Clean Your Cooking Gear with Wood Ashes May 9, 2005 by Ron Fontaine

Wood Ash Soap – You can use wood ashes instead of soap to clean your
mess kit and cooking gear. Shown here is a greasy pot with food residue that
we want to clean, a bottle of water that has been treated to destroy disease
causing organisms, a pile of wood ash, and a scouring pad. Important: do not
wash your gear with 200 feet (60 meters) of any source of water. Using wood
ashes as a cleaning agent makes alot of sense: they are readily available, free,
and relatively safe for the environment when compared to many types of
soap. In this Survival Topic we will cover this very handy method for the
outdoorsman to clean his dirty dishes. Re-purpose Natural Materials When it
comes to wilderness survival, large scale disaster, or even just camping
outdoors we often try to do things in the same manner as we are accustomed
to doing them at home. However what works well enough in civilization does
not necessarily translate smoothly to a wilderness or disaster scenario where
familiar supplies of every sort are limited or non-existent. Solutions are
available to most outdoor and survival problems, if only we have the
knowledge and inventiveness to use them. But because we usually spend
most of our time in civilization where specialized tools and products are
readily available, we loose some of the edge in our abilities to utilize the
common items we find around us in the wilderness. Often it is simply a matter
of key pieces of information missing in our expertise, which once provided
suddenly gives us a powerful new way to accomplish necessary tasks.
Survival Topics maintains that the best survivalists are experts at repurposing
what is available to them under field conditions. Consider the daily chore of
cleaning your mess kit after a meal. There can be no doubt that the proper
cleaning of your mess kit and cooking gear is an important wilderness or
disaster survival task; when it comes to the food you eat and the cooking gear
and utensils that come in contact with it, a lack of proper hygiene can lay you
low in short order. Easy Access to Soap is Limited Mix Wood Ashes and
Water. Place the wood ashes in the pot that needs cleaning. Then ad water
and mix into a thin paste. And, the greasier the pot the better the wood ash
soap. In a disaster or wilderness survival setting you will often lack soap with
which to wash your camp cooking gear and mess kit. Soap takes up weight
and space, which is a very important consideration when every ounce and
every cubic inch of your gear must be measured against what is most
important for your survival. Especially when you are on foot the less you carry
the better off you are; hard decisions must be made on what you bring with
you and what is left behind. On extended stays in the wilderness or during a
large scale disaster re-supply from outside sources is usually not available.
You are likely to eventually run out of any soap you have so an alternative
means for cleaning your cooking gear and mess kit is preferable. When
practicing survival skills in the field I usually do not bring soap to clean my
mess kit and cooking gear. To save on bulk and weight, I would forgo using
any soap I had in favor of rubbing and swirling a mixture of water, mud and
sand on cooking utensils in order to scour off caked on grease and food
particles. Although sanding down cooking gear certainly removes food
residues, it often doesn’t eliminate all the grease. And the mess kit and
cooking gear sure take a beating. For many years I was content on using the
sand and mud method to clean my cooking gear when in the wilderness. But
one evening while sitting around the camp fire after having washed the
remains of the evening meal from my mess kit with the usual mud, sand, and
water mixture, the smoke sudden cleared from my eyes and the world seemed
fresh and new. I had independently made a discovery that had already been
known for centuries. Use Wood Ashes to Clean Dishes Scrub Well. Scrub the
pot well with the wood ash paste. With a flash of insight I realized all the soap
for washing my mess kit has always been right at hand. What’s more, the
supply is inexhaustible and I do not have to carry it. The answer to all my
mess kit and cooking gear cleaning problems? Wood ashes. Back home I did
the necessary research and discovered that cleaning dishes with wood ashes
is a sound practice. Wood ashes have been used for centuries as a source of
lye in the soap making process. When lye derived from wood ashes is mixed
with fats or oils a chemical action takes place that produces what we call
soap. While the chemistry behind this process is beyond the scope of this
Survival Topic, its implications are not; if you have wood ashes (from a
campfire) and fats or oils (in your dirty dishes) then you’ve got soap! How to
Use Wood Ashes as Soap Before we even begin to describe in detail how to
use wood ashes as soap in the wilderness, I want to emphasize the
importance of washing your cooking gear far away from any water supply. Do
not pollute the water sources that you, other people, and wildlife rely upon for
survival. Follow these basic steps for cleaning your cooking gear with wood
ashes. As with most processes, the description is wordy but actually doing it
is easy: Before you start cleaning your cooking gear with wood ashes there
are some important considerations that should be addressed: The wood
ashes used to wash your gear must not contain residue from plastic, food, or
other trash that was burned in the fire; these substances could very well be
toxic. To obtain pure wood ashes be sure you do not use ashes in which
others may have burned items other than wood. You may have to build a fire
at a fresh location from which to obtain pure wood ash. Water is a precious
resource that is easily contaminated. Avoid being the cause of water
contamination – do not wash anything within 200 feet of streams, lakes or
ponds, springs, etc. Water for washing anything that will come in contact with
food must be first treated to destroy disease causing organisms. The Survival
Topic That Water is Unsafe to Drink goes into further detail on contaminated
water and is required reading for any disaster or wilderness survivor. The lye
from wood ashes can make your hands dry if left on for a period of time. Be
sure to use gloves or rinse your hands in clean water after scrubbing your
gear using this method. Do not use wood ashes to wash your body or any
gear that cannot withstand harsh soaps. Ashes from hardwood trees are
better for making wood ash “soap” than ashes derived from softwoods. In
general, softwood trees have needles as leaves and do not shed them in
winter. Hardwoods have broad flat leaves and in cooler climates often shed
their leaves before winter sets in. Let your fire burn down to the point where
you can easily extract wood ashes. Select the greasiest pot you want to clean.
If the food residue is not very greasy you can help the soap making process
by adding a small amount of fat or oil into the pot. Butter, margarine, olive oil,
animal fat, etc are all good. Just a few drops are enough. Add a few cups of
ashes into the pot. If there are bits of charcoal mixed in with the wood ash
that is even better since charcoal will aid in scouring. Often I carefully add a
few hot coals from the fire in order make hot water (see the next step). Add
enough hot water to the wood ashes in the pot to make a paste. Because you
are cleaning gear that will be touching food, you must make sure this water is
free of disease causing organisms as stated in step one. You can either first
boil this water to make it safe (see the Survival Topic on How Long do You
Need to Boil Water?), or first add some hot coals to the pot as mentioned in
step #5 above. These hot coals should bring the water up to a high
temperature that destroys any organisms in the water. The hot water will
create potassium salts from the wood ashes, which will then mix with the fats
or oils in the food residue. This forms a crude soap that will cut through the
crud and grease on your cooking gear. When the water and wood ash paste is
cool enough smear it all over your cooking gear and let it set for several
minutes. This is where the chemical reaction takes place that makes your
wood ash soap. Scrub clean your cooking gear and mess kit. Rinse with
treated water. Of course being able to use wood ash soap means you must
have access to a wood fire. In some areas open fires are not allowed or you
may choose to use fuels other than wood for cooking food or heating
purposes. Cook with Wood and Save Rinse With treated Water – It is very
important that you rinse your cooking gear with water that has been treated to
destroy disease causing organisms. Survival Topics is a big fan of using
supplies provided by nature’s survival supply depot rather than have to carry
them myself. This saves on problems of procurement, expense, weight, and
bulk; always welcome attributes when traveling in the wilderness. Since in my
area wood is always available and open fires are not restricted, I do my camp
cooking on a hobo wood burning stove. The advantages of using a wood
burning stove over stoves using other types of fuels include: Do not have to
purchase fuel. Do not have to carry fuel. The fuel supply will never run out –
bits of wood or other natural burnable materials can easily be obtained
anywhere I go. The fuel wood is burned into ash during the cooking of meals.
The ash is then used to wash the dishes so I never need to carry soap for this
purpose! So there you have it – cook with wood and get all the free fuel and all
the free soap you need to for cleaning cooking gear. A sound wilderness
survival skill you can easily use the next time you cook a meal in the great
outdoors. Filed Under: Survival Topics Blog, Uncategorized MORE SURVIVAL
TOPICS February 2012 June 2005 May 2005 February 2005 May 2004
SURVIVAL TOPICS SPONSOR 

Copyright © SurvivalTopics.com Read more

at: http://survivaltopics.com/clean-your-cooking-gear-with-wood-ashes/