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Utilizing Resources Tallow Making Lye Soap

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Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Cadbury Pathfinder school when my instructor Jim here to help me today we're going to continue with our utilizing resources series on tile and make some soap today I apologize if you hear chainsaws in the background I got a couple guys next property up from my putting up firewood for the winter time so you might hear some chainsaws in the background now and then so the first thing we're gonna do is render our lower down or render our tile on down depending on what type animal are using whether it's tile or lard in this case we're using deer so it's tallow and then we're going to extract our ligh to get ready to make our soap so stay with us okay so the first thing we're going to do today is we know making a live soap we're going to render this tallow again and add some questions last night on the video segment about the candles asking about tallow versus lard is anything is any fat can be used from any animal and like I said tallow is kind of a fancy word for fat but so is lard and the difference between fat and tallow you know as pointed out to me by general on YouTube last night he's right lard usually will stay fairly soft at room temperature tallow will be hard at room temperature that's why the deer tallow is so good for what we're doing and now we're going to make soap with this so what we're doing now is we're cutting it up and render it again we've got a small container of wood ash off to the side over here and that's what we're going to get our live from and we'll explain that process to you in just a few minutes I'm going to get assisted today by my buddy Jeremy one of my instructors at the Pathfinder school say hi to the camera Jeremy I know you're shy now we're doing okay so what we've got here is we've got some ashes out of the fire in another pot and I've got a mason jar full of water and the water is kind of important in this process I assume that you're going to use natural water that's what we're trying to do out here is make this a project that you could do in the woods in a self-reliance situation so taking water out of the creek you collect rainwater for this but what you don't want to use is you don't want to use hard water I don't like your sink or something like that if you're on city water because you don't want all those chemicals and chlorine in the water what I'm going to do is I'm just going to fill this up with water a little bit to the top of the pan let's settle down inside

we're going to boil this over the fire just like we're doing with our Tyler right now it's important that you use a hardwood coal in this or hardwood ash in this you don't want to use pine and soft woods and things like that you want like oak and hickory hardwoods is what you want okay so here we are back to fire Jeremy Janie and myself working on our tallow rendering it down and working on our live solution and lye is very easy to extract people to understand how easy it is but wood ash and water will extract lye so what we're doing right now is we're boiling it down we're going to strain it off to get any soot and ashes that are left in it out then we're going to add a little bit of water to it and boil it down again so you're almost making a decoction if you were making it herbal remedy it would be like a decoction you're going to boil it down a couple of times to concentrate that law okay so we're going to do now is we got this mason jar here which I hope we don't crack with this hot liquid and we're going to put this old nasty smog over top up to strain it off we're going to strain some of that ash off so we've got left now residually it's basically a liquid that's got a high content of lye in it that's what we're going to use to make our soap glue but we're going to render this down one more time like I said almost like a decoction and strain it off one more time we do that

okay so we've pulled our lye water off and set it off the cool we're getting ready pull our towel off now now we're going to strain the cracklings off of it and then we're going to put it back on a low fire and mix our live water with it and boil it again to get everything seized together and get that thing into a solution where we can pour it in a mold and make soap so the next step is to strain the cracklings out of our towels okay so we've mixed our lye water with our melted tallow now now what we want to do is we want to burn the water off so that we leave nothing but the like Emma chol mixed with the tallow okay so the next step in the process now we've pretty much got everything rendered down where we want it what we've got left should be able to harden in the soap and now we're going to strain it off one more time just to make sure we get any more impurities out of it I'll just cut a piece of this cloth here real quick strain it over top of them and then we're going to use the other piece the line our mold with up again here we're going to wet this cloth if we line our mold with it don't you take this over the creek in this dinner but that's going to help it cool and keep it from sticking as much if we do that let's just going to put this stem all the whole thing flat let's just go into the corner kind of set it on an angle

shoot the house just a mattr let that cool down and solidify and we'll come back okay guys so this is our molded soap right here in the dish and we put this rag in here to collect some of the excess water that might be left in there I'm gonna pull that out and you can see there was a little bit of water left in that but that rag allowed that to drain off so now what we have left is a solid bar of soap so we'll get that water drained off of it real quick and now we can use that cut that up or break it up whichever one we want to do just like that break it into a couple squares you know we've got some good lie soap right there and it smells pretty good we can wash our skin wash our clothes wash our hair it's got enough grease in it you know that gives us a little bit of protectant too but it also will clean our stuff really well so we've got you know three or four small Barzilai soap there that we can split up between me and Jeremy put those in our kit dry this out we can store them in a cloth like that if we wanted to we'll just let that dry out then we can wrap our soap in our cloth to store it when you made some lye soap pretty awesome hi I'm Dave Canterbury pathfinder school this is one of my assistant instructors Jeremy Janie and we appreciate you joining us today during this segment and making live soap utilizing the resource of tallow we appreciate your views we appreciate your support we'd back the other video very soon thank you very much you

About the Author

wildernessoutfitters

wildernessoutfitters

From the lore of bushcraft to all things related to self-sustainability, the Pathfinder vision is to pass on the knowledge of outdoor self-reliance. Providing basic to advanced self-reliance training and survival gear, our goal is to offer both practical knowledge and survival gear that will stand the test of time. From emergency preparedness to sustainability, the Pathfinder way is to share and educate.

Here you can explore the world of survival knives, survival kits and simple tips on outdoor self-reliance. We are always learning and enjoy passing on the knowledge we acquire.

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