Lacto fermentation

Nasty. How is this different from just letting food rot in a jar?

I eat the sweet peppers plain or my wife and I eat them with cheeses.

The hot chile peppers I make into chutney or hot sauce, or eat them plain, or put them on burgers/tacos.

The pickled limes/habanero all go into a hot sauce.

Pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut we just eat with sandwiches or what have you.

Fermented lemon is for a sauce that goes on lamb

Someone tell me how to do this properly. Fermenting seems kind of dangerous to me as it propagates bacteria.

Not dangerous at all. If it goes bad, it's extremely obvious by looking and smelling.

Important to keep things clean, but it's not dangerous

Also it rarely goes bad. The salt brine makes it so only lacto bacteria can grow, and once they are set, they release lactic acid that kills anything else that tries to grow in there

Nice, where do you store the jars? Cool/dark place or does it matter?

It depends on what you're making. Definitely don't want the temperature above 75 and for most things, you don't want it below 60.

If it's hotter, it ferments faster and loses its crunch, so cucumbers you usually want in a cooler environment.

I've never put jars in a dark environment and I've never had an issue.

Biggest thing is keeping the pickles submerged in the bridge - a few ways to do this. If stuff sticks out the top, it can grow mold. Air tightness is a big deal too but you can buy lots of tops that allow gasses to escape without you constantly opening the jar to "burp" it, while exposing it to air.

Also most of these ferments only take 1-2 weeks before they are good to go. Some people let them ferment super long, but I don't notice too much improvement after 1-2 weeks.

Could anyone recommend jars specifically for fermenting vegetables and peppers for hot sauce? I've had problems in the past with pressure building mason jars and them cracking, causing a huge mess. Are there are jars or lids made specifically for self-venting?

Obvious bait, have a (you) for getting it over with.

I'm the user that ground my tabasco's with the brine prior to fermentation. Never had any mold develop. I've got them in growler style jars now in the pantry. Tasted it a few days ago and it was really good. Next year, I'm going to try brining jalapenos whole and grinding after fermentation. But this tabasco tastes so good, I probably will grind them prior again.

Question: Should I just leave them in the pantry since they appear to be done fermenting or should I move them to the refrigerator?

Pantry should be fine. Vinegar will keep it shelf stable for quite some time. You should time one of the jars from bottle date to the date when you think it's starting to turn and base your future shelf life off that (if you have any left by the time that date even rolls around!)

Thoughts on these jars?

amazon.com/Go-Ferment-Anaerobic-Fermenting-Recipe/dp/B016FWZDO4/ref=sr_1_11?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1481485958&sr=1-11&keywords=Fermentation Jar

>Vinegar will keep it shelf stable

Damn, I didn't really want to add vinegar because I like the more smooth sourness from the fermentation. Do I have to add vinegar?

Nah you don't have to, but without the vinegar you're going to wanna keep it in the fridge.

Easiest approach is a regular mason jar, with a rubber airlock lid. The laboratory looking airlock is great in that it doesn't let smells out, but the rubber lid is my favorite. Normal mason jar, just ditch the top of the lid and keep the band.

Also not sure if you can see it in there, but good to use glass pickling stones to keep stuff submerged

Just ordered a set of pebbles and airlocks. Thanks for the tip.

With that on the way and coming in a week, anyone have some good fermenting recipes?

How do you make sure there's enough salt in your pickles?

Is there a good "how to" guide for this? I'm tired of buying hot sauces and would like to make my own

Prep your peppers.
4 cups water to 3 tsp sea salt
Jar it for 2 weeks
Blend with half fermented liquid, half vinegar
Strain

Pretty simple stuff

did you touch your cooch before starting to work with the vegetables?

where do you find those rubber lids? google is just giving me a bunch of expensive plastic pieces

amazon.com/Pickle-Pipe-One-Piece-Waterless-Fermentation/dp/B01726CJ9Y

Nope. Lacto bacteria exist naturally on vegetation

...

Gross. I don't think lacto bacteria reside in a healthy cooch.

Great thread. I have just finished my first ferment of a few pounds of chillies. I had no idea what I was doing but it went well and now I have pints of tasty chillies sauce. I like the idea of ginger and carrot.

I don't, but damn I'm interested. I usually do the old stovetop cookery for my chilli sauces/onion jams. Thanks user, now I'm looking into even more bottles of preserves in my kitchen cupboards.

Biggest thing: don't use iodized table salt. Iodine will kill the lacto bacteria.

2nd biggest thing: don't use tap water. Chlorine. Same deal.

Bottled water and kosher or sea salt.

lol, you have no idea how wrong you are
>lrn2microbiome

Good tips.

How much salt again?

The amount of salt you use in brine varies by recipe, but a good brine that works for just about everything is 1 tbsp salt per 500ml water. 500ml is the size of a commercial water bottle. Makes sure the salt fully dissolves in the brine - best to shake, not stir.

Some ferments don't use brine, but instead use salt packing (sauerkraut, fermented citrus fruits, kimchi, etc). Just need to get a feel for the amount of salt required for these ones.

2% salt solution by weight is pretty standard.

Wing it on the salt. Dump a decent amount into an extra mason jar, add water, shake it up, then dump it over the vegetables in your pickling jar.

pickling salt is more appropriate than kosher or sea salt

it's pure salt, no anticaking agents at all

I usually go for 5% for hot peppers, 2% is great for pickles and kraut though

I finally made lacto fermented hot peppers this year. They were some cayenne hybrid my parents grew. Pretty hot but not habaneros. Shit was very good but i erred on the side of caution and added too much salt.
Excited to try my buddies lacto pickles but he also added like 7 sprigs of dill so im afraid it will be overwhelming.

What do you guys use to keep things submerged. I have a giant jar (over 2 quarts) I got from an old job and want to make a bunch of kraut.

2% by weight of water AND vegetables, or just water?

Vegetables only. The guy who mentioned 5% is also right. You want to keep it between 2% and 5% respectively or risk hindering the growth of lacto bacteria.

Example:
vegetables weigh 100g.
you want to add between 2g to 5g salt to water for your brine.

For how much water?

2% by total weight of jar contents. I normally dry salt my veggies, press for an hour and, if I need more liquid to cover them, I will make up a 2% w/v salt solution and add it in to cover.

The more sugar in your initial mixture, the higher the salt should be for a really safe start. Sweet peppers might need as much as 6%, depending on the environment where you ferment them. More sugar gives more fuel to things that initially compete with the lactobacilli, but once they get the acidity rising they tend to beat out their competition.

Just make a large batch of brine and go from there.

1000mL = 100%
2% of 1000 is 20g of salt.

Look into how to cross multiply, makes ratio calculations a breeze.

Thank you. My autistic brain of a chemist got it, at least.

Okay, so, I stand by this , but these other cu/ck/s aren't wrong, as long as you keep the total salinity above about 1.7% and below 8% you are going to culture lactobacilli. On the low end, they might get out-competed (especially if your're not completely air-tight) on the high end, you're getting close to retarding their growth and will salt-cure your food instead.

The lower the pH of the starting medium, the lower the required salt; the more sugary, the more salt.

They may not necessarily be wrong, but they were not accurate, nor mentioning the underlying principles you made crystal clear. Thanks.

A decent website I'm working on has a guide. You can let me know what you think is missing and I'll update jt

>check my name for the website

I checked today and I can't fit all my jars in the refrigerator. What's the least amount of vinegar I can add to keep it shelf stable?

You want to shoot for a pH of 4.3 or lower. The lower the pH, the more acidic it is. Unfortunately the only way you can measure pH I'd by using a pH testing devise. You can't say 1 TSP of vinegar is X amount of pH.

Bump

No limes in your hot sauce ingredients?

Pickled (fermented) limes are the best.

Isn't vinegar rated as containing at least a certain percentage of acetic acid? By adding water we're just changing this percentage.

If we know the amount of acetic acid and amount of water in the solution we can calculate the pH. While the vinegar ratings aren't perfect, pH is a logarithmic scale so it's extremely forgiving (going up by one on the pH scale should require increasing the water by an order of magnitude, and vinegar is already mostly water).

Despite preferring fresh pepper I would almost consider doing this just because the jars look so good on the counter.

That only takes into consideration the pH of water and vinegar itself. Vegetables/Peppers also contain various amounts of pH so there will be some variance, especially if you're mixing different species. If 4.3 pH is the baseline for room temperature safety and you're using ingredients with a lower pH value, even if you calculate the proper concentration of vinegar to water ratio, if you don't account for dilution by those higher pH ingredients you'll fall outside your baseline and risk propagating harmful bacteria.

Its just easier to add the vinegar and leave it room temp, or dont add the vinegar and fridge it. Unless you want to be the Good Will Hunting of fermenting and do all those calculations to account for everything.

What is the acceptable range of pH values? Is there a lower bound or is it just minimum=all 5% vinegar (~2.4) and maximum=4.3?

If we calculate the vinegar concentration with respect to the container and not the added water we should be able to ignore the packing factor for the vegetables.

Outside of a few exceptions I don't think most ingredients would be alkaline enough to raise us outside of the safety margin. From what I'm seeing here

fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/CausesOfIllnessBadBugBook/ucm122561.htm

most foods are more acidic than water so would push our final pH down.

>implying nothing in your jar acts as a buffer
Get some pH paper or a proper pH-meter (which you would still have to learn how to use and calibrate).

You don't just do maths without physically checking the results.

t. the chemist from above

Is this different from pickling?

Same thing. Fermenting is the only way to pickle.

Bamp

So what do fermented vegetables taste like?
There's no vinegar in the brine, do they sour up?

Much better than chemical pickles (vinegar cured).

They do sour up- fermentation creates lactic acid which is sour. However they stay firm and crisp, and taste a lot better than vinegar pickles.

And they are probiotic. Meaning they make your shitting very healthy.

something something glycogen secretion

Looks yucky