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fermenting Failed mash experiment: - 60 days of OMG kill it with fire

Sam & Oliver

Sam & Oliver

After lurking about THP and before I registered, I found a thread about making pepper mashes and decided to try making my own out of a ball quart jar and drilling a hole in the top, using a stopper and a 's' airlock.

Well something went wrong between me washing the jar to the time it the peppers were PUT in the jar, sealed, etc.

On 12/28/2012 I jarred a combination of hab, red chili peppers, carrot and jalapenos... some rock salt and whey. I used grain alcohol in the airlock and covered the jar with a black sock and stuck it in a cupboard.

I don't have a picture of the initial mash, but here's the mash 3 weeks post seal:

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Next up was the first week of februrary:

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Finally we come to 2/22/2013, almost 60 days in:

A31A8A40-1CA1-4DC3-82CD-E84AE853D51C-33054-00000DA707AA3789_zpsa5e6d958.jpg

686449A0-03F1-4ABD-8101-1CC48A98D4BF-33054-00000DA705985B3E_zps92029557.jpg

6FCDABB2-E231-4BE8-B86D-FD3BCB792CE1-33054-00000DA70358FE55_zpsb852fb65.jpg



Looks like hamburger on the top level. Can I get an 'eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwww'?

I will post again in 2 weeks, and update this OP.

Should I let the project go beyond 90 days or just let it ride? LOL
 
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Nope, kill it and plug you nose when you open it. Unless you put something in to account for that black stuff on top you have mold growing in there and it's shot. If your brave enough to take a sniff though does it smell like death warmed over, a backed up sewer or like a peper mash?

Questions:

1. Have you opened it?
2. Was it at the 76 dF as the rest of the ones you posted are?
3. Did you wash the jar using soap and then sanatize/steralize it right before use?
4. What ratio of salt did you use and did you disolve the rock salt or just dump it in?
5. Did you want the black sock before putting it on or just pull it off your foot? :) Sorry, couldn't resist.

Answers will point to where it went wrong.

RM
 
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OK where' to start:

1) no, I did not open it
2) It has been at 72 degrees constant temperature. It's the best I can do, I brought it to work and put it in a cupboard and left it there
3) Yes, I boiled the jars first, as well as the lids and bands. Since I was not jarring it for long term, I did not use a new lid (didn't need a fresh seal)
4) I used a 12% sea salt ratio, and threw it in with the food processor with the peppers
5) The sock was clean, haha. There was a hole in the toe so I used it.
 
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this is a dumb question but... you did boil the mash itself right? i wholly admit to being largely ignorant regarding hot sauce making.

i have a mondo pressure cooker, and i have make salsa from time to time( only with grocery store canned stuff tho). and its just stupid easy seal up the jars pressure cook for 15 min and chuck them on top of the fridge for years.
seems like this is the same deal just opening it back up when cool and adding bacteria for fermentation?
 
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Here's how I went about making this:

Using a step drill bit, I made the hole in the top of the lid.
Boiled the bottle, lid and ring for 20 minutes, completely submerged.

Removed and placed upside down on a drying rack.

In the processor, I put measured ammounts of hab, jalapeno and red chili peppers. After blending for 2 minutes straight, I added 12% salt by volume (sea salt, no anti-caking addatives). Blended for 30 seconds. Added whey (strained from whole, plain yogurt from Stonybrook Farms (a local vendor here). No additional ingredients.

Flipped the jar over, scraped in the mash, put the lid and band over the top and screwed it down tight.

Took a #3 stopper and wiggle-wedged it into the hole. Used a S-airlock in the top and added grain alcohol to the fill line.

Placed the jar inside a black sock.

Placed in cupboard at 72 degrees stable.
 
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yes i would toss it too.. the black is not supposed to be there.. sometimes i get the white kiam on it but that actually protects the mash.. i scoop it out if it forms before i bottle..it best not to take the chance.. you should make sure you have high acid level and salt.. that usually prevents that mold.
One trick i have heard is to add a layer of oil on top to keep the mash away from the air.. also a good starter helps a lot i use the greek yogart whey
 
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I only used 2 teaspoons of whey. Should I have used more?

I followed what I thought was the directions I was reading in the thread on fermentation. It was a little confusing. I don't remember reading anywhere that I had to boil anything. I boil the peppers when I'm ready to process it. I was setting these up to see how the flavors melded after 90 days.
 
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like i said i know very little about making hot sauces, so it may infact be the case that you are not supposed to heat the ingrediants.... however this makes 0 sense to me what so ever.

when you brew beer, the reason your fermentor is not filled with wretched putrid toxic stinking liquid after fermenting is because you have essentially pasteurized the entire batch. then you add yeast to the batch... and th yeast has the run of the entire place... no competition with other microbes. this allows the yeast to do its work without problems and you can get repeatable tasts and flavors.

i SUSPECT the same applies to hot sauce... i dont see why it wouldnt? next maby time try following traditional canning techniques. either boil your ingredients and then jar them up, then boil the jars too. or maby add raw ingrediants into the jars then boil the jars.

this will pasteurize the jars AND the food. when they cool open them up and quickly inoculate them with your bacteria. hopefully your bacteria will relatively pure and not have mold spores etc. opening the jar obviously introduces the possibility of contamination so do it in a clean area with still air and do it quickly.
 
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I have other mashes that are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing though, and I never boiled it at all. Only blended / puree'd it then put it in a half gallon jar with a tight lid and airlock.
 
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Kalitarios said:
I have other mashes that are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing though, and I never boiled it at all. Only blended / puree'd it then put it in a half gallon jar with a tight lid and airlock.
Click to expand...

i guess my question then is... is there a reason not to heat/boil ingrediants? maby flavors change? if there is no reason not to boil then.... i would just boil the ingrediants.

may just be a numbers game tho... some finish some dont. tbh i just dont know. you need to wait for comments from the super hot sauce/cooking people like salsalady etc. they have vastly more experience with this than myself.
 
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to boil or not to boil the mash that is the question. whether tis nobler to suffer the sling and arrows of smelly slimy gunk

whoops sorry, was just..

I have never boiled a mash prior to fermentation and have yet to loose one but as a homebrewer also I understand where your coming from.

Numbers game, well in this case I think it is and those numbers would be temperature.

See if you follow this, the salt is in there to prevent the nasty stuff like you had from getting a start before the good stuff can. Once the good stuff has a great start then the co2 layer is there and the bad stuff can't get a start because it needs oxygen. Because you had the mash at such a cool temperature the lacto was sluggish in getting started and so the co2 layer didn't develop as fast as it should have. This is how the nasty stuff got its start and took over the jar. Could it have een prevented? Best answer I have is maybe. Rock Salt is great for making ice Cream but in a Fermentation the best thing to use it Canning Salt or Sea Salt without the anticaking stuff in it. We want the salt to melt and make a brine so that it's spread throught out the mash. Since you only kind of hacked it up a bit with the peppers I'm not sure you really had a good brine in there.

RM
 
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I've been fermenting vegetables like sauerkraut, beets and kimchee for a while now. I have never boiled, cooked or heated any of them prior to fermentation. Don't know anyone "fermenting' who does. I've never even gotten that kahm yeast on any of my vegetable ferments. I wonder why it shows up so often in fermenting peppers?

I think I will "cook" my sauce after fermenting though, for flavor purposes.
 
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