How to Make Hot-Process Soft Soap

By Susan Verberg
Published on December 6, 2016
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by Susan Verberg

Soap-makers love to tell the story of how ancient Romans first “discovered” soap by burning animal sacrifices on Mount Sapo, and how the creeks at the bottom of that mythological mountain were the best places to do laundry. They’ll tell you that the water, ash, and animal fat on those sites accidentally created the soap that filled the creeks. The reality is that the Romans didn’t actually make soap. They traded for it with the Celts, who dominated the market because of their access to abundant limestone and seashells, from which they produced slacked lime to make a caustic soda lye (sodium hydroxide).

After years of professionally making all-natural goat’s milk soaps to sell at our local farmers market, I decided to develop a self-sufficient soap-making process based on ancient techniques. My goals were to make my own lye and to turn kitchen-waste fats into soap. I finally took the plunge — and what an interesting adventure it’s been! I dug through old articles and manuscripts, learned to decipher medieval English, and filled my kitchen with weird, bubbling concoctions. And I wondered how something that seemed so simple could be so challenging.

Don’t let me discourage you. If you’re an outdoor enthusiast, you may have made soap already. Scrubbing a greasy frying pan with campfire ashes doesn’t just scour the dirt away: When rinsed with a little water, the hydroxide salts in the ashes combine with the cooking grease to form a primitive cleanser.

Understanding Soap-Making Basics

To undertake the process of making soap, known as “saponification” (from sapo, the Latin word for soap), let’s first review what soap is and why it works the way it does. Because soap is made from water-soluble bases known as alkalis, it neutralizes acids while retaining its ability to be dissolved in water. More specifically, soap is a surfactant with the unusual ability to diffuse fats and oils into water, which is why it can rinse away oily stains.

Soap is made by mixing dissolved hydroxide salts, generally called “lye,” with fatty acids. To make your own lye that you can use to produce a soft soap, you leach (or drip) water through ashes to dissolve the hydroxide salts. Ashes are highly concentrated minerals of hydroxides, nitrates, carbonates, sulfites, and more. The quality of the lye produced depends on how well the plant material was burned. I’ve found that the more complete the burn (all organic material combusted), the more hydroxides will be dissolved, and the more basic (that is, higher pH) the resulting lye will be. In the case of incomplete burns, such as you’d find in fire pits and fireplaces, you can add lime to the ash to help change carbonates (charcoal) into hydroxides.

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