Lye | Baking Ingredients | BAKERpedia (2024)

FAQs

What is the main ingredient in lye? ›

It is 100% pure sodium hydroxide, which can make all sorts of things like detergent, laundry detergent, or deodorant products. The main reason soapmakers use lye in their soaps is that it has many benefits over other ingredients, such as salt or synthetic chemicals found in many non-natural soaps today.

A lye is an alkali metal hydroxide. Traditionally it was obtained by using rainwater to leach wood ashes, which are strongly alkaline and highly soluble in water, of their potassium hydroxide (KOH), producing lye water, a caustic basic solution.

Lye is a stronger alkaline than baking soda or sodium bicarbonate, with a pH reading ranging from around 13 to 14. Its base of sodium hydroxide is created commercially by the electrolysis of sodium chloride solution, as well as reacting calcium hydroxide with sodium carbonate, according to the FDA.

Sodium hydroxide does not produce systemic toxicity, but is very CORROSIVE and can cause severe burns in all tissues that it comes in contact with. Sodium hydroxide poses a particular threat to the eyes, since it can hydrolyze protein, leading to severe eye damage.

The Truth About Lye

It imparts that unique pretzel smell and taste by inhibiting the creation of typical baked-good aroma compounds while spurring the formation of others and also adds unmistakable mineral flavor. And it gels surface starch, so the pretzels bake up smooth and shiny.

Lye is a caustic that today is most often used as a drain opener (and is one of the key ingredients in Drano.) Although it sounds like a horrible addition, it's a necessary ingredient for making handcrafted soap. It's used to saponify the oils, or chemically change them from oil into lovely soap.

Lye is made from wood ashes usually gathered from the fireplace and put in a wooden hopper. They typically needed about one wooden barrel of ashes to make the lye. The pioneers poured about 4 liters of water over the ashes to soak them. The water that seeped out was the lye water!

A lye solution, heated to 300 Fahrenheit degrees (148 Celsius), can dissolve an entire body into an oily brown liquid in just three hours. Dissolving of bodies in lye is a time-tested method used by Mexican drug cartels to get rid of tell-tale corpses.

Lye can corrode lots of things like metal, plastic, paint, cloth, and your skin.

Sometimes lye (sodium hydroxide) is added to raise the pH of the crust, which promotes browning and caramelization during the bake (this is identical to how pretzels are given their signature flavor and appearance, though in the case of bagels the concentration of lye used is much lower).

What is a natural alternative to lye? ›

In this method, you're replacing lye with baking soda, both of which are alkalies. However, lye is much stronger than baking soda. Heating up baking soda in the oven turns it from sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate, making it a slightly stronger alkali that'll better replace the lye.

Melt and pour soap is made without ever touching lye yourself. Purchase the premade soap base, cut it into chunks, and melt it down on the stove top until it becomes liquid.

Is lye harmful to humans? Lye is highly corrosive and can cause eye damage and burns to the skin. However, during the saponification process, the lye combines with water and oils and creates soap. Fully cured soap does not contain lye.

Contact with very high concentrations of sodium hydroxide can cause severe burns to the eyes, skin, digestive system or lungs, resulting in permanent damage or death. Prolonged or repeated skin contact may cause dermatitis.

Hardwood ashes are some of the best producers of lye. Learn how to make lye from ashes using a lye-leaching barrel to help filter rainwater through hardwood ashes to make lye for the soap-making process.

Heating up baking soda in the oven turns it from sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate, making it a slightly stronger alkali that'll better replace the lye.

To make lye in the kitchen, boil the ashes from a hardwood fire (soft woods are too resinous to mix with fat) in a little soft water, rainwater is best, for about half an hour. Allow the ashes to settle to the bottom of the pan and then skim the liquid lye off the top.

While it might sound scary — and is certainly dangerous in it's original form — lye isn't something you should worry about in your soap because the lye is no longer active in the soap after the soap has cured.