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That time of year again!tinegar

Well, it's that time of year again when I have to empty the freezers of all the peppers I haven't done anything with yet. So it's time to make mash.  Some chilies I have enough to make a single quart mash other, others not so much. So I put them together according to classification, chinense, fructecens, annuum, baccattum.
 
Got about 11 quarts of mash out of it. I mix canning salt with water until the water is super-saturated and add about a cup to the peppers as they go into the blender. Occasionally, I may have to add a bit more to keep the blender going and not burning out.

I know I have 1 qt. of 7 Pot Burgundy, 1 qt. of Island Hellfire, 1 qt. of Indian RC-1, 1 qt. of Yellow Chinense, 1 qt. half/half yellow chinense and red chinense, 2 qts. of red chinense, 1 qt. of yellow baccattum, 1 qt of of annuum, 1 qt of mixed cayennes, 1 qt. of mixed fructecens.
 
So they'll sit in the garage for the next 6 months at least or later depending on when I can buy enough 5 oz bottles to put them all in. When bottling, I put the qt. through the blender again and then put through the food mill twice, put the sauce into a qt. jar and fill up the remaining space to the 30 oz line with distilled white wine vinegar.  Then I put that mixture back into the blender for a few minutes until I bottle it. Of course, before even adding the vinegar, I check for a proper ph in the mash to make sure it has been uninhabitable by the nasties.  Here's a pic of yesterday's work.
 
 
charlesquik said:
You are not cooking it right? And you can use it in a sauce later on?
Nope, no cooking. Just deep fermentation. By the time I get around to bottling it, fermentation is practically complete so there's no chance of it 1. exploding or 2. nasties being in there. But if you are afraid of nasties I think I used a pressure canner (according to directions for canning) to kill everything and neutralizes and toxins from botulism if they somehow got formed. But this mixture is pretty salty and it stays closed with the occasional burp during fermentation. Most important is to sterilize your bottles and bottle caps.
Also, if you are making a sauce out of it later on make sure your practice safety i.e. proper ph or add preservatives.
 
No use in doing this if you're going to freeze it. The point is to make a fermented shelf stable sauce. I don't use a bubble lock. I've done them before. Don't find them necessary. It'll burp on its own as long as the lid isn't tightly on. The main thing is you want enough salt to delay the nasties until an environment more hostile to them is created by the fermentation. If you let them ferment as long as I do, you also don't have to worry about further fermentation when you bottle them, at least it is very small.
 
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