This is my second attempt at lactofermentation pickling. I tried for the first time last year and it went horribly wrong, so I haven’t tried again since.
I received some self-burping jars and glass weights as a gift and have decided to give it another try.
This is 1lb of serrano peppers that I hope to turn into hot sauce when it’s all said and done. The jars were much more full initially; the glass weights have condensed the peppers considerably at this point.
Today is day 4 (of maybe a 14 day fermentation period). The brine has started to get cloudy and I can see bubbles forming beneath the surface, which seem to be good signs.
Fingers crossed. If the whole process goes well, I’d like to bring some home-made fermented hot sauce to Thanksgiving this year.
Gotta leave a bit more room at the top. General where the threads start. Other than that, looks like a clean batch.
The biggest thing with fermentation is STERILIZING EVERY.THING.
Bake your jars at 150-170 in an oven for 20m before packing (allow to cool a bit). Wash and boil your weights for a few minutes. Don’t use chlorinated water. And always weigh your contents and create a brine by WEIGHT, not volume.
Pretty foolproof otherwise.
Thanks for the advice! I used boiling water to sterilize the jars, lids, and weights in this instance. Would you say that’s sufficient compared to the oven? I used filtered water from my fridge for the entire process (washing and for making the brine).
Weighed everything out using a scale. Did a 4% salt brine by weight. Last time I did 2.5% so this time I went a bit higher to be on the safe side.
What exactly do you mean when you say “leave a bit more room at the top”? Room for what?
Yeah, boiling works as well for everything, just maybe more involved for entire jars. Oven works as well, especially if you’re doing many at a time.
Headspace in the top of the jar. Most ferments really create a lot of activity in bubbles and such in the first 2-5 days. If you fill the jars all the way to the top, that bubbling mess will spill over or clog the venting mechanism, allowing mold or yeast to grow.
Ahh, gotcha. I’ll keep it in mind for the next batch
The jar on the left initially was filled up to around the threads, but then I added the glass weight and it nearly spilled over the top, lol.
Boiling water isn’t enough to kill a lot of hardier bacteria and fungal spores and so it’s certainly not “sterilized”, though it may be ‘sterile enough’ for your purposes. Water just can’t get hot enough and the “shells” are well insulated enough to survive for hours in those conditions.
However, they also become tougher once dehydrated and so simply placing them in a really hot stove has the same issue.
You simultaneously need more heat, pressure, time, and possibly some form of chemical attack to truly “sterilize” something.
Using a pressure cooker and a tiny amount of alcohol, ethanol, is usually enough to do the trick.
Yeesh. That’s a lot of work, but I guess it makes sense that properly sterilizing things isn’t easy.
I have a pressure cooker, but would be a bit anxious about putting glass inside it. Another user said they used Potassium Metabisulfite for beer and wine bottling. Would that be sufficient for sterilization, or would one still need high heat and pressure?
If you have it, it sounds like it’s a better option than whatever easy ethanol source you’ve got. But the trick to proper sterilization is that certain microbes are resistant to different things. The Potassium Metabisulfite sounds like it’s about as nasty, but less toxic, than bleach. However even that alone isn’t enough for sterility.
Glassware is usually fine so long as you allow pressure to build and release slowly.
For what you’re doing there are additional microorganisms which can outcompete anything you don’t kill and so “sterile enough” is probably fine, but putting this here as something to keep in mind in case things go wrong.