Howdy All,
Frequent visitor/first time poster. I apologize if you’ve already read or responded to this post in other forums. I just wanted to gather as much feedback as I could about this. I’ve read and understand numerous posts regarding the importance of hot-filling hot sauce when bottling to minimize the possibility of a food borne pathogen making someone very sick. I’ve also read several posts asking about cold-filling. However, I’d like to ask just one more time about cold-fill bottling hot sauce with my own specific situation.
Fueled by recent success in growing our own peppers on our farm on a large scale, and years of urging by friends and family to sell our popular home-brewed concoction commercially, my wife and I are considering wading into the competitive waters of the local hot sauce market. This morning we received a digitial pH meter that we ordered recently. After calibrating, we eagerly tested our sauce. Somewhat surprisingly, it came back as pH 3.22. I say only somewhat surprising because the sauce is 35% vinegar after all. But it’s still much lower than we expected. Given this, here’s my question. At pH 3.22, could we consider cold-filling into bleach-sanitized PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic woozy bottles? The caps and dropper inserts are PP (polypropylene, max. temp 275F) and could be boiled to sterilize. We’ve always hot-filled our sauce into glass bottles in the past, but PET bottles are a fraction of the cost of glass bottles and would help us be much more price competitive. As I understand it, the problem with PET bottles is that they cannot be used for hot-filled product because their maximum temp is 145F, and the vacuum created by the hot-fill contorts the bottle. Which is why I’m asking about cold-filling. We're wondering whether we could either heat small batches of the sauce at 190F for 10-15 minutes, let cool to room temp (within say an hour or so) and then cold-fill into sanitized PET bottles, OR mix up a batch without heating at all and simply pump the sauce into the PET bottles. Given the low pH of the sauce, could we expect it to have any shelf-life?
With the exception of the peppers and dried garlic (which we would consider removing if it’s a cold-fill deal breaker), each of the other ingredients in our sauce has a pH of 3.7 or less. A couple of ingredients are pH 3.3. One is pH 3.1. The vinegar is pH 2.4.
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.
Gram's Dad
Frequent visitor/first time poster. I apologize if you’ve already read or responded to this post in other forums. I just wanted to gather as much feedback as I could about this. I’ve read and understand numerous posts regarding the importance of hot-filling hot sauce when bottling to minimize the possibility of a food borne pathogen making someone very sick. I’ve also read several posts asking about cold-filling. However, I’d like to ask just one more time about cold-fill bottling hot sauce with my own specific situation.
Fueled by recent success in growing our own peppers on our farm on a large scale, and years of urging by friends and family to sell our popular home-brewed concoction commercially, my wife and I are considering wading into the competitive waters of the local hot sauce market. This morning we received a digitial pH meter that we ordered recently. After calibrating, we eagerly tested our sauce. Somewhat surprisingly, it came back as pH 3.22. I say only somewhat surprising because the sauce is 35% vinegar after all. But it’s still much lower than we expected. Given this, here’s my question. At pH 3.22, could we consider cold-filling into bleach-sanitized PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic woozy bottles? The caps and dropper inserts are PP (polypropylene, max. temp 275F) and could be boiled to sterilize. We’ve always hot-filled our sauce into glass bottles in the past, but PET bottles are a fraction of the cost of glass bottles and would help us be much more price competitive. As I understand it, the problem with PET bottles is that they cannot be used for hot-filled product because their maximum temp is 145F, and the vacuum created by the hot-fill contorts the bottle. Which is why I’m asking about cold-filling. We're wondering whether we could either heat small batches of the sauce at 190F for 10-15 minutes, let cool to room temp (within say an hour or so) and then cold-fill into sanitized PET bottles, OR mix up a batch without heating at all and simply pump the sauce into the PET bottles. Given the low pH of the sauce, could we expect it to have any shelf-life?
With the exception of the peppers and dried garlic (which we would consider removing if it’s a cold-fill deal breaker), each of the other ingredients in our sauce has a pH of 3.7 or less. A couple of ingredients are pH 3.3. One is pH 3.1. The vinegar is pH 2.4.
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.
Gram's Dad