Making Horse Chestnut Soap

So I like to experiment with things. This year I've been trying out different wild foods. Some have been pretty successful, and others were an absolute bust.

Here's another experiment...

My neighbors have this huge Horse Chestnut tree, and this year it's dropped a TON of nuts. It seems like such a waste. Now these nuts aren't edible, they contain the saponin aescin and also tannin, both of them would give you a pretty nasty case of the "green apple trots", or worse, for toddlers could be fatal.

I've read that Horse Chestnuts can be used to make a soap, that's not lye-based, to use on linens. Supposedly it whitens and brightens them. Really?!

So here goes...... gather some inedible horse chestnuts.....

They're kind of pretty, some folks use them in decorating, in wreaths and such. I'm not a big decorator, so I'll make soap.....

I needed to crack this thing to get at the nut meat, so I tried a potato masher...

No luck

...maybe my meat smasher flattener mallet thingy..

Nope still fine...

Out comes the hammer, the trick was holding it still without hitting my fingers, which I eventually accomplished.

Peel the nuts

Slice meat into boiling water

Let sit in boiling water for 10 minutes or so.

Ok now I have boiling soap water, that I have to say looked and felt like it was not going to work, and smelled like potatoes. I was pretty sure I'd wasted my time at this point. Well except for the hitting the nuts with a hammer, that was fun.

Now for the experiment. I took one of my linen towels and dropped wine on them (ps this was a bad idea, I love this towel, I should have used a towel I didn't like).

Then I soaked one side in the horse chestnut soap, the other side I washed with woolite.

Here's the result, can you see that the horse chestnut soap side is better?

I was amazed actually, really surprised!

Then I washed the whole thing in horse chestnut soap to get the stain out of the woolite side too. Once it was dry the linen towel was pretty as ever, but stiff, like I'd starched it (which I guess I technically did, right?).

So the verdict is:

On new stains it works better than woolite, smells like potatoes, and starches your linen. Is a little bit of a pain to make, and not sure how I'd store it. Also I've no idea if it'd work on old stains.... an experiment for next time I suppose. Overall, if I had some stained linens that I loved and wanted to resurrect without using harsh chemicals, I'd make it again.