water is chlorine and mineral
free water. Instructions for making steam distilled water are also included
in the above water article on my web site.)
Your objective is to make approximately one-gallon
of brown lye water from one fresh batch of cold hardwood fire ashes.
Heat about one-half gallon of rainwater to boiling and then slowly pour it
over the ashes in the upper container. If the ashes were packed down firmly
they should not be swimming or floating in water. While the rainwater gradually
disappears into the ashes, heat another one-half gallon of rainwater and then
slowly pour it over the ashes. Wait about one-hour and then heat another one-half
gallon of rainwater and slowly pour it over the ashes. Wait about one-half
hour. If your brown lye water container has about one-gallon of brown lye water
then you may stop. If you do not yet have one-gallon of brown lye water, then
heat another one-half gallon of rainwater and slowly pour it over the ashes.
When you have finished you will have poured a total of approximately 1.5 to
2 gallons of hot rainwater into the pot of ashes. It may take a little while
for the water to make its way through the ashes and out the hole in the bottom
of the upper container. Be patient. The liquid that drips into the smaller
container on the ground will be brown lye water. 1.5 to 2 gallons of hot rainwater
will yield approximately one-gallon of brown lye water. (Note: The ashes will
absorb and retain between one-half to one gallon of rainwater, depending on
the size and shape of your container and how tightly you packed down the ashes
in the container. Discard the used ashes after you have extracted one-gallon
of brown lye water. If you need more brown lye water, then use a fresh batch
of hardwood fire ashes to extract your next gallon of brown lye water.)
Wear rubber gloves and goggles when handling the brown lye water because it
is caustic and it will burn your skin if it comes in contact with your skin.
If you get some lye water on your skin, wash it off immediately with soap and
water.
If necessary, the brown lye water can be stored in a safe container, such as
a stainless steel pot with a lid, or a glass jar with a lid. However, the best
procedure is to use the brown lye water immediately to make soap.
(Note: There are several different methods for testing the strength of the
brown lye water but none of them are necessary. There is no reason to complicate
the soap making process by attempting to get the brown lye water to a specific
strength prior to using it to make soap. If your lye water is at the recommended
average strength, then you will make a good all-purpose soap. However, if your
lye water is a little stronger than average then you will produce a good laundry
soap. If your lye water is a little weaker than average then you will produce
a good bath soap. Therefore don’t be too concerned about the strength
of your brown lye water. You will need both laundry soap and bath soap, and
you will be making soap frequently if you are out of soap. Therefore you can
tolerate a little variability in the strength of your brown lye water. Besides,
you will be boiling off most of the brown water anyway before you use it to
make your soap.)
(Note: Some recipes recommend that you pour the brown lye water through the
same batch of ashes several times in order to increase the strength of the
lye water. This procedure has marginal value. The first extraction of the lye
from the ashes will remove most of the usable lye from the ashes. Trying to
squeeze a little more lye out of ashes that have already been seriously depleted
of their lye is just not practical. On the other hand, a single extraction
of lye from each new set of ashes will yield brown lye water that is of approximately
the same strength each time, and this will result in a more predictable soap
making process that can be replicated over and over again. From a quality control
perspective, this means the process will have less total variation and therefore
it should yield a product that is more consistent from one batch to the next.
When you have a consistent stable process, it is easier to fine tune the process
and improve the quality of your finished product.)
There are three methods for making soap from the brown lye water as follows:
Method 1 - Brown Lye Water: Some soap making recipes recommend using the brown
lye water in the same strength as it was originally created when the rainwater
was poured through the ashes. This method requires a much larger soap making
pot and it also adds several hours to the soap stirring process. This is the
traditional method that was used in the 1800’s and it is the method that
is still used today in many third-world countries. If you have a really, really
old soap making recipe, then this is probably the method it describes. The
major difficulty with this method is that it requires considerable skill and
experience to consistently produce usable soap. Relatively minor mistakes or
poor timing when using this method will result in a batch of nasty stuff that
is neither soap nor anything else worth using. That is the reason this method
was abandoned by our ancestors when commercial lye crystals became available
at the local hardware and general store. Lye crystals significantly reduced
the time required to make soap and they also yielded consistent batches of
good usable soap.
Method 2 - Lye Crystals: Some modern soap making recipes recommend boiling
down the brown lye water until nothing remains except lye crystals, and then
saving the lye crystals in a safe container for future use. Later, when you
want to make soap, you add the lye crystals to a little fresh rainwater and
make fresh lye water. This method adds an unnecessary step to the soap making
process and it does involve some danger when reconstituting the lye crystals
into lye water. (Note: These homemade lye crystals are very similar to the
lye crystals that were once widely available at most hardware and grocery stores.
However, it is no longer possible to purchase lye crystals at the grocery store
because they were withdrawn from the market because they were being used to
make illegal drugs.)
Method 3 - Concentrated Brown Lye Water: This is the method I developed out
of necessity, and it is much more practical than either of the above two methods.
Boil one gallon of normal strength brown lye water down into 3/8 cup of concentrated
brown lye water. If you boil the brown lye water down before you use it in
a soap recipe, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to stir the soap
mixture by several hours. This also simplifies the trial and error method of
combining the lye water and the grease and it significantly reduces the possibility
of making a failed batch of unusable soap. If you start with one-gallon (16
cups) of original strength brown lye water, then it usually takes between 3
to 4 hours to boil it down to 3/8 cup of concentrated brown lye water, depending
on the amount of heat used. This means you will have reduced the subsequent
old fashioned soap stirring procedure by at least 3 to 4 hours. As the water
gradually boils away, the boiling process begins to proceed faster and faster
because there is less water remaining in the pot. By the time the water is
down to one-quart or less, it boils away very quickly so you will then need
to watch it carefully to make sure you don’t boil off all your water.
(Note: If you make a mistake and boil the one-gallon of brown lye water down
into less than 3/8 cup of concentrated brown lye water, then wait until the
concentrated brown lye water cools a little bit, and then add just enough rainwater
to return the concentrated brown lye water to the 3/8 cup mark. Add the rainwater
slowly and be careful because the mixture may sputter a little bit.)
(Final Note: The Grandpappy’s Homemade Soap Recipe that I developed through
trial and error specifies the use of the concentrated brown lye water made
by following Method 3 above. However, as mentioned previously, most really
old soap making recipes recommend putting the brown lye water and grease into
a big pot and cooking it over a big fire for several hours and stirring it
while it cooked. The reason for the big fire was because they were using original
strength brown lye water that contained too much water to make soap. Therefore
they had to boil the water off and this frequently resulted in a failed batch
of soap, or a batch of soap that was gritty, lye heavy, and of very poor quality.
If you follow my Grandpappy’s Homemade Soap Recipe at the beginning of
this article, you will notice that it is not necessary to cook the soap mixture.
The reason is because the brown lye water has already been boiled down to the
correct ratio of water to grease using Method 3 above. If a person does not
know about Method 3 then he or she will probably invest a lot of time and energy
in a multitude of unsuccessful attempts to make soap, and repeat the very same
mistakes our ancestors did in the 1800’s before the invention and sale
of commercial lye crystals.)
SUMMARY:
A brief summary of the most important critical information from "Grandpappy's
Homemade Soap Recipe" is as follows:
A. Boiled rainwater poured through ten cups of tightly packed ashes from a
hardwood fire will yield one gallon of average strength brown lye water.
B. One gallon of average strength brown lye water should be boiled down to
3/8 cup of concentrated brown lye water.
C. 3/4 cup of concentrated brown lye water should be mixed with 2 cups of warm
grease which was made from melting (rendering) almost any type of animal fat.
D. When stirred the lye and grease will combine together in a chemical reaction
to make soap. This normally takes between 30 minutes to 3 hours. The soap mixture
must be kept above the melting point of the type of animal fat you are using.
E. When the soap mixture traces, pour it into a mold and let it rest for one
to seven days, depending on the type of animal fat or oil used. Then remove
the soap from the soap mold.
F. Air dry the soap for another 2 to 6 weeks. The chemical reaction will then
be 100% complete and all the lye and grease will be gone. The lye and grease
will have been converted into homemade soap.
The major contributions this article adds to the body of knowledge about soap
making are items A, B, and C above. Items D, E, and F can be found in any good
soap making book and at a variety of Internet web sites, with both minor and
major variations.
CONCLUSION:
Knowing how to consistently and successfully make soap from rainwater, campfire
ashes, and animal fat takes you one step closer to becoming an independent
resourceful human being in God’s natural order of things.
