Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (24 page)

Part 1: Making Lye

PREPARATION:
1 hour

WAITING:
24 hours

Folks used to save all their ashes in a wooden barrel with a drain built into the bottom or in a trough-shaped ash hopper. The lye barrel or hopper was left open to the rain, and the rainwater leached through the ashes and became lye, which dripped out into a small receptacle bucket. The weak lye in that bucket was collected for general household cleaning. Clothes were washed in lye water, too, as opposed to soap and water, in a process called bucking. To make soap, people needed to make a stronger lye solution. To do this, they either passed the weak lye through ash again and again, or they boiled it down until the solution became strong enough to float an egg. Egg floating sounds bizarre, but it is a primitive test to determine, in chemistry terms, the relative density or specific gravity of the solution.

While you could make your own leaching barrel by packing a 5-gallon plastic bucket with ashes, we’re going to share a faster method with you.

YOU’LL NEED

• 1 gallon (16 cups) white ash
  *
  
• Old pillowcase
  
• 3- or 5-gallon bucket
  
• 2 gallons rainwater, filtered water, or distilled water, brought to a boil
  
• Protective gear: kitchen gloves, shop glasses or goggles, long sleeves
  
• Cabbage patch pH Indicator (page
  163
  )
  
• 1 fresh egg
  
• Stainless steel or enamel soup pot (It must not be aluminum, because it will react with the lye and discolor. Lye will not harm stainless steel or enamel, though, so it’s okay to use your usual cookware.)
  

*
Note on ash:
Ash for lye making must always be the white, feathery ash that comes from a hot fire. Charcoal will interfere with the lye’s effectiveness, so use a colander to sift out black charcoal chunks. The best wood ash lye is made with burnt hardwood (oak, hickory, maple, etc.) or fruitwood (apple, cherry, etc.). Don’t use softwood, like pine, because it is too resinous. The ash of dried seaweed, bracken fern, and even palm fronds can be used as well.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

SOAK THE ASH

Scoop the 16 cups of ash into the pillowcase and knot the top. Put the pillowcase in the bucket and pour the 2 gallons of boiling water over it. You don’t have to add the water all at once—you can add it in kettle-size increments as you heat it. Put the bucket somewhere safe, out of the way of children and pets. Let it sit overnight. Anytime you think of it, put on a pair of kitchen gloves and slosh the pillowcase up and down a few times, like a tea bag. Be careful not to splash your skin as you do this.

The next day, don gloves and goggles and raise the pillowcase out of the water. Let the first rush of water drain out, then contrive some way to suspend the pillowcase over the bucket to finish draining. You want to collect every last drop of that ashy goodness, so leave the ashes suspended until they stop dripping entirely—several hours or overnight.

TEST THE LYE

When it’s all drained, you’ll probably have a gallon of lye, and this lye will probably need to be cooked down to reach soap-making strength. Test it two ways.

First, we recommend you do a preliminary test with our Cabbage Patch pH Indicator, just to make sure you’re on the right track. The lye should turn the indicator yellow or green, meaning it’s highly alkaline. If the reaction is blue to blue green, that’s not a good sign. Those colors indicate a lower pH, meaning the solution is not alkaline enough to make good lye. Be sure you are using ash from the right kind of wood and that you haven’t mixed lots of charcoal in with it. It’s unlikely that this low-pH lye will ever be strong enough to make soap, even after it’s boiled down. We’ve been there and done that. It might be best to try again with a new batch of ash.

SAFETY NOTE

At this point, the solution is not caustic enough to burn your skin outright. It’s milder than the sodium hydroxide solution you mix up for regular soap. Still, it will dry your skin severely, and you definitely don’t want to get it in your eyes, so be sure to wear gloves and goggles. Later, when the solution is reduced to full strength, be extra careful.

If the liquid tests yellow or green, move on to the egg test. If the lye solution is dense enough to float an egg, this means it’s strong enough to make soap. Start with a fresh, raw egg. (It must be fresh, because rotten eggs float in water. If you’re not sure how old your egg is, put it in a bowl of water. It should sink to the bottom.) Then lower the egg into the lye water—wear gloves when doing this. If it sinks to the bottom, the lye is too weak and must be cooked to reduce the water content. If the egg floats high enough that a little circle of shell the size of a nickel or quarter breaks the surface of the water, then it’s just about perfect. Some people will also accept the lye if the egg floats just below the surface but does not quite break it. If the egg floats high on the water, the lye is too strong and must be watered down with rainwater until the egg floats correctly.

Set the egg aside for subsequent rounds of testing. Don’t eat this egg! It is a sacrifice to the cause.

REDUCE THE LYE

Most likely, the egg will sink at this stage and you’ll have to cook down the lye. We’ve found the quantity of lye usually needs to be reduced by half. Pour the lye into a large stainless steel or enamel pot and heat it to a steady simmer. Take note of the water level early on so you can gauge how much water has cooked off. At any point, transfer a couple of cups of lye into a bowl and let it cool (so it doesn’t cook the egg) and test again. Test, cook, and retest until the egg floats. You’ll find it takes surprisingly large amounts of water and ash to make small quantities of soap-worthy lye. This project will probably yield 1 or 2 quarts.

If you notice ash sediment in the finished lye, strain it through a finely woven piece of cloth, like a dishtowel or a coffee filter. Store the lye in a lidded glass jar until ready to use.

Part 2: Rendering Fat

PREPARATION:
2 hours

Both tallow and lard are used in soap making. Lard is pure pork fat. Tallow comes from the fat of any grazing animal, like cows, sheep, or deer. Of the two fats, lard makes the better soap, because of its cleaning abilities and its gentleness on skin, but both types of fat are used for soap, alone or in combination with other fats and oils. Lard is also a high-quality cooking fat, which is enjoying a renaissance after years of undeserved scorn. You might want to render lard just to have it on hand in the kitchen. Tallow can be used to make candles as well as soap.

YOU’LL NEED

• 3-5 pounds animal fat
  
• Big, heavy-bottom pot
  
• ½ cup water
  
• Colander or sieve lined with cheesecloth
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

The best days to render fat are mild days when you can open all the windows in your kitchen, because this is a stinky process. If you have a range fan over your stove, turn it on when you start cooking.

Chop the fat into 1- to 2-inch chunks to facilitate melting. If you can grind it, things will go much faster. As you cut the fat, trim away as much meat and tissue as practicable. The rest will be separated out later. The processes of melting lard and tallow are a little different, so the directions branch off here.

SOURCES OF ANIMAL FAT