Making your own hot sauce
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I'm not an expert, but from what I've heard about botulism, that's recklessly irresponsible advice. (Do your own research before taking the advice below.)
The whole point is that:
1. Botulism spores are everywhere.
2. They only reproduce when the conditions are right. Guess what those conditions are? a) Not too acidic b) NO OXYGEN.
3. Soap doesn't kill them. Boiling at at STP doesn't kill them. The only way to kill them is to boil them at a high enough pressure that the temperature.
Therefore, "make sure everything is clean" is useless advice; and "make sure everything is airtight" just helps you make sure the conditions are right to be poisoned.
Two ways to counter botulism. Either:
1. Boil things at the right pressure for long enough (with a pressure gauge to make sure it's actually at the specified pressure) to kill the spores
2. Make sure it's acidic enough to keep the spores asleep.
EDIT: My point wasn't "Don't bottle things like hot sauce at home". I bottle things at home myself. And I bet his recipe is perfectly safe -- not because he keeps things airtight and clean, but because it's acidic.
If he had said, "Watch out for botulism but this is safe because it's acidic", then people using his recipe will make sure to keep things acidic as well, and if they dilute the acidity, they'll be warned to look up the pH required to be safe.
But instead he said, "Watch out for botulism, make sure everything is airtight and clean"; which means people might take his recipe and reduce the acidity, believing themselves still to be safe because they're keeping things airtight and clean. That is what's reckless about the advice.
Also, another condition botulism requires is to be above 5C. So what I actually do myself is bottle things that are acidic, and then keep them in the fridge. I don't typically make more than a few jars a year, so that's sufficient for me; if I was going to can things properly, I'd get pH testers and/or a pressure cooker with a gauge.
If anyone is concerned about it, the simplest thing to do is buy an inexpensive pH tester and confirm the brine's pH is below 4.6
Here's some real numbers: between 1976-2009 there have been 3618 confirmed cases of botulism in the USA. 100 per year. You have one in 3,400,000 chances to get botulism if you live in US in any given year. And I bet the vast majority are from eating spoiled or contaminated industrial tinned food, rather than people making hot chili sauce.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5460764/
EDIT after rereading the research: of 3618 cases of botulism, 109 were fatal. Of these fatal cases, 61 were due to foodborne botulism. In 33 years. That's a probability of ~1/170,000,000 per year to die of botulism in the US.
Don't be. Read up the facts, and make sure to prepare things right.
This is the point of the warning. Botulism is not some cosmic horror which reaches out and grabs you randomly. It is like a knife. If you do things right it is perfectly safe. If you do things wrong it can kill you. The point of the warnings is to learn where the "edge of the knife" is and how to behave to keep yourself safe.
The point of the comment is that the provided "safety precautions" are wrong. It is as if someone said "to avoid knife injuries make sure to always put your fingers under what you are cutting. That way you will know when your knife is getting blunt." The advice provided is that obviously bad.
> here's some real numbers:
We are not talking about national averages. If you make chilli sauce which is not sufficiently acidic then you bottle it up and close oxygen away from it you created a science experiment to grow botulism bacteria. If you do that you suddenly increased your personal probabilities from those nice and low national numbers to alarmingly high.
The warning is there because people are bad at following instructions. And that is usually fine. When someone is making a cupcake and they forgot the chocolate chips out the cupcakes will be less delicious but won't kill them. With chilli sauce this is not the case. It can literally kill you if you adjust the recipe such that it is not acidic enough anymore. So we warn people about that.
In a way botulism reminds me of stories about vampires or other mythical creatures of evil: They're potentially powerful and scary but have simple weaknesses which, if you know them, render them powerless.
Per https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/prevention/index.html: "You cannot see, smell, or taste the toxin that causes botulism. But taking even a small taste of food containing the toxin can be deadly."
On a side note, I see that botulism toxin (but not the spores) is destroyed by heating at 185F (84C) for a period of a few minutes. I've always boiled my fermented sauces as a final step because it stops the fermentation from progressing and makes the sauce last longer without developing any further "off" tastes.
1. The botulism spore can only be killed by heating to something very high, like 250C, which can only be achieved at a higher pressure
2. If the conditions are right, the botulism spore spawns to be a botulism bacteria inside your sealed container; and this bacteria creates the botulism toxin.
3. It's the toxin that kills you, not the bacteria. The botulism toxin can be broken down by heating for a few minutes.
Unfortunately, your "boiling fermenting sauces as a final step" happens between 1 and 2, but not between 2 and 3; so the botulism toxin isn't present yet, only the botulism spore, which won't be fazed at all by 85C. If you want to use boiling to protect yourself from the botulism toxin, my understanding was that you'd need to boil it after you open the can for the first time.
Again, I'm not an expert, so make sure to do your own research.
I'd hazard a guess that about zero of those 3618 total cases were related to the consumption of food that was preserved through fermentation.
It's not like you can just seal up a jar and it's going to form botulism, it's necessary that the botulism spores have the necessary resources to multiply, just as it's important that yeast or other fermenting agents require the necessary resources to multiply and colonize. I definitely appreciate your point, but I also think your concern, in the context of fermentation, is overblown.
In fact, I generally assume anything that's fermented properly is safe to eat. If you ferment it, and it doesn't taste bad, it's basically good to go for the human body. This is part of why we now use the term "probiotics" which are mostly bacterial or yeast growths that are involved in fermentation and can help to fight off illness causing bacteria. Beer, wine, kimchi, sour kraut, and pretty much anything else you ferment is safe exactly because of this competitive exclusion.
Botulism in food is a well-studied subject.
Even particular foods like garlic, notwithstanding aspersions cast in other comments, have empirical studies e.g. [1] that look pretty plausible. Several more reports from reputable sources turn up in the first few pages of internet searches around just garlic.
It is true that there are a lot of traditions and implicit knowledge around food safety, but it seems like a strawman fallacy to ignore what is explicitly known.
We're in a golden age of knowledge, people!
"If your sauce has a sufficiently high salt and/or acid level it shouldn’t grow anything nasty."
I probably should have said.
"If you are careless, you could end up with botulism, one of the deadliest toxin known to man! But if your sauce has a sufficiently high salt and/or acid level it shouldn’t grow anything nasty. ... To avoid mould and other issues make sure the fermentation vessel is airtight and everything is clean."
Anyway, I'm not trying to tell anyone the detailed process of how to make hot sauce here. Just encouraging them to find out more from someone who is more expert.
https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/blogs/usdas-complete-gu...
This page refers out to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which is a web resource with similar guidance and recipes:
These recipes do include things like salsas. The point being is that safe canning practices have been well-studied, documented, and already paid for by tax payers. It's a good resource to use as opposed to just winging it.
my go-to brine is by weight, which eliminates a bunch of issues:
* 400g water
* 26g salt
this makes for a great brine without trying to estimate or "taste" it to see if it's ok.
in addition, I sometimes use adjuncts:
* garlic - this adds a lot of flavor to the sauce, but could add yeast if you're not careful
* carrots - adds some vegetable flavor and a little bit of sweetness without adding sugar directly
I also don't pasteurize it (heat it up after it's done, or add vinegar), since I prefer the natural change that the sauce has over time. I also don't "thicken" it, you can get a better sauce by using the correct amount of brine when you go to blend it at the end, if all else fails, any leftover brine can be used for other things (I have some great pickles that were started with a partial batch of brine).
it's a fun hobby, but make sure that you can find a home for the extras if you aren't an avid hot sauce eater!
editing to add some tips:
1. if you're dealing with hot peppers, use gloves - they help a lot!
2. the seeds and the pith add a lot of heat - you can remove them and get yourself delicious flavor without the pain.
Also, check out Habanada peppers.
https://heatonist.com/collections/hot-ones-jr-hot-sauces
A “super mild” line of sauces to introduce kids to hot sauce without overwhelming them. They might be a good starting point to see if she likes it.
Note that when self made it can be accidentally end up with too much “vegetal” taste to it. It’s been a very long time since I’ve made it so I forgot what my resulting recipe was that addressed that.
On heat tolerance, do some genetic thing where people get one, two or three receptors[1] which give different sensitivity to different people. I had a GF who would struggle with the level of capsaicin I literally wouldn't even notice. I knew a guy who would snack on scotch bonnet peppers straight, which would be impossibly agonising for me.
[1] from memory, doubtless incorrect as well
But "acı" can also mean bitter. You have to look at the context to understand. However things can both be spicy and bitter. In that case it gets complicated :)
Perhaps the lack of a dedicated mapping to "capsaicin sensation" stems historically from England's reputedly bland cuisine...
Thank goodness for immigration.
But I don't think it's fair to call UK food bland. Done properly it's very good, but what it's not (usually) is heavily seasoned. In no way does that require it to be tasteless, and done properly it isn't.
There is a reason there are thousands of Indian restuarants in England and approximately zero English restaurants in India. ;0)
Thankfully, food has improved vastly in the UK since the 70s.
England's bland food is a relatively recent development, much more recent than the language.
https://edmundstanding.wordpress.com/2020/05/28/hot-peppers-...
personally, I'd add a little more than bell peppers, which tend to have a more vegetable flavor. there are some Italian peppers that have a nice sweetness without heat, for instance.
if you're looking for more of a sriracha flavor, add some garlic in there! there's just as much of a world of peppers to explore that isn't burning hot as there is super hot varieties.
In my 20s I on more occasions than I’m prepared to admit, rubbed my eye while cooking with peppers. Then I ran to the bathroom, cupped my hands under the water and splashed water in both eyes. This (obviously, in retrospect) left me painfully blind for about half an hour.
I’d note that gloves would have helped in this scenario only if I was smart enough to take them off before splashing water in my eyes. Which branch of that if statement would have been more likely is left as an exercise for the reader.
Something I learned googling with one eye open while the other was burning from being touched with a habanero contaminated finger :/
They also tasted hot for 3 days
I have worn gloves each and every time since, when dealing with more than 2 or 3 peppers at habanero heat or above.
I do all my ferments at about 2.5%, maybe 3 for sauces where saltier isn't a problem. I do it all in a vac bag, but the concept is the same, just use the final weight of everything.
I always use 3% of water weight, which in more consistent than weighing the veggies, because the amount of water can vary.
Very unusual to see food-related content on HN. I love it!
> Very unusual to see food-related content on HN. I love it!
:) me too. I really love lacto fermenting things, it's a nice old technique that's very forgiving and rewarding. The flavour you get out of it makes so many things pop, and the noma book is full of ideas (even if I'll never make them quite as fancy)
I'm doing a bunch of kefir now, and someday I'd like to do koji.
as for "when" - put them in the brine with the rest of the peppers, wait your couple of weeks, then blend.
I grow the bird’s eye chilis (piri piri) that is an important part of a number of Portuguese dishes that I like, including wonderful piri piri oil that I drizzle on many things. I always have extra chilis at the end of the year so I make sauce.
There is a Portuguese sauce made from fermented red (sweet, large) peppers that I’ve never been able to get right though. Finding a recipe online is tough because this is a family recipe that gets passed down, many families have their own take on it, and I’m in California and don’t have any Portuguese relatives. If anyone makes massa de pimentão and has a recipe please share
I like them so much I picked my username after them :)
I bought my last batch from that link and they tasted perfect.
I used to just get them from local Filipino stores/communities, if you have any. A lot of people grew them when I was in Florida.
My last house was in the desert, and wasn't able to find any locally so bought those off ebay.
I thought / have observed that the spelling "chili" (single letter l) was used for the US / Mexican dish called "chili con carne", and the spelling "chilly/chillies" was used for the hot pepper that came from the Americas and spread to much of the world.
Edit: Wikipedia says both spellings are used for the hot pepper:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper
Edit 2: See the Spelling and usage section.
It does not mention the y ending, but I have seen it in India.
> Chilli or Chili, a name now commonly used in Asia and Africa, is said to have come from the Nahautl dialect of Mexico and Central America.
> The U.S. Government Standard divided Capsicum into types corresponding to commercial types; paprika, red pepper, ground and crushed. The term "chilli" is not generally used in the U.S., but is used in Britain, India, Africa, and the countries in the East.
> The British Standard Specifications, however, differentiate between chillies and capsicum, obviously based on the degree of pungency. It gives no values but describes "chillies" as pungent small fruits of certain forms of the species C. frutescens L. and describes Capsicum as of varied sizes, generally big, of the species, C. annuum L.
In India, chili chicken (probably spelled chilli chicken) is an Indianised-Chinese dry starter or appetizer kind of dish, of small pieces of chicken stir-fried with a tangy dry coating / sauce that includes ginger, garlic and red chillies. You can get vegetarian versions too, like paneer chilli. That coating / sauce is really good. It has tiny solid bits and pieces of ginger and garlic which adds to the taste.
You get it in (Indian) Chinese or multi-cuisine restaurants.
Can confirm I have never seen "Chilly" as a spelling for the pepper in either country!
Meanwhile, my fellow Texans have famously bastardized “chile con carne” to refer to spicy beef stew, and would tend to specify “chili pepper” to refer to the actual fruit itself.
Cook down lemons, spices with Piri Piri (dry and fresh both) and throw some uncracked pepper corns in with the dry peppers directly into the jar with great quality olive oil, it’s my favorite condiment
Both of the recipes calls for roasting the peppers under low heat (my oven min is 170F) for an hour or so to drive off some water… every time I do that I think I kill off the lacto. I get mold every time I try the fermented version.
If you know of any family recipes I would love to hear them!
Also I’d love to hear about the tech scene in Portugal, my wife and I have been thinking of moving the family there
I have seen some people recommend to put some fresh chillis in with the roasted ones for this reason.
>I get mold every time I try the fermented version.
It is airtight? Is the brine salty enough (2-3% salt to water usually recommended)?
I’ll try adding some fresh peppers in just for the lacto and try again.
A very very rough recipe is:
- 4 lbs of dried chiles de arbol (no seeds or stems) - 1.5 lbs each of Serranos and Jalapeños - 1 lb of habaneros - 4 large carrots - half cup of garlic - about 2 gallons of white vinegar - a little salt and maybe a cup of water
I like the idea of adding some mangoes from the link so maybe add 2-3?
Rough chop everything and take out stems and the majority of seeds. Start heating the arbols in a very large boil pot outside (on a grill or its own propane burner). Then after 15 mins add the other peppers and salt. 15 mins later add the veggies, 5 mins later pour the vinegar and water if needed in so that it just covers the chiles. You might not use all the vinegar. Heat to a low boil for 2 hours. Let it cool for 20 mins, blend it in batches till smooth. Then transfer the blended batches back to the pot and reboil for 10 mins. Then pot directly into mason jars. Stir occasionally throughout so nothing burns, but some color is good at the beginning.
It feels pretty safe. It’s very very hot but that’s how I like it and makes it last longer. It’s not as smooth as the off the shelf hot sauces, but not quite as thick as the chile hot sauce in Asian restaurants.
Oh and don’t touch your eyes or sensitive areas.
Maybe it’s just me but chiles have decreased in hotness in the past decade. Like a habanero or jalapeño is not as hot as they used to be. For jalapeños, there used to be like 1/5 that would floor you, so their average hotness was quite higher. Now it seems like all jalapeños I buy are the same, which reduces the average heat so I have to add more habaneros.
https://www.dmagazine.com/food-drink/2023/05/why-jalapeno-pe...
1. Chop up bird's eye chilis, add fish sauce and lime juice - boom, prik nam pla. If you don't have fish sauce, bird's eye chilis and white vinegar.
2. White vinegar, sugar and salt, garlic and/or ginger, bird's eye or jalepeno, some bell pepper to cut the heat - stick it in a blender, done. Super delicious.
1. Botulism is nearly a non-issue in lacto fermentation. As the article mentions, salt and acid inhibit its growth. For an extra layer of protection, you can add a bit of vinegar at the start of the process to further encourage the growth of safe microorganisms. Botulism only starts becoming an issue when you have low-salt, low-acid preparations, or when you start the process like you would in traditional canning (boiling the fermentation mixture ahead of time -- getting rid of all competition for the botulism). If you cook the peppers you should make sure to pitch in a significant quantity of yeast and/or lactic acid producing bacteria.
1a. Botulism is a lot higher risk if you stabilize the mixture (the "simmering it in a pan to thicken" step) before storing it. That kills any safe microorganisms and again opens up the door for an infection from something dangerous (though, as the article mentions, it's less risky because of the accumulated salt and acid in the final product).
2. Mold requires a stable, aerobic environment to grow. Completely submerging the peppers suffices, as does using some form of air-lock, but you can also almost always get away with just stirring it twice each day.
3. Sugar can make the fermentation work better. The suggestion of fruit to achieve that is a great idea. As a side-note, mango is particularly delicious fermented on its own (halves or other large chunks, fermented just till there's a lot of CO2 bubbles, making them fruit chunks sparkly, no longer or it gets mushy).
> kills off the fermentation.
4. That has pros and cons. Fermented foods "keep" better while still fermenting (in terms of food safety), but the texture and flavor can degrade (it varies, look at how fantastic kimchi is as an example of longer fermentations being beneficial). Once hybrid strategy if you still want the improved texture from cooking is to reserve some of the pre-cooked sauce and re-introduce after cooking, re-innoculating it with yeast and bacteria. It'll tend to keep a lot longer if you do so. The flavor changes can be good or bad. It'll build up pressure over time though, so don't seal it air-tight.
I don't think fermented hot sauce is taking anybody out. At least, not that way.
(I'm fascinated by this because it's an article of faith that you can't store garlic confit or garlic oil in the fridge, but it's very difficult to find a case of anyone contracting botulism from cooked garlic, and when I get taken out by a case of garlic botulism, you all have my permission to write your dunks directly onto my gravestone).
A traditional native Alaskan dish, for anyone else as curious as I was
It's right up there with storing cooked rice in the fridge. Garlic you're at least able to cook long enough to kill the botulism spores, but typical fluffy white rice preparations are nowhere close, and if you had enough spores to start with (this being quite rare, hence why illness and death are rare) you'll have a very dangerous concoction brewing in your fridge.
> beluga flipper
That story's especially wild because it was just a dead whale of unknown age they then processed. Generally though, meats are less safe to ferment than vegetal matter (lower sugar and acid content, higher initial bacterial loads and other parasites). It can be done safely, but where I'm comfortable telling just about anyone veggies and fruits are safe, I'd not want to recommend meat to somebody with the wrong background.
15 episodes (62 patient cases) in the UK between 1922 and 2005. https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/28/4/337/1622732... Mostly not home-prepared, and of those that were only one was canned vegetables (mushrooms).
It's nasty and can be fatal yes, but in terms of risks in life it just doesn't warrant mentioning, and yet it is so often. (And I do not believe it's bloggers feeling the need to warn about it that's suppressing the numbers!) You're probably more likely to get run over on your way to the shop for whatever you want to can/ferment.
Maybe fearmongering is one of the reasons the deaths are so low?
That, and the fact that the recipes that have become a part of the culture in many cases happen to be recipes that prevent botulism (i.e., things that are sour).
> (And I do not believe it's bloggers feeling the need to warn about it that's suppressing the numbers!)
As for safe recipes being established part of the culture (no puns intended?) - yeah, well that's somewhat the point, C. botulinum spores can't be seen, but other things can, we've developed preservation techniques that work for both, it's rare anyway, it doesn't warrant worrying about specifically. It's the nastiest thing that almost certainly isn't going to happen.
I think my favourite hot sauces have started by drying the chillies, then toasting them in a pan. This adds a lovely smoky, rich flavour.
In terms of other additives, i recently made a rather long winded rum and coke themed hot sauce, the main lesson from which is that orange peel goes amazingly with chilli. I am now thinking about a chocolate orange hot sauce, built around toasted chillies, orange peel, and cocoa powder perhaps. Can i make an orange peel oleo saccharum using citric acid, and use that instead of vinegar? Should i make it oil-based? Use crème de cacao?! Much to ponder.
If you're going to grow your own chillies, i can highly recommend NuMex Bailey:
https://cpi.nmsu.edu/_assets/documents/Bailey.full_.pdf
It's a pequin pepper, so very small, but hot and with good flavour. This particular strain grows like the clappers, forming a compact, dense bush, which is covered in flowers and then fruit, which as the paper says, are very easy to pick when ripe. The productivity in terms of mass of fruit per unit of pot area is far better than anything else i've grown. It seems to be impossible to kill, too.
+1. I spent hours lovingly sanitizing and prepping and waiting for habaneros to ferment; in the end, they added a bit of funky tang, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time. I realized that vinegar-based hot sauce recipes are quicker to iterate on and perfect and taste closer to what I prefer.
However, it's all subjective! Watching something ferment in a container is inherently fun, in the way a terrarium with a small creature in it can be. YMMV.
I wonder if I could get a nice flavour profile from using some smoked/toasted (dried) peppers and some untreated ones in a fermentation? Would there be a nice flavour combination of the Smokey and Tangy aspects that I enjoy?
My last efforts at growing my own chilli’s were going extremely well until I went away for a month, forgot to leave instructions for their care, and they died off beyond recovery.
I'll also second the article's recommendation for Ring of Fire, the Habanero variety (they have a lot of varieties).
If you do that, then the "fuzzies" the article mentioned basically never make an appearance.
Alternatively, ziplock bag filled with water and a little air for buoyancy.
You’ll often see this done with brine instead of water so if the bag develops a leak the salt concentration of the ferment stays the same.
I typically just skim it off.
And you can't get botulism from fermenting. That is only in canning foods, since all the microbes are competing with each other. Good old C. botulinum can't hang.
Makes it really easy to just have tons of bags fermenting without taking up lots of space or reusable containers. The Noma Guide to Fermentation has a lot more info.
I’ve only ever had to vent ferments with lots of fruit sugars like blueberry habanero. I just cut the bag, force some of the air out, then fold it over and use a binder clip. I don’t reseal them because the salt pulls out their liquid and I don’t have a chamber vacuum sealer.
I've used a ziplock of water as a fermentation weight. I didn't know I could use a chamber sealer, and I have one (the "cheap" model VP112S - at $600 and only 57 lbs. - but I bought it 7 years ago and it's still going). I think I need to try this with some chilis.
I've had pepper ferments that got a little carried away and tightly filled the bag with CO2.
There's a lot of ways to deal with this problem, but I just poke a tiny hole in the bag, let the bug farts out, and cover the hole with a strip of clear tape.
(A lazier method is to plan better and use a bigger bag to begin with. And for those who aren't familiar, vacuum bags can be huge: They're available as continuous uncut rolls.)
Vac bags for me have worked every time for me, I like to make these things with my kids, let them pick things to lacto ferment. Strawberries is the most recent that was excellent (and we'd picked several kilos), the liquid was fantastic for a dressing and the strawbs themselves worked great on meringues.
I did lacto once because I had a bunch of habanero from the farmers market and wanted something that could sit around for a while. But I usually don't plan ahead, so typically it's habanero and a garlic clove under the broiler and then blended with some lime juice - a bottle at a time, as needed. A recipe I got from Rick Bayless.
The grocery store has been out for a few weeks, so I may need a different strategy. And I should branch out more.
If it improves the flavor right away, you can try option C of simmering not quite the entire batch, so that fermentation resumes after you recombine.
Won't leaving it fermenting cause pressure to build up in the bottle? And the contents to exit when you open it?
That being said, this does sound really fun.
Only one ingredient must be measured before it is added: Salt.
There is just not anything here that could be improved by adding specificity:
1. Use pure-ish water, if any water is used at all. Chlorine is bad. Buffering from dissolved minerals is also bad. (Distilled water is cheap; use that.)
2. Weigh water, if any, along with the peppers.
3. Add 2% non-iodized table salt, by weight. (Kosher salt works here, and has other uses.)
4. Mix it up in a suitable vessel (I prefer vacuum bags because the results are both flawless and easy), and put in a dark-ish place that is not cold.
5. Wait.
That's really all there is.
https://www.openagrar.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/openagr...
I don't think you need to worry about iodine.
I'll still use kosher salt in my ferments because...well, just because. For one thing, the larger salt corns dissolve more slowly, and this gives me a longer period to work before chunks of chili pepper react with salt and start producing liquid. I've been surprised before by how quickly this can happen. (Slower/less-liquid-ey is easier for me to handle with my particular (cheap, Aldi special) vacuum sealer.)
But if I get to that point in the process and discover that I don't have any kosher salt today for some reason, then: I'll have no reservations about using regular iodized table salt instead.
By 'air' I'm meant air leak from stuff you're trying to can or preserve, as others began mentioning preserves and canning
As long as you're following good practices (cleaning, temperature, proper salt ratios, verifying acidity, following researched recipes), it's pretty safe.
edit: I'd add to this, I don't preserve meats, that's the risky stuff.
Please do not do people the disservice of conflating botulism with mold. They are not even close to being the same fucking thing.
Twice.
Please kindly go white knight somewhere else. Your additional agitation is unnecessary, and is not helpful for anyone.
In decades of canning and fermenting across four generations, my family has never gotten food poisoning from it. Mushrooms on the other hand…
I was a bit nervous the first time we salt cured our own bacon, but it turned out way better than any bacon I've bought from a store!
I stuck with the 2.5% by weight ratio of salt to bacon. We have a nice chamber vacuum sealer so I used that to seal the meat while curing it. I don't have a slicer unfortunately, but partially freezing the slab right before slicing made it easy enough. Slicing soft pork fat is no fun, getting the meat a bit stiff and icy works wonders when slicing!
On the first batch I used maple syrup basically the same as the recipe. The author noted wanting to double the amount of syrup - I stuck with 2% by weight and it was almost too sweet for me, I wouldn't do more.
I actually just sliced and packaged another slab tonight. For this one I did half as much syrup and did a pretty strong costing of cracked black pepper. No clue how it will turn out, but it smelled great when slicing it! I'll probably try a few slices tomorrow morning before freezing most of it for later.
I wonder if your experience with maple syrup is different from the author’s because of differences in pork belly size. My recent food experiences lead me to believe that sugar doesn’t penetrate solid foods deeply even when left over days or weeks. If that’s true, your unwashed bacon and the author’s could vary from the author’s by surface area. Or it could be a subjective matter of taste.
If you go off script, that's on you.
I didn't lacto-ferment them but I did make one similar to your mango one (I used a fresh pineapple and fresh mango plus some honey and IIRC cumin) and like yourself, found it one of the most amazing sauces I've ever had.
It was sweet and tangy, super flavourful and HOT AS HELL! I put it on everything and because of the "chilli high" I was getting from it decided to nickname it Pineapple Express.
I was hoping to make another batch this season but the plant, despite over-wintering well, has barely grown and is only just now producing flowers which I'm pretty sure will produce very small pods if they are even successful...
Basic recipe: blend together chilis, kombucha, and some filler (e.g. carrots, or fruit).
"frozen chillies (30 g), machine-chopped, boiled up with spring water (35 ml) and Himalayan salt (2.5 g), left to cool, mixed with ginger live kombucha (35 ml), left for a week (i was in a rush). Future versions could use twice as much chilli. Tolerably hot, with a heat that plateaus and then lasts."
The chillies would have been Numex Bailey which i grew myself. I pick the fruits when they're ripe and freeze them until i have enough for a batch of sauce, hence using frozen chillies. Should work fine with fresh too.
I'm now patiently growing some jalapeños in my backyard. Meanwhile, anyone know a source for red jalapeños?
https://www.reciperium.com/woile/fermented-chili-sauce
It's delicious, I just recently started experimenting with fermentation
> Lacto-ferment chillis with your choice of veg and/or fruit in a brine solution for a couple of weeks at room temperature.
Room temperature is no kind of standard. Optimal fermentation is up to about 75f max. I live in the south and most of the year room temp for me is at least 76. I've ruined several batches of lacto-fermented experiments before making that connection.
Don't get me started on vague salt measurements like "seawater" taste.
Shameless plug for his Dutch website here: https://lavasaus.nl/
Don't get me wrong, I'll douse a chicken wing in franks quite happily, but when it comes to my bacon and eggs in the morning, I prefer something smoked and fuller.
https://lapostachileco.com/products/hatch-smoked-chile-hot-s...
https://cantinaroyalhotsauce.com/collections/frontpage/produ...
The runner up (and my favorite sauce for beans and rice) is The Brinery’s Aura Solanales. It’s like a fresher, more vibrant version of Franks/Crystal.
I rally need to make my own, but I mix raosted paprika into a lot of cooking I do with hotsauces...
Making it airtight would actually increase the risk of botulism, because the bacteria is anaerobic.
Also, the botulism bacteria wouldn't survive such an acidic and salty fermentation environment anyway. Have a better chance of getting both struck by lightning and winning the lottery multiple times in a row than dying from botulism, even in an environment that's ideal for it.
I wonder why botulism even gets a mention in modern discussions of traditional fermenting and food preservation.
It's unbelievably rare and really only occurs in modern preservation methods, like canning, and commercially-prepared food.
I just don't understand why it gets a mention at all. When I see it pop up in tutorials about traditional curing and fermenting, it's an immediate red flag about the quality of the tutorial. It's one of those common misinformation things that won't die because of all the momentum behind it.
And the misinformation ought to stop, because it's giving us cancer, because industry and home-curers think they need to load nitrites into their meat to make it safe, which is terrible for you.
Because too many "natural health" people don't understand actual health risks.
Botulism pops up because "<flavor> infused oils" became a thing and people started dumping uncooked garlic into them. And then a bunch of people got sick with botulism because a low salt, neutral pH, anerobic (the oil blocks oxygen) environment is practically tailor-made for incubating botulism.
"Classic" recipes for preservation generally make sure to have salt, nitrates, low pH and little oil/fat (and generally a combination of them). Guess why? Most pathogens don't like salts (curing) or acid (most canning). Some of the worst (like botulism) don't like oxygen and oil/fat can block oxygen.
You can even see the ignorance in the comments here. Some people were talking about putting non-acidic things in a vacuum seal without a pressure boil (240-250F). No. Bad. Very Bad.
Take a look at things playing out in "raw milk" right now. "Pasteurization" was hailed as a breakthrough for a reason--it is.
I hate the "industrialization" of our food chain as much as anybody (I simply cannot find a tomato that doesn't suck). However, you solve that by breaking up the cartels--not by wiping out food safety.
As for nitrates, a lot of the problem is the fact that the "industrial" process pumps the meat with a LOT more nitrates than people would use at home. When properly cured, most of the nitrates in meat have chemically reacted and there is very little residual. Industrial processes worry more about running out and so pump the meat so full of them that there is a ton of nitrate still left in the meat even after curing. It is this unreacted nitrate residue that seems to "cause problems".
Unfortunately, it also makes the milk taste awful. I cannot stand the taste of pasteurized milk, it makes me almost throw up. Raw milk is at least tolerable, if not the tastiest thing in the world.
I find pasteurised milk quite tasty. I'm probably unusual in that I also don't mind UHT, and am quite fond of Soy, oat and hazelnut milks as well. But lots of people get on with 'normal' milk just fine.
Are you in Australia?
If so I feel your pain. The tomatoes available here taste of basically nothing. In the UK it was the same for most cheap/ordinary/mainstream tomatoes, but you could at least buy the fancy ones from the better/more expensive supermarkets and get something good.
Here in Aus that's not really even an option, the brown ones marketed as "Kumato" are the only thing I've found with really any flavour at all, when they're available. I can't really even find good ones at farmers markets or upmarket grocers, just the same "Truss", "Vine Ripened" and "Roma" varieties that are like crunchy water.