Olive Castile Soap

the hawken shop
L & R
Shop deals on ebay
Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I remember every once in a while at Grandpa's ranch back in the 50's, my grandmother would make soap. Seemed to coincide with slaughtering pigs. She'd make soap and Grandpa would make "cracklins".

She had this huge old cauldron that she would put over a wood fire on the hill behind the ranch house and seems like it would boil for days. Then she'd put in the ashes, stir it up, and we'd have "fresh soap". Lots of live oak and white oak on the ranch, so that's what we'd burn and those were the ashes she'd use.

It would stink pretty badly if you got too close to it while rendering the pig fat, but smelled fine by the time she put in the ashes. And we used the soap for everything - baths, laundry, shampoo, washing the car - it cleaned it all.

Twisted_1in66 :thumbsup:
Dan
 
twisted_1in66 said:
I remember every once in a while at Grandpa's ranch back in the 50's, my grandmother would make soap. Seemed to coincide with slaughtering pigs. She'd make soap and Grandpa would make "cracklins".

She had this huge old cauldron that she would put over a wood fire on the hill behind the ranch house and seems like it would boil for days. Then she'd put in the ashes, stir it up, and we'd have "fresh soap". Lots of live oak and white oak on the ranch, so that's what we'd burn and those were the ashes she'd use.

It would stink pretty badly if you got too close to it while rendering the pig fat, but smelled fine by the time she put in the ashes. And we used the soap for everything - baths, laundry, shampoo, washing the car - it cleaned it all.

Twisted_1in66 :thumbsup:
Dan
Click to expand...

Yep, I used to love those craklins, especially in cornbread.

Good hardwood always makes the best lye. My great grandpa would only put oak and mesquite ashes in the barrel to make the lye. They rarely used soft wood for firewood anyway because it made so much poor quality ash for the amount of heat that it produced. Plus, grandpa had just that much more ashes to haul out. He liked to put the soft wood ashes on the garden on those relatively rare occasions when they burned soft wood.

I remember one time when a neighbor's Chinese Tallow tree blew down. My cousin helped the neighbor cut up the tree. The neighbor was going to haul the wood out into the woods and dump it. He said it was no good. My cousin thought it was a shame to do so much work and then waste the wood. So, he brought it home to my great grandpa for firewood. They only used it one time and they found that when it burned it stunk something terrible. It smelled like old diapers burning. I don't know what is in Chinese Tallow wood that smells so bad but it sure does. My cousin had to load it all up and haul it off and dump it just as their neighbor had wanted to do in the first place.

Moral: Some wood makes good usable ashes, some wood makes poor ashes and some wood just stinks when it burns. So, if some kind soul offers you some free Chinese Tallow wood for firewood, run like hell. :haha:
 
colorado clyde said:
Elnathan said:
Only store-bought soap I've found that uses sodium tallowate (the active ingredient in lye soap) is Ivory.
Click to expand...

I always thought sodium tallowate was lye soap....(tallow or fat, sapponafied with lye (sodium hydroxide) )
And sodium tallowate was just the commercial industrial name for it...... :idunno:
Click to expand...

Bing says that it is the salt of the fatty acid of tallow. Basically the soap part of lye soap - I think that the homemade stuff may contain certain other things as well, but I'm not a chemist...
 
Lye soap is made from 3 ingredients: Water, Fat and Lye (NaOH/Sodium hydroxide for hard soap, KOH/Potassium hydroxide for soft soap). If all one has is Lye water from ashes (primarily KOH), salt (NaCl) needs to be added to harden the soap.
 
Black Hand said:
Lye soap is made from 3 ingredients: Water, Fat and Lye (NaOH/Sodium hydroxide for hard soap, KOH/Potassium hydroxide for soft soap). If all one has is Lye water from ashes (primarily KOH), salt (NaCl) needs to be added to harden the soap.
Click to expand...

Right, but is the chemical reaction 100 percent efficient? If not there may be non-saponified fats, plus whatever trace elements may be in the ashes, etc.
 
If I remember well, if there is too much fat and not enough lye, it won't saponify properly and won't set. In other words - it won't be soap...rather soapy water with fat globules.

More troubleshooting at http://www.mabelwhite.com/SoapTrouble.htm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Well, you probably know a lot more about this then I do. Everything I know I got from the Foxfire Book and looking up ingredients on teh interwebz. Never tried making soap myself, though it looks interesting.

Lye soap might make a good detergent for hunting clothes, since it doesn't have scents, dyes, or UV brighteners. Of course, you'd still smell like lye soap!
 
Elnathan said:
Right, but is the chemical reaction 100 percent efficient? If not there may be non-saponified fats, plus whatever trace elements may be in the ashes, etc.
Click to expand...


From my experience helping my great grandma make hers, it all came out in good order. She always boiled her hog lard that she rendered out. She would boil it a couple of times changing the water each time. What she ended up with was nice white lard like you would find in the store. The ash barrel had sand in the bottom that acted like a filter to remove most of the ash from the leachate. What came out of the bottom tap of the barrel was clear lye water. It was pretty dilute so grandma would boil it down until it was concentrated enough to make soap. She didn't measure anything except the specific gravity of the lye water. She did that with an egg. If it floated, the lye was strong enough. When she made soap, all measuring was done by eyeball just as when she used to make her delicious "cat head" biscuits. Both her soap and her biscuits came out perfect. She had a pretty well calibrated eyeball when it come to measuring ingredients for both cooking and making soap.

So, to address your question as to whether the reaction was a 100% stoichiometric reaction. Probably not but was it close enough to culminate in a fine soap? Yep! She made fine soap. :thumbsup:
 
Thats were adding some pine oil or other flowers are great additives to enhance the scent :)
It is very important to get the lye quantity right, always have a little oil left over,adds to skin moisturizing.
I did a batch once and did an error some ware and their was a little lye left, was great a few days then my skin would tingle in sensitive areas, so had to put it away, great for anything hand related cleaning.
 
Dragonsfire said:
I did a batch once and did an error some ware and their was a little lye left, was great a few days then my skin would tingle in sensitive areas, so had to put it away, great for anything hand related cleaning.
Click to expand...

Yep, don't get the recipe just right and it will still get you clean but it may be a tingly clean. Great grandma must have gotten hers just right because it always got you clean but as long as you let the cut bars sit and finish cureing before using it, no tingling. She used it for everything including washing my baby sister and 65 years later and baby sister is still going strong and has all of her hide.
 
Correct, and I find it odd in the first article where the author writes:

..., that include chemical hardeners, ...,

Well using salt to turn one's potassium hydroxide soap into hard soap, is using a "chemical hardener". I have read that most soap that was produced in homes from ashes was "soft", until the use of Sodium Hydroxide came around. So it was soft in colonial times, except for the Castile, which apparently was hardened by using some sea water with the rain water, when running the lye from the ashes.

LD
 
Loyalist Dave said:
Correct, and I find it odd in the first article where the author writes:

..., that include chemical hardeners, ...,

Well using salt to turn one's potassium hydroxide soap into hard soap, is using a "chemical hardener".
Click to expand...
It is always amusing when people use jargon or vague technical terms to cover a lack of knowledge....
 
I wish I could find a way to extract the wonderful-smelling oil from tarweed -- Madia elegans -- which is native to Oregon and California and was an important food source for Native Americans here.
In fact, the Kalapuya tribe got their name from their habit of rubbing tarweed oil on their skin.
 
BillinOregon said:
I wish I could find a way to extract the wonderful-smelling oil from tarweed -- Madia elegans -- which is native to Oregon and California and was an important food source for Native Americans here.
In fact, the Kalapuya tribe got their name from their habit of rubbing tarweed oil on their skin.
Click to expand...

There is an old saying in the world of chemistry "Likes dissolve likes". That being the case, if you want to extract the tarweed oil from the tarweed with something that you could incorporate into the soap, you might try extracting the tarweed oil with another oil. Perhaps you could take the part of the tarweed plant that contains the oil and pound or grind it and then soak it in something like olive oil to extract the tarweed oil from the plant. Of course a solvent, perhaps alcohol or acetone might work too but you don't want to add such solvents to your soap. Stick to cold extracting it with an oil that will work in soap. I don't think I would heat it because the fragrance that you want to capture is most likely relatively volatile and would likely be lost in a hot extraction. You will just have to experiment to see how much of the plant material you need and how much oil you need and how long to steep the plant material in the oil...possibly hours and possibly days. Try to keep the amount of extracting oil to a minimum so that you can have the greatest concentration of the tarweed oil in your extracting oil. You will need to add the fragrance containing extraction at the end of your soap making when the soap has cooled just before you pour the finished soap into the mold to solidify. Do this so you don't loose the volatile fragrance. I think you may have to do a bit of experimentation to come up with the best way to get the tarweed fragrance into your soap but I believe it is doable.

Right after I had posted this, I thought of a possible oil extraction procedure. Crush and grind the tarweed with the oil in something like a mocahete to form an oily paste. Let the paste sit and extract the tarweed oil. Just how long that might be, I don't know. After the extraction period, place the paste in a piece of cloth and twist it to squeeze out the oil just as one separates fruit pulp from the juice when making jelly or wine. I have never actually done this but I feel sure it will work.
 
Oh, I just thought of an alternate plan B. Pulverize the plant material and place it into a cloth bag to form a sort of large "teabag". When the soap has finished making and has cooled, before pouring it into the mold, stir your "teabag" in the still soft soap and let the soap itself extract the fragrance. This "teabag" method of extracting a desired fragrance or flavor from an herb has been used, when cooking, by chefs for years to extract the flavor and fragrance and yet keep the leaves and stems of the herbs from getting into the finished dish.
 
Black Hand said:
From what I have read, lye soap should be aged for a few weeks before use.
Click to expand...

Weeks, I do two months. Salt is normally used to separate the Valuable Glycerine, you dont want that. The soap I make is HARD, no need for additives, coconut oil is a hardener.
 
You are using NaOH - the Na (Sodium) hardens the soap much like adding NaCl to KOH soft soap. No Na, no hard soap....
 
Sodium Hydroxide :)

32264311.jpg
 

Latest posts

Back
Top