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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

Anything home preserved makes me anxious. Canning, bottling, etc. It just sounds way too easy to poison yourself.

That being said, this does sound really fun.

Botulism is the biggest concern, and even still, it is pretty rare and avoidable. Mold is generally visible, and if found, you can just discard.

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.

Botulism is invisible and odorless and deadly.

Please do not do people the disservice of conflating botulism with mold. They are not even close to being the same fucking thing.

I don't think I did?

You should reread parent's comment before posting such agitated commentary.

I did.

Twice.

Please kindly go white knight somewhere else. Your additional agitation is unnecessary, and is not helpful for anyone.

All the videos I have seen say that sterilizing all the vessels you use is one of the good practices.

Yes, I boil my equipment.

In my experience a ton of it really does come down to quality of the ingredients you use. We actually ferment quite a few things here and have never had an issue. Though, whether we're making sauerkraut, kambucha, pickles, or cheese it always starts with ingredients we either grew ourselves or bought from a local CSA.

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!

Can you share more about what you did for salt curing bacon? That sounds intriguing

I came across a recipe [1] for salt curing without doing a water rinse after curing. The idea of using only enough salt to cure the meat made a lot of sense to me, most recipes end up with way too much salt that you have to wash off afterwards.

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.

[1] https://tasteofartisan.com/how-to-cure-bacon/

That sounds amazing, thank you for sharing.

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.

You can use a pH meter to monitor the sauce while it's fermenting if you'd like some extra assurance. Hot sauce is one of the safer things to do at home (in terms of things like botulism risk) due to the acidity and saltiness.

ahhhhh, this is what I was looking to read about; some kind of sensor to make sure no one dies. though I also imagined a sensor for the air around the fermenting container as well?

Not sure what you mean by air, I use pH test strips instead of a meter and just drop some of the liquid on them.

I see, so at some interval you take a sample and directly test it on a meter. Thanks.

By 'air' I'm meant air leak from stuff you're trying to can or preserve, as others began mentioning preserves and canning

Isn't the sauce quite strongly coloured and doesn't that make it difficult to read the pH?

The bacteria behind botulism can't grow in oxygen-rich environments, so I think the makeup of the solution is the main thing to worry about. That's why botulism is mainly a concern with canning, oil suspensions, etc.

In this day and age, you’d have to show some gross negligence to poison yourself from ferments. Either by ignoring some basic guidelines or doing something stupid like eating a clearly contaminated batch.

In decades of canning and fermenting across four generations, my family has never gotten food poisoning from it. Mushrooms on the other hand…

Anything that’s salty or acidic or sweet or fermented enough isn’t dangerous. So no risk for jams, hot sauces, beers, pickles etc. Canning fruit or vegetables requires more care

There's a lot of steps you're missing. Just by virtue of having those qualities does not mean it's safe, there is probably a lot of prep, cleaning, and boiling involved.

Even without those steps the worst you’ll get is fur on the top. As long as you’re putting the correct weight of salt There’s no danger

Canning was pretty common when I was growing up. The Ball Blue book of canning walks you through it. If you follow the directions, you shouldn't have to worry about safety.

If you go off script, that's on you.

This, to me, is an interesting take, since where I'm from (Europe) nearly everyone has grandparents or such who make home made jams and canned foods of all kinds. Similarly foraging is common here. I wonder if there's a link between the two, although I could be wildly extrapolating.

Agreed... I can never find a hot sauce ferment recipe that has weights and measurements like sauerkraut or kimchi. Everything is too eyeball-ey and makes me super paranoid about not getting the right salt and ph. Botulism scares the shit out of me.

There's only a few things to do with pepper ferments. It's not at all like baking a cake is. And it's far easier to accomplish safely than canning is.

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://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30166176/

https://www.openagrar.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/openagr...

I don't think you need to worry about iodine.

That's persuasive-enough data to make me convinced. Thanks.

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.

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