Frugally Friday: Quick and Natural Dish Soap

Welcome to Frugally Friday Post Holiday.

Today I want to share how to make an all natural, inexpensive dish soap. I don’t have a dishwasher yet, and I like to test these recipes out before I post them, so I don’t have a recipe to publish now on dishwasher detergent.  However, I hope most of you still use dish soap in your home, like I do, at least sometimes and so will find this recipe worthwhile.

ingredients for dish soap

You will need:

1/4 cup of Dr. Bronner’s Citrus Orange shavings

2 cups of water

1 tablespoon of white vinegar

Dr. Bronner’s Castile Orange

If you have a favorite natural soap equivalent to Castile soap then you can use that.  I would recommend using one with citrus and or orange oil to help with cutting grease from your dishes.  This bar cost me 3.93 plus tax, and will give me just over 4 servings of this recipe, about 64 oz. of dish soap. So about a dollar for 16 oz.

Melt Soap

Grate about 1/4 cup of soap and begin melting in the 2 cups of water.  With castile soap this take no time at all. Probably 2 to 3 minutes.  Let the mixture cool for about ten minutes, then add the tablespoon of vinegar. As we all know, vinegar is a great grease cutter and will really help with cleaning your oily dishes.

You will see the mixture go cloudy, when you add it, which is fine, but stir gently so as not to cause too many suds.  I learned this the hard way.  Once the suds are created, if you stir too much it separates some.

pouring soap

Gently stir the mixture every once in a while as it cools. Once cooled, put in your container. You can shake it gently before use too, if it needs to loosen up a bit.   I recycled all of my old dish soap containers, I do have this one that we would use at the sink,  refilling from the store-bought container.  I wish I had an empty commercial container, as it would hold more and I could double or triple the recipe.

fill container

Let the mixture cool overnight.  If only after then, you want to thicken the mixture, you can add an 1/8 tsp of salt OR 1/8- 1/4 tsp of super washing soda.  These will thicken it.  I messed up here with the first batch too.  I thought it was too thin so I added a tablespoon of super washing soda and within an hour or so it was perfect consistency and I started tooting my horn then when I woke up the next day it had solidified!  OOPS!

I think Edmond uses too much because he is expecting it to be really sudsy, but it is not supposed to be.  So you will need to get use to that.  He also likes to put the soap on the sponge instead of the water and this makes you use more too.  So, I recommend adding the soap to the warm water in the sink to wash the dishes.  It cuts grease really well, and have no problem getting the dishes clean.

There are a number of recipes for dish soap, both cooked and uncooked, so don’t give up if this one doesn’t work for you.

I would love to hear how you like it, or what improvements need to be made.

Have a great weekend,

Nicki

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~ by Perfect Prospect on November 30, 2012.