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Various Degrees of Separation

emanphoto

emanphoto

My fermented thai chili with mango sauce is bottled now and I have some questions.  Tastings showed the sweetness coming thru some, but should be more distinct in my opinion. 
 
Problems have showed up with an obvious visual deficiencies of this batch with major separation of the sauce.  Shake well indeed!  
 
This recipe involved thai chilies with garlic etc fermented for 30 days done in 2 batches.  The ferment with mango added to the fermenting was kinda funky and I had to refrigerate it because of yeast.  Also, I dared and was again thwarted in my attempt to heat that sauce and got all the nasty oil separation that I have posted about before and documented here.  http://thehotpepper.com/topic/68852-separation-in-hot-sauce-after-cooking/  For whatever reason, Thai chili sauces here do this when heated and now I just avoid boiling Thai chili sauces altogether.     ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
But that's not the separation I'm talking about.  This sauce is the second of the 2 mango tests. Once fermenting was done, 3 fresh blended mangos were added to it.  Started with about 800mls of chili mash. This went thru the food mill.
 
1. Added 25% by volume of pineapple vinegar.  This tasted too sour to me, so I added another mango.
2. I sterilized the bottles placed the lids in boiled water.  
(I gotta get that StarSan stuff when I get back to the states for a visit as this washing plus dilute bleach plus boiling water process sux!)
3. Added boiling water to all my bottles to be used.
4. Dumped that hot water then filled each bottle with sauce and placed each bottle in a pot of hot water 3 inches deep or so.  I am using 180ml bottles.
5. Boiled the water lightly so to not knock over the bottles, and when the sauce had expanded to the mouth of the bottle or over it, I capped the bottle and inverted them.  
 
pH of the finished sauce is 3.3/3.2.
 
Fairly soon I noticed some separation happening.  No oil etc as I got with directly boiling the sauce, just clear liquid and chili.  
IMG48451.jpg

 
So my questions are:
1. How can I prevent this when adding mango which is the only variable from my usual recipes?  My thoughts are to boil/heat the mango down in volume before adding to the sauce next time?
 
2. Can I use less than 25% vinegar and still get the fermentation cessation and food safety aspects?
 
3. Also, in regards to the bottling process, how can I improve the consistency of the sauce levels?
 
Thanks for any help. :)
 
 
 
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Looks kind of like you still have some fermentation activity going on in there.  I get separation in my bottles after a month or two, but it's always a layer of clear-ish liquid on top.  Maybe your water bath didn't properly kill off all the live bacteria.
 
I use the hot fill method.  I cook the sauce by bringing it to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for about an hour, stir regularly, then blend with a stick blender while it's still simmering.  Then I turn up the heat and stir it a lot, checking the temp until it's above 180 consistently, I shoot for 200.  Then bottle it by using a funnel over the mouth of the bottle, and pouring the sauce in with a metal measuring cup, directly out of the pot of boiling sauce.  Then wipe any sauce off the rim of the bottle, put the cap on, and invert it.  Stir after every few bottles.  As I get closer to the bottom I turn down the heat so it doesn't start boiling too vigorously.  Wear gloves because you'll get boiling sauce on your hands no matter how hard you try to avoid it.  It also helps to put a big plastic bowl on the stove top, anything that gets covered with sauce goes in the bowl between bottles so you don't get sauce all over everything.  You don't want to turn on a burner a few days later with some surreptitious sauce on it, it's a great way to mace yourself.
 
The stick blender is awesome.  I used to have to cool it down enough to put in a regular blender, then put it back on the stove and heat it up again.  It doesn't work as well as a regular blender but I don't mind a few chunks.
 
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Thank you for your reply Bold Badger Sauces!
I wish I could boil thai chili sauce and not worry about it, but everytime time I do, an oily substance separates and floats to the surface.  I detailed this phenom here.  http://thehotpepper....-after-cooking/
 
This doesn't happen with jalapeños at all, only with thai chilies.  As spicy as thai food's reputation is, there are only a few varieties used in their cuisine and jalapeños aren't one of them.  So there's not a lot of chili choices here.  The Royal Project grows jalapeños fortunately so they can be had when new batches come in but that is infrequent as they are hard, as most chilies are here, to grow.
 
RE: Your fermentation idea.
I worried about further fermentation occurring since I was adding fresh mango to the fermented mash, but I was assured here that since I was using vinegar it would stop the fermentation.  
That said, I've had a sauce keep bubbling a bit once after vinegar is added, so I did heat it gently to stop it.  This mango batch of sauce has no bubbling going on.
 
Oily separation: it's not in this mango batch as I didn't boil and I don't want to see this ever again! ;)  Once it happens there is nothing I can do about it and it's damn ugly.  The sauce becomes house sauce used only at home. :(
 
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Bold Badger Sauces said:
Looks kind of like you still have some fermentation activity going on in there.  I get separation in my bottles after a month or two, but it's always a layer of clear-ish liquid on top.  Maybe your water bath didn't properly kill off all the live bacteria.
 
I use the hot fill method.  I cook the sauce by bringing it to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for about an hour, stir regularly, then blend with a stick blender while it's still simmering.  Then I turn up the heat and stir it a lot, checking the temp until it's above 180 consistently, I shoot for 200.  Then bottle it by using a funnel over the mouth of the bottle, and pouring the sauce in with a metal measuring cup, directly out of the pot of boiling sauce.  Then wipe any sauce off the rim of the bottle, put the cap on, and invert it.  Stir after every few bottles.  As I get closer to the bottom I turn down the heat so it doesn't start boiling too vigorously.  Wear gloves because you'll get boiling sauce on your hands no matter how hard you try to avoid it.  It also helps to put a big plastic bowl on the stove top, anything that gets covered with sauce goes in the bowl between bottles so you don't get sauce all over everything.  You don't want to turn on a burner a few days later with some surreptitious sauce on it, it's a great way to mace yourself.
 
The stick blender is awesome.  I used to have to cool it down enough to put in a regular blender, then put it back on the stove and heat it up again.  It doesn't work as well as a regular blender but I don't mind a few chunks.
Click to expand...
 
 
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Yes I'd agree as this has never occurred until adding mango which is a very moist fruit.  I've never seen a sauce do this, or certainly not my own anyway, and have been looking at this result as a defect.  
Perhaps it's not?
In any case, once the mango is blended, I'm thinking a low simmer of just the mango before adding to the mash to reduce the water in there might prevent this.
 
I did 2 tests with mango at the same time.  My other batch of mango/thai chili I added the smoked mango as part of the 30 day ferment.
I got tired of battling yeast etc with that batch so I pulled it early at around 20 days maybe.  Because of the doggone yeast etc, I used an abundance of caution and did a HFH with this batch.  I still got some slight separation, plus of course the red oily globules endemic to thai chilies when heated. Perhaps during the heating, enough water evaporated to lessen the separation.
These are some pix of that batch.
IMG49901.jpg

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The Hot Pepper said:
That's water. If it was oil it would be at the top.
Click to expand...
 
 
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