Prepping – Making Soap

One of the big things I worry about if the SHTF is hygiene. When you have less access to good quality running water, keeping clean becomes not just a personal choice, but an absolute necessity. Soap and water are your greatest armor against disease and septic injuries. But if you can’t run down to the corner store for soap, what do you do?

Of course you could just stock a 20 year pile of soap. It’s not that expensive. It does, however, take up space. The better choice is to store enough for a year, which gives you enough time to get settled and create the parts you need to make your own soap with nothing but stuff you’d nominally throw away anyhow.

Soap History

There’s a story about how soap was “discovered” in ancient Rome. It goes like this… Along a particular stream in Rome, women used to wash their clothes. The clothing was beaten against rocks, then rubbed with sand. They’d then submerge the clothing and let it sit in the running water, smaller stones holding it in place, until they figured they were clean. Then the clothes would be pulled out, wrung out, and hung to dry back at their homes. In one particular place along that stream, the clothing was MUCH more clean.

Apparently, upstream from the women, there was a place where they rendered fat. Some of the animal fat dripped into the water. It was enough that it created a sheen on top of the water. A little closer to the ladies was a spot where people would dump their ashes from their wood fires. That gave them the basic recipe for soap: water, fat, and lye (derived from wood ash) equals basic soap. The reason the women in that one spot had cleaner clothes is that they were using a rudimentary form of soap in the water to do their washing.

All that’s a story, of course. But it’s indeed plausible. It’s the sort of thing that happens. Making usable soap for your home is not quite so easy, of course, but it’s still possible. The first part of the process is to create the lye that is the base of your soap.

PLEASE NOTE THAT LYE IS CAUSTIC. IT CAN AND WILL BURN YOU IF YOU DON’T PAY FULL ATTENTION. ALWAYS WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR WHEN MAKING OR USING LYE, OR ANY OTHER CAUSTIC AGENT!

There, with that out of the way, let’s continue.

To make lye, you want to first gather a bunch of hardwood ash. Pine ash is not going to do it. This MUST be from hardwood: ash, beech, hickory, maple, etc. Softwoods don’t give you the necessary chemical parts. I use a large cauldron that has a leak to collect them when I’m up at the Fort, and that allows me to separate out the big chunks of charcoal from the ash. You just want the ash.

Once you have enough ash, you need a lye press or lye bucket. This doesn’t have to be anything special. There’s actually a very old one on display at the Fort, which was made of an old tree stump that had the center burned out, and then a small hole was whittled in the bottom for the water to run out. A homer bucket with a hole in the bottom also works. You set this up higher than your collection bucket, which should be free of any and all holes and be non-reactive to lye (do NOT use glass, aluminum, tin, or any recyclable plastic to hold or store lye, as it will damage the container!). You can use wood, hard plastics like homer buckets, Polypropolene plastic (which is technically recyclable but it’s a #5 which most centers don’t handle anyhow), and stainless steel.

Fill the holey bucket with ash to the half way mark. Pack it down tight with a wooden dowel or a gloved hand. Set the holey bucket up so that it can comfortably sit for a long time, and drip into the lower bucket/container. A small table or stool works, or you can make a rack for yourself. Add soft (ie rain or well water) BOILING water to the ash bucket, and use a wooden dowel, muddler, or spoon to compress the ashes even more. Then let the water drip through the ashes. This may take a while. Once all the water is through your ashes, what you now have in your bottom bucket is technically lye. It probably isn’t strong enough, so…

The next step is to test your lye. You can do this by picking up test strips and aiming for a pH of 12 or 13 (according to this site, which has two different ways to make lye, so go check it out!). The older, non-technical method is to float an egg or potato in your lye water. If you put a fresh raw egg in and it sinks, it’s not strong enough. Take the lye water and run it through the ashes a second time. If your egg sinks, it is very strong and you may need to dilute it to be safe. If it floats with just a bit of the egg above the water, you’ve got it right. (Marquis of Winchester)

Now it’s time to bring the fat into the deal. You want to use a natural fat. Animal fat is great, but you get different reactions from different fats. Lard (pig fat) will give you a hard soap which is moisturizing and good for your skin. However, it doesn’t lather very well, so you usually need to add another type of fat as well (coconut oil or castor oil both work great). You can make lard from bacon drippings, or you can keep the lard from a butchered pig (or go buy some at the grocery store or local abattoir). Any type of animal fat can be used, however. If you have a jar and just save up all your rendered fats in it, you’ll end up with a bit of a mushy soap at the end which is great for laundry but not so great for people. Lard and/or tallow (beef fat) will make the best people soap. You can add in any kind of vegetable oil as well, to make your soap gentle and lather rich.

Please note, when using lye (any kind of lye), ALWAYS ADD THE LYE TO THE WATER! Never add water to the lye. EVER. Always cover your eyes with safety goggles, because even the most careful soap maker sometimes has splash back. Wear gloves for the same reason. And keep vinegar on hand to pour onto any lye burn, as it neutralizes the chemicals in the lye.

Rather than write out a recipe here, I’m going to re-direct you to several decent ones. Making soap is a process, but man is it nice to be able to produce on your own.

• Simple Tallow Soap Recipe
• Pure Tallow Soap Recipe (crockpot hot process soap)
• DIY Tallow Soap
• Homesteader’s Tallow Soap
• Cold Process Soap Recipe
• Many Tallow Soap Recipes

Next week, I’ll tell you how to use that soap (or another hard soap) to make your own laundry detergent!