Backwoods Clean Cooking With Wood Ashes

When it comes to backwoods survival, large scale disaster, or even just camping outdoors we often try to do things in the same manner as we are use to doing at home. However what works well enough at home does not necessarily translate smoothly to a backwoods 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 backwoods.

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 reusing what is available to them under field conditions.

Consider the daily duty 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 backwoods 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.

In a disaster or backwoods 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 backwoods 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 was in favor of rubbing and swirling a mixture of water, mud and sand on cooking utensils in order to scrub 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 backwoods. 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.

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 cannot be used up and I do not have to carry it.

The answer to all my mess kit and cooking gear cleaning problems? Wood ashes. At 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!