5 Comments

  1. Question: If a homade hot sauce (5 lb pureed carrots, 1 lb onions, garlic, 1 lb scotch bonnet peppers, vinegar) has been cooked on stove top, then properly cooled and poured into sanitized hot sauce bottles, what would a safe shelf life be?
    1. I do not have a Ph meter, but added quite a bit of vinegar (didn’t use a recipe, maybe 2 – 3 cups).
    2. The sauce was cooked, then cooled, then bottled. There was no processing done after bottling. I have water bath processed pickles and stuff in jars in the past, but not these 5 oz glass hot sauce bottles.

    Should these little hot sauce bottles be boiled like Mason jars? Would the hot sauce in the bottles be safe? Do they need to be refrigerated? If I get a Ph meter, what is the “safe ph” for non-processed foods?

    1. Jason,
      Tough questions. I would look around and see if you can find a recipe similar to yours and follow those instructions for processing.
      That being said, I would at least try to process it. Hot, uncooled sauce into hot, sanitized containers. Boil them for 15 or so minutes.
      BUT! I haven’t done any death-time studies on this process! I have made “raw” vinegar-based hot sauce and kept it in the fridge for over a year.
      Many local ag-extensions will test the pH of a homemade sauce for a small fee. I’d fund out what you’re actually working with, then you can also have reproducibility.

  2. Personally I’ve found that a lot of grandmother and great-grandmother’s recipes are rather more intense than the modern ones, and several of them add a fair amount of salt just to be sure. And then, on top of that, when they opened it they’d boil it for 20 minutes more to get rid of any botulism that had somehow survived.

    It works if you don’t mind your vegetables being just short of mush.

  3. Has there any new research on electric canners? There is a newer brand made by Presto. I was interested in more research using a data logger has been done.

    1. I took a master canner/preserver course from my local Ag Extension a couple years back and we talked about this. At the time, there were no electric pressure canners that could get up to a high enough pressure for safe canning at our elevation here in Utah. The presto one says it meets USDA standards, I don’t know if that’s for all elevations. Certainly, the data loggers would be of use to see if the time and temperature requirements for low-acid canning are met!I”d contact your local Agricultural Extension to talk to their food preservation guru and see if they are up to date on the new developments. Or, get a logger and go for it yourself!

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