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condiment 3 month salsa

Well here is my first Salsa for your enjoyment.

This is a serrano pepper with onion and cilantro fermented with Cuisine yogurt starter and with 2 teaspoons of salt on the top of the mixture in a quart jar. I pressed the chopped vegis inside the jar to minumize the amount of water needed in the jar; as can be seen in the pic with very little water showing.

Notice the large amount small bubbles from the fermenting showing in the must. The cap was kept tight with just a crack of a opening to let out the overflow. There was not very much overflow even though the must was full to the top with the salt laying on the surface as I screwed on the cap. The white colored streaks down the left side is brine that was expelled as the salsa cooked.

There was not much action in the must---at first I thought there was something wrong with it and added more bacteria but it seems that the fermentation progresses very slowly. This is contrary to my experience with alcohol fermentation and so people that do brewing or vintner activities this fermention is like watching glaciers move downslope.


SerranoSalsa.jpg


Now I come to my more contentious report for some of you who will raise heck with me for saying so; but I am a BS in Chemistry and have done brewing and vinter work for years and I like to expariment with process and procedure and so I did not pre boil the jar or ingredients before putting them in the jar. I Do NOT advocate not boiling--infact I often tell people to do it before making salsa. But just for the heck of it I wanted to see if anything else grew.

I am located in Wisconsin and it is cold up here and plus I keep my place at 60 degreess. Bugs do not like my place in winter and judging by my results I did not get any contamination from any "bad" bacteria. This came out fine and clear and well fermented. The material you can see on the lid is brine that overflowed and crystallized; another reason to cover the salsa with salt. So I was able to make a good salsa just by throwing the stuff into a jar without killing alien bacteria. I will probably do that again this summer with my peppers I grow and see if I can repeat the success.

Now I know I am supposed to boil the stuff to kill everything but I also know that when I was in Vietnam the restaurants had veggis in a jar of water with a small pepper. They had bugs all over the place and had a temperture of 100 degrees and 80% humidity that grew everything in the world. So if they put a small pepper in their veggis to keep them from going bad I was thinking that the pepper is by it self a anti-bacterial agent. That is the reason I tried this process and report it here for your enjoyment.

Now for my next expariment I am adding serrano peppers to friuts slush and see how long it takes for them to start growing. I will repost those results when I get some results.
 
Lookin good, interesting ideas you got goin on there. Pretty skeptical about the peppers being an antibacterial agent though, sounds like an urban myth to me. If they were you wouldn't be able to ferment in the first place!
 
I live in Florida where the temperatures are rarely below the 60's and the humidity is always high. When I put together a mash I will use a bleach and water solution in the jar for 15 minutes then rinse very well with tap water and add my chopped, not boiled, ingredients, top up with salt water and starter and close it up and let it ferment. Fermentation takes place between 80 and 90 degrees F and I have yet, knock on wood, to loose a batch.
 
well I tested the anti-bacterial theory with 4 batches of fruit and serranos chopped up and salsa I made. they all molded in 5 days---so much for that theory. Oh well

Live and learn

RochetMan---I will try bleach and a through wash next time---I will also wash the ingredients as well.

Thanks
 
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