how to make soap from wood ashes (lye water and tallow/lard)

So I have been collecting

ashes

from the grill for several months. This is what's left of the

ashes

and what I did was basically take what was in here and pass it through basically like a screen for a window. that way the ash would fall out, but then the rest of the charcoal, the carbon, would stay separate and the end result is basically I have a big portion, a good amount here of cigarette cigarette. Coal ash, uh. Ash, it's fine from the grill. okay, this is a lot that I have down here, okay, but there's very little carbon in there, that's the point, so now what I'm going to do is put

water

in this and basically we're going to

make

a slurry, so I've been mixing this not even for 30 seconds, but I want everything to break down there and suspend and we have a nice thick mixture here, but I'm going to add a little bit more

water

to this, um.

Ash, another name for it is potash or potash, depending on where you are from and it has a lot of potassium, so potash, potassium, okay and water is made of H2O, so there is more hydrogen, H2, two hydrogens per oxygen, so when you mix these together and we'll end up getting hydrogen. Sorry, we're going to get when we mix these two together, we're going to get potassium hydroxide. Okay, so we have our potassium, we have our hydrogen and we have our oxide, we have our oxygen, but it needs some leaching, it needs to sit here for a while and I'm going to say it's probably good, so I'm going to let this basically hang. in this water. so leave it out maybe a few days and let the water absorb as much potassium as possible, this ash should sink to the bottom and when it does you should have a clear liquid that you can decant or decant from this and basically it will be a very light form of lye and that's going to be the first thing we're going to need to do, so it's been setting for a few days and now you can see that the top has lightened up quite a bit.

This is basically lye water that probably isn't very concentrated, but let's concentrate it now. If you want it to be stronger with all these ashes here, you can boil it all well, boil it all. -20 minutes and then this will be stronger, okay, but I'm preparing for a few days, since this should be adequate enough to extract enough potassium from that marijuana ash or get cash, depending, um, no I know. whether I mentioned this or not, but when you use ash you want to use hard

wood

, like you don't really want to use ash from trees that have a lot of resin like pine and Doug fir and things like that, um, you want to use something that's like hard

wood

, now this It's Mesquite and I know mesquite has resin in it so I'm not entirely sure how it's going to turn out right but that's it and also this particular

soap

that we're going to end up with.

Making is not going to be as difficult as store-bought

soap

and store-bought soap. You know, they put a lot, they put other things in there, um, and they also use sodium hydroxide, this is potassium hydroxide and this is a little bit. denser, but we're going to end up tricking the system a little bit later by adding a little bit of salt to this so it sets up a little bit better and then it also won't foam up like it would look like with a normal bar, that's because they add stuff to it, it's Well, nowadays, soap is more like a detergent, but this will clean, you know, this will clean your clothes, this will clean your, this will clean your dishes, this will clean your hands, this will clean this.

It's old school soap, so now what I'm going to do is drink this water. Try to leave as much Ash as possible. If you want to pass this off as a t-shirt or something, you can. to try to get a little bit more of this debris out of here, okay, if not, don't worry, a lot of this stuff is going to end up separating when we start reducing it, but I'm going to pour this into a stainless steel pot. You don't want to put this on aluminum, okay, you want to put this on stainless steel or glass.

Bleach reacts with metals so

make

sure you don't do that so I'm going to go ahead and pour this in and then we'll move on to the next step, there's a little bit of Ash coming out with this right now and I'm trying to avoid it as much as I can, a little bit is going to be fine, so there's still a little bit of water in here, um, but I'm going to let it settle, technically I could put more water in that and like I said, I could boil it and I'll end up having a more concentrated lye water, like this which um and this is just an old t-shirt that's been out for a long time since the last time I made this, so I have this on the stove during the time it's heating up, this can create some pretty nasty fumes that really You don't want to be breathing, so it's probably best to do this outside.

Now my stove is just a couple feet from the sliding glass doors, so my door is open and I'll be monitoring this for if it starts to smell too unpleasant or something too. Toxic I'll just turn off the heat and take it outside and then find a way to finish it outside, but I've done this before, it actually wasn't that bad or anything in here, but just a warning that you're dealing with. lye here, so let's go ahead and start boiling this and also how do we know if it's concentrated enough. We're going to do the old egg test that also works with a potato if we take an egg or a potato and then we put it in the water, it should float and this is not right, that tells us that it's not concentrated enough, let me rinse it and rinse my hands and when this thing floats and starts being friendly.

Leaving the top a little bit tells us right there that this is the appropriate concentration. I'm going to let this reduce probably about two and a half or three inches and then I'm going to taste the potato again and again. because we want to have concentrated lye water when you make soap, it's very important that the ratio of lye water to fat is, you know, with the money that there is in the past, they didn't have a lot of sophisticated measuring equipment when they were making this out of the house was just for experimentation and testing and things like that when they could do it and that's pretty much how we're going to do it generally as a rule of thumb in At least if you were making crystals like, because if we kept boiling this and then lowered the temperature to where it was evaporating, we would eventually have light crystals, well, that would be as concentrated as possible, so let's move on. and let's let this continue, let's let this simmer for a while and as soon as this reduces, it will clear up as well, it will clear up during, you know, during the time that we're sitting, but we're just.

We're going to go ahead and let this kind of boil concentrate a little bit, so what we're going to do is take the LIE um water that's been reduced considerably and we're going to pour it in here and try it. to keep a lot of the stuff that's on the bottom on the bottom so we can clean this out and then concentrate it a little bit more so the pan has been cleaned and the lye water has clarified pretty well if I let it sit for about five minutes a little more The ash will fall to the bottom of the container.

I'm not completely worried about that, so let's go ahead and pour this back in and I'm going to rinse this container, but I'm going to let it pass. Go ahead and continue boiling a little bit more, okay, so the egg floats and the amount of egg that basically appears on top is about the size of a quarter, which is about right, so we have our lye water and it's at the right concentration to give you an idea of ​​exactly how much we have left after we've reduced all that, so this is approximately how much we have left after all that reduced and things like Okay, so right now I have a pan that I just rinsed, I mean, a pot, this is the same one that I was making the lye in, watering it and concentrating it, there's a little bit of water in here, I'm just going to let that evaporate and um, what I'm going to do is do is as soon as this evaporates or I just take a paper towel to speed this up, this is on low heat, okay, this is on low heat and I have a cup of

lard

, okay, a cup. of

lard

and we're going to go ahead and melt this, we don't want it to get too hot, we're just trying to melt it, we want this to stay so basically we want this at a temperature that keeps it in a liquid state. state, but not much hotter than that, so maybe like 110 120 maybe 130 or something like that um and during the time this is set up, I'm going to get 3 8 of a cup 3 8 of a cup of concentrated water from lye I made as soon as this melts the rest of the way we'll go ahead and pour our lime water in here and during the time we're going to stir it we really don't want to I'll use a metal spoon and again I'm using stainless steel, not aluminum, but I want to use a wooden spoon or maybe something plastic, something that the bleach won't start to eat, so I'll call it that. okay and now we're going to go ahead and we're going to pour in our water And here and that's going to be roughly the ratio: for every cup of fat we're going to use 3 8 of a cup of the lye water, okay, and a few things about the wood ash soap, okay, some things, this is very, very old school, you know, one, this will end up being gentler than the kind of soap you would buy at the store.

Overall, okay, now if we want to make sure that this hardens a little bit, we can go ahead and we can put salt in here, maybe like a teaspoon or so, and that will harden this a little bit more, so here's a little bit . of just regular salt, this is not iodized salt, this is sea salt. Okay, technically that's something that you're going to want to heat up and have it dissolve completely, but I think it's going to dissolve very well in this um and basically we're going to keep stirring this and then stir, it may take a while, it may take anywhere from 30 minutes. and three hours, four hours, five hours, who knows, but we're going to keep going, we're just going to keep stirring this until we get to what's known as a trail and a trail is to think about this where it becomes something that looks like pudding and if you run your fork or something through it, it will leave a mark there and it will stay in the right place. and you want to make sure that when you're doing this you don't let the mixture get too cold because if it gets too cold, let me turn this down if it gets, turn off the heat completely if this gets too much. hot, it will actually cause separation, so we don't want to do that at first, it will help bring everything together, but then it will cost the separation, um, where was I?

Oh, if it's too cold, you can get what's known as a false trace where it looks like it's kind of solidified, but actually it's just because it's gotten too cold and the fat is starting to build up, so you have to keep it warm, but don't too hot at all, so I mean it was on low. I just turned off the heat and this will probably be fine at this temperature for a good 10 minutes and I'm going to continue to stir this allowing the saponification process to continue and a homemade soap like this one made from wood lye.

Ash, as I said, is generally milder, it usually doesn't smell very good. You can add fragrance if you want, but yeah, what's the point? This is the kind of thing you would only do if absolutely necessary. Anyway, there really isn't. The reason for you to do this other than saying you know how to make soap from wood ashes, you know, but if you're adding a fragrance you'll want to use something like an essential oil or something you don't know. If you want to use something water based, you want to use something oil based, if you want to use one of those hand mixers to speed up the process, you can do that if you want, but we're just going to sit down and we're just going to keep stirring this and let it the saponification process happens now.

This will work for bathing. You know, this. You know. So you can take a bath. You can use this to clean clothes. You can use this to clean the dishes. This is a complete so it's a versatile soap so we're going to keep doing this for a while so I've been stirring this for about 15 minutes or so and I can feel it's getting a little bit thicker you can definitely . smell that beef fat and that's one of the things about traditional soap like this, you know, like I said before, it doesn't really smell that fantastic, but it cleans, it won't make a lot of bubbles, you know, like lather. but the bubbles and foam don't add anything to the cleaning process so it's basically just for looks honestly but we're going to keep working on this until we can get a trace so this is definitely starting to thicken but no altogether.

It's still there, um and I give it another 15 minutes, okay, so I'm going to go ahead and add a little more lime water to this. I think I needed to concentrate my lye water a little more, but I'm getting close to a trace, but it's taking a long time, so I'm going to add a little more of my water. Your hand keeps stirring. Okay, it's definitely thicker. The problem is that you know that you add it to living water and if it is not com, it is. It's not concentrated enough, you're also adding water to the solution, so I'm going to stir this for about 20 more minutes and thenI'll call good.

I mean, it's definitely a lot thicker than it was, but I really don't want to spend all day on this. and not only that, but I think I could have concentrated my living water a little more and then this definitely probably would have started tracking by now um, but it's getting there, it's getting there, it's just taking a while, the extra water is coming out . end up keeping this stuff a lot more liquid than I originally wanted, but as long as it's still going, you know, as long as it's going and hey, we're good, you'll see it's pretty close to tracking now it's like really close it up with that extra water that's in there.

I don't know if I'll be able to get this to track completely, but it's pretty close, I mean, because you can see this is almost like a pancake batter, like a thin pancake. dough um and ideally we would like it to be thicker than this we want to be able to see that Trace if I go like this I want to be able to see you know that line that the fork has made God, that Trace is so close I'm so close to it Trace, of course, it's making me crazy, you know, um, man, I think if I had wanted to, maybe, drink another glass of water from the lye water, this would be, this would be money, um, man, that's the problem. although you know when you're MacGyvering and stuff and you're doing things the old fashioned way, so I've been stirring this a little bit more, it thickens a lot more and you can see it's almost almost traced, it's definitely almost traced.

I mean, when I move this back and forth, it takes a second for it to fill that space, it needs to be thicker than this, honestly, but I think because of that water, the lye water that I used, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this as thick as you need, but it's definitely pretty thick. I'm going to give it maybe another 10 minutes and then I'll give up because it's like I'm like I'm over this, I've been stirring for so long, okay, we have a trail, we have a trail, see that's a trail and it's Does it look good, does it look good, man?

I was thinking it was never going to happen, but Okay, we're ready, so what I'm going to do now is take this and pour it into a mold and basically let it sit there for about a day to harden and what I'm going to do . the use is a mold it's just a plastic cup okay so I went ahead and poured it into this container and I'm going to put a paper towel on top and let this basically sit and wait until it solidifies. and then as soon as I do it, I'm going to take it, turn it over, cut it into the pieces that you know I want for the soap and then let it sit for about four or six weeks, let it cure, um even. although I have a trace of this and generally when you make soap with common lye, which is sodium hydroxide and this is potassium hydroxide, usually what will happen is the next day it will be hard enough to cut. in pieces, but this could remain soft, it's hard to say now.

I put some salt in there and this has a good trail so who knows maybe we'll get lucky it's hard to see but that's it guys the rest is just. waiting now, this is how you make soap from wood ash, so anyway, I hope you learned something from that and all that and like I said, this is like a scientist, the proportions have to be very close You have to get the money right or you'll end up having crappy products or it won't work and a lot of times you'll have to do a lot of experiments on batches and batches and batches to get something that actually works, you know, I'm not really a soap maker even though I I know how to do it and obviously then I'll know I'm more like Candle Maker, that's more in my line, but this is going to work. it's going to work, so anyway guys, until next time, we'll talk to you later.