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I'd be most interested in how much salt you used, what you based it on, etc. Also fresh v. dried peppers and how much you blended/chopped the ferment.

Holy crap, that's awesome, both for you and me. You for getting the peppers you wanted, but I had no idea that they had a store so close to where I grew up/where my parents still live! (About 20 minutes drive east of Alton, IL.) I hope you enjoyed Illinois. Lots of corn... that's about it...

As SmokenFire said, don't add more salt just yet - if you don't get kahm yeast and your pH is fine, don't worry. It's when you get kahm yeast that you have to start to worry about flavor - but not about health. You worry about health when you get other kinds of mold/nasties. You *may* have...

In addition to what (the vastly more experienced) SmokenFire said, you may see some white, almost stringy (not really "fuzzy") kahm yeast. This isn't a dealbreaker, but, and I defer to SmokenFire on this on whether or not I'm correct, you'll want to skim this off to prevent it adding an...

  My first instinct is that you'll be fine. If they were already dried previously, I would think there would be enough cracks in the skin to make them relatively pourous. However, if you didn't remove the stems, I would pull them out and cut them if I were you.That'd solve one problem as well as...

  The only way I know for certain that you're safe with shelf-storage is to get the pH below 4.0 and cook the sauce. This being said, I know there are companies like Tabasco that don't cook their sauce, and they are indeed safe with just having a low pH. I have done the same, but only part of...

If you just started this morning, I doubt it's kahm yeast, but that's usually what "stringy" white stuff like that is. Hard to tell. How long have you had this mix? My first ferment I did was 2% salt by weight of material, but not water, and it definitely got kahm yeast, and bad. If you did 2%...

  They won't stop water. Theoretically they'll help force out more air than otherwise, but if the mash contents themselves are expanding, too...

Now for the difficult part: What to name it?

  "vur-degree." It's a play on the word "verdigris," which is a greenish mixture of corrosion products, frequently found as sludge when it starts clogging pipes - we deal with it occasionally at work, which was the original taste-test audience. The name was successfully semi-humorous...

  Sorry for not describing more. Yes, I did mean "heat." I'd place it at Franks Red Hot level. Slightly lower than Zatarain's, and lacking the distinct flavor I want to get from it. Not that I anticipate beating Zatarains - but it'd have been nice to be closer than I got. For flavor - it...

Narrowing down on my V3rdegree sauce recipe.   V3rdegree, Mod 1 Recipe:     Jalapenos: 347 g Serranos: 419.3g Habaneros: 186.9g Shallots (4): 202.5g Garlic (5 bulbs): 170.5g Lime (2): 158.5g Water: 500g Pickling Salt: 103.2g Yogurt starter (roasting, I'm certain, killed any natural yeast)  ...

My new quadra bottles came in this morning, and I've been itching to try this out. It's been only two months instead of the three I preferred, but I'm impatient. It was a success, relatively speaking. Jar on the right for reference of how much "mash" I had started with. Points to note:  The...

I'm probably going to bottle the smaller jar this weekend. It's only been a month and a half, but I want to make sure the rest is going to be worth keeping. Otherwise I'll probably go with a previous recipe with the rest of the jars.

This Saturday I'm planning on redoing this one with shallots instead of onion and adding in the flesh of two limes into the mash, as well as using a yogurt-starter. I'll be sure to take pictures/measurements. Probably shifting the Habanero-Serrano-Jalapeno content in favor of habs and serranos...

  Not going to lie, I feel like making a better sriracha than Huy Fong wouldn't be incredibly hard. I like the stuff, but, I dunno. I feel like it's missing something. Then again, perhaps I just don't like that style of sriracha. Though I just realized that my failed attempt at replicating Mae...

So, first batch was a functional success, but copy-cat failure. Mid process wound up upping the water to about double, and the sugar by 50%.  I chose to go with rice vinegar instead of white vinegar. I think that was actually a great idea, in hindsight. Fresh thai chilis? Too hot. Going to try...

  Others have given good advice. The only stuff I know for certain that you shouldn't ferment is anything going bad. Go for fresh ingredients. The fresher the better. Most tend to promote farmers markets and the like over major commerical stores like wal-mart, as they'll sometimes use chemicals...

  That white stuff on the peppers looks suspiciously like mold - which is wierd, as it's underwater. What's your salt content, percentage-wise? If your salt content is too low, it could be nasties. If your salt content is too high, it could be salt coming out of solution.     All the advice...

My first real batch of this was great with some lime and a tad bit of sugar, with rice vinegar to get it to a hot-sauce consistency. Everyone who's tried it loves it. The second jar went better than the first, likely due to lack of kahm yeast. I've decided to cement the name as V3RDEGREE. Shout...