Fermentation Support Forum • View topic (2024)

I have read a lot and the more involved I get well... It seems more dangerous. E coli, Botulism, Salmonella. I don't want to make headline news by wiping out families with my botulism infested hot sauce. I have read some guide but things are unclear to me would someone beable to help me out! I would very much appreciate it.

Currently I have a batch of cayenne peppers.

Most of this is obvious but I am going to be as clear as I can, basically what I know so far is as follows:

1. Grow yer peppers
2. Harvest your peppers
3. Wash your peppers
4. Blend peppers into a mash
5. Put mash into a clean glass container
6. Add 6-10% salt (I added 10%)
7. Lid the jar using an airlock system
8. Let sit and ferment for minimum of 30days
9. blend again with vinegar
10. bottle sauce and let sit for a week
11. refrigerate sauce
12. squirt sauce on food and eat

I know that the PH level is supposed to be below 4.6

Come unclear things to me are as follows:

Is there supposed to be any cooking involved?
Can you taste the mash while it is fermenting?
Is there a minimum amount of vinegar needed?
How can i be sure its safe to eat?
Does it have to be blended to a mash or can they be sliced?

I will probably have more questions but that's it for now, thanks for any help!

I no longer blend my peppers before fermentation. They're easier to brine-ferment whole. I'm not sure about 10%, I think I use a much weaker solution -- around three tablespoons of salt per quart. But if it works for you, I guess that's fine. I've fermented my peppers with nothing but cheesecloth over them for months at a time at room temp and I've fermented under Fido-sealed air "lock" and they both work. And I've never added vinegar, but I have thought about doing that because my pepper paste grows a whitish bloom if I leave it sitting around too long.

I expect that whether there's cooking involved depends on the outcome you want. I wouldn't cook anything after fermentation and I haven't cooked the peppers before fermentation but I could see a reason to fire-roast them for flavor.

You *can* taste the fermenting mash. But if you're using an airlock, every time you open the container, you're subverting the purpose of the lock. It's no big deal, but you might as well ferment under a cloth instead. I typically recommend to people that they do that under a cloth when starting out so that they can taste their ferments every day. It's really rewarding to taste the changes.

The minimum amount of vinegar is none. But you seem to have a pH target so you might want some if you don't get enough lactic acid. I don't concern myself with those numbers, so I'm not an expert, but I get the feeling that 4.6 shouldn't be hard to hit without any vinegar. Hopefully someone else can weigh in with more metric experience.

You can be sure it's safe to eat by eating it and seeing if you get sick. That might sound like a flippant answer, but it's how I do it. Also, bear in mind that no one gets sick from properly fermented vegetables. It literally never happens.

They don't have to be mashed. You can ferment them whole and serve the whole. you can ferment them as slices and serve them as slices. You can ferment them as either and then blend them more or less to the desired consistency. I haven't ever fermented them as a literal sauce, but I have fermented them as a chunky salsa and found it much harder to keep things under the brine than when they're in big slices or whole.

If you're making these for yourself, I think your fears about infection are way overblown. Sniff and taste and use common sense about what smells good and what smells putrid. I guess if you're making things to sell, you have a different set of concerns.

I've never actually tested it, but pH of 4.6 really isn't that low, and I also suspect the fermentation alone can easily get you there.

The process you have outlined is for making something akin to store-bought peppers/sauces...one of two basic approaches. You can lightly ferment for a little flavor, then get the acidity down by adding vinegar - that's what you're talking about doing here. The other option is to fully ferment the peppers to a good acidity and skip the vinegar.

To do the latter, I'd recommend (as Christopher alluded to) cutting the salt in half, maybe even less. A 10% brine means a really slow fermentation, probably even after a month. At about 5% or less you should have some very pickled (naturally) peppers after a month without a need to add vinegar.

It's really all a matter of taste. Do you prefer the flavor of acetic acid (vinegar) or lactic acid (fermentation), or both together?

Like Christopher said, I can imagine getting a little cooked flavor in there from the beginning (maybe some of the peppers get griddled for example), but after the fermentation and/or addition of vinegar I don't see a need.

The directions you have follow a certain convention that you don't necessarily need to follow. If you're making tons of this stuff, packaging it, putting it on grocery store shelves, etc. it makes sense to quickly get the pH down, and cook it afterward so there's definitely no more fermentation happening. If you're just making this for yourself or some friends, you have a lot more latitude.

When you aim for distribution and economy-of-scale, the number possibilities you have to be creative with and the quality of what you make necessarily goes down.

Wow! Thank you so much for your Fast and Informative replies. You have been really helpful.

I am just making for myself and friends so no concern of any selling or commercializing.

I read of botulism coming up from fermenting chili peppers and so it planted a whole scene in my brain involving "police do not cross tape" around my house, news crews showing up and the living with the death of my friends and family, haha.

Heck I already tasted a few slices of peppers I have been fermenting for a month, they were freaking delicious. Over a week later now and I'm fine! But that article I read about botulism had my mind racing like a crazy person.

Its was mainly blog and/or forum topics nothing in a news paper or anything. I read probably 20-30 articles and it ranged from fermented whale blubber, fish, meat, garlic, potatoes, and chili peppers (specifically cayenne was one of them which is what I am growing so it gave me a special concern). I wasn't worried so much about the first few but garlic and chili peppers concerned me. None of the articles specified the process that food went through it just stated people died from botulism from (item that ate) but one of them did state it was from Home Fermented Foods which gave me more of a scare. I will take a look and see if I can find them again.

Most of what I read about botulism and fermenting peppers explained that it has to be in an oxygen free environment for botulism to grow. And if the pH level is below 4.6 botulism cannot survive.

If using an airlock system would that be considered oxygen free?

HeckRaiser wrote:None of the articles specified the process that food went through it just stated people died from botulism...

The process is important. What I'm finding is something will be reported to the CDC, then a blogger or somebody picks it, nobody actually reads the CDC report, and then it gets completely misconstrued.

HeckRaiser wrote:If using an airlock system would that be considered oxygen free?

Yes, it will be more or less oxygen free. But there's more to it than available oxygen. If you have good bacteria fermenting away, there's no worry. You're not going to get botulism by just fermenting peppers in a brine. Even if you don't hit the 4.6-4.8 pH mark, at a salinity of 10% you've already essentially shut down Clostridium's growth and metabolism.

Since you posted this and so many people have this concern, I'm working on an article debunking the "botulism fear." I'll have it posted in Miscellaneous in a couple of days, when I have all my research done.

Actually what I'm finding so far is botulism becomes more of a concern when the food is not fermented...and especially if it's been pasteurized (heated afterward).

Tim that would be wonderful thank you very much for the explanation and for creating an article to further detail it!

I look forward to reading it and sharing it to other who are looking for that information as well.

Another question popped up for me, Do my peppers have to be weighed down in the brine? I have a layer of slices at the top that aren't submerged but I do shake it up daily.

I think you're probably inviting mold growth by letting them float.

Your shaking them up will help. But it would help more if you did it hourly. As I noted above, the reason that I ferment my peppers whole is that it's easier to keep them submerged. Sometimes (as with cukes) I can just wedge them in and using their geometry and the jar's shoulder, I don't need to weight them. More typically, I'll use a pint-jar in the mouth of a half-gallon jar to push them down and displace the brine up.

Another thing to consider that I've been thinking about quite a bit, is whether that mold is really all that bad. So there are a bunch of organisms we call mold that are beneficial and a bunch that are dangerous. I sort of wonder why I grew up thinking of mold as a frightening horror rather than just a thing to be careful about (like mushrooms and wild berries). So, I'm not exactly suggesting that you eat random mold that your ferments harbor, but where some people throw away a whole ferment at the first sign of mold, I just scoop it out and throw it in the compost and still eat whatever's underneath.