Washing without soap

I don’t like using much soap to wash my dishes or me because without copious amounts of hot water, a soapy residue stays on, so, I have been using baking soda when I have a greasy pan to wash and sometimes I use it to wash my hair as well, as I learned to do from this Mother Earth News article. The baking soda acts as the alkali and the grease in the pan or the oil in my hair acts as the fat, put them together and you have soap. It has been working really well until I ran out of baking soda. Lye (the alkali that soap is usually made with) is made from wood ash so I tried washing a greasy pan using hot water and ashes from my wood stove, and it worked great.