Homemade Lye Soap
Homemade lye soap is a great way to get back in touch with your roots. No matter where you hail from, chances are, at some point, someone in your lineage made lye soap. While this fact is fascinating and intriguing and making homemade lye soap is a lot of fun it is relatively easy.
Homemade lye soap dates back so far we are not even sure when people began making it. However, the ashes from burned wood and the droppings from meat cook outside were the first lye solutions. Actually, even after lye could be bought, many farmers still made their own lye solutions with this simple formula.
With that in mind, it is clear that homemade lye soap is very simple to make. If you go to a store and buy the lye you can made your own soap by using lye, fat and water. The types of fat you use is negotiable and largely up to you. However, some fats will make a softer soap while other will make a very hard one.
Once you have the lye, you will want to use a lye calculator to figure out how much lye should be used. Different fats and oils will call for a different amount of lye. Once you find that out you want to add the lye to the water very slowly. Lye is a strong chemical and should be handled with care. The mixture will need to be heated until it reaches the melting point. Next you will want to add the lye water to the fat.
Depending on the fat that you use, this mixture will need to cook for a while. While the homemade lye soap is cooking a process known as soapafication will take place. The soap will be ready to be poured into molds once it traces. This can be determined by the mixture that is on the wooden spoon you use to stir it with. Look at the mixture that slides down the edge of the spoon. When it looks like it is a different texture than the soap in the pot, it is ready to be poured into molds.