Soap nuts have been around for centuries. It’s one of the oldest medicinal plants in the world which is native to India and Nepal, and is known by other names like ‘Indian soapberry’ and ‘washnut’. The Soapnut is the dried fruit of the Ritha tree and the saponin released is a 100% substitute to normal detergents. Read about soapnuts more here

For Any Soapnut recipes , Very first step is to prepare the soapnut liquid . This will act as a base for all soapnut recipes like dishwashing, bodywashing , car washing , and as a multi purpose liquid cleaners This is our first part of this DIY series and in this blog we will see how you can make the basic soapnut liquid . On our next blogs we will see how using this liquid , we can make different soapnut products

Ingredients needed- for 500ml of soapnut product

• 100 gms of soapnuts (~50 soapnuts)
• 1250ml of water

For the ease of use for all of our blog readers , this article is targeted to get 500ml of soapnut product. You can proportionally change this . There is no hard and core rule for this

Steps

1. Take around 100gms of soapnuts in a big vessel and add around 1250 ml of water and leave it overnight

2.Most of the products we make with reetha , first step is to boil it . Next day , bring this liquid to boil. Boil for around 30-45 mins in simmer and take precaution that it doesn't overflow while it is cooking . you can cook to such extent that whole liquid should come down to half of the initial quantity we have taken . In our case once the liquid comes down to 500ml you can stop this process

3. Once the liquid cools completely,Leave it overnight.

4. Next day ,squeeze the soap nuts with your fingers nicely to extract more soap. You should deseed all the soapnuts and after you deeseded it put all the deseeded soapnuts to back in and then you can squish the pulp from the berry as much as you can . You can already see the forth at this step.

5. You can strain the liquid now and store into a plastic bottle . As it is a natural product, you have to refrigerate it. It stays good for 10 days in the refrigerator and for a longer period in the freezer.

This is a base for all our products such as bodywash , handwash , dishwash, floor mpopping liquid etc .

Pro Tips:Don't throw the soapnuts after filtering the liquid . You can use it further for until it disintegrates . We will tell you how you can use these in our upcoming blogs.

To be Continued ...

In our next blog we shall see how we can make various products using this base solution . Stay Tuned for our next article . Any suggestions , doubts, questions , please feel free to add it in comment section . We look forward to answer all your queries. Until then GoodBye! and Take care