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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

It’s so fun to ferment stuff! Yogurt and sauerkraut are good starter ferments. Kimchi too. With hot sauce make sure to wear gloves and try to remove the pith and seeds. In my experience it can make the sauce quite bitter.

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Any tips to calm an overly cautious mind for food based tinkering like fermentation? My rational part understands that with a proper recipe and clean work there’s no more risk than from a random food locality and still … when I was young my mom was a cooking enthousiast and a great cook and she landed in the hospital with a nearly lethal food poisoning one day. That has probably shaken my senses for the more adventurous cooking like fermentation.

Fermentation is pretty much safe. Make sure you get two things right:

1. Salt. You want at least 2% by weight (vegetables and water). Recipes differ, up to 5-ish %, just follow the recipe.

2. Anaerobic. No need to fear opening the jar every now and then, but submerge the vegetables in the brine and don't stir the brine much when you open the jar (to taste it, for example). There may be white fungus on top where the brine-air line is, but that's benign. Just skim it off.

If you make sure those two conditions are met, lactobacilla (and yeast) will out-compete everything else. Especially everything dangerous.

Fermentation can be safer than raw veggies actually. just make sure you have 2%+ brine by weight of the veggies and the water and you should be ok. keep the ferment in a cooler to let the lacto bacillus do their thing at optimal temperatures.

if there is stringy/fluffy mold then your ferment went south and you should throw generally to be on the safe side. if it's more brain like white folding without wispy bits you should be ok to just skim it. (kahm yeast is harmless generally)

if you are really paranoid you can buy some pH strips to see if the lacto bacteria got the veggies down to the proper pH. botulism is basically impossible for a setup like this as long as you are following the basic guidelines and not trying to do some weird canning/fermentation setup. (botulism needs low competing bacteria[aka improper canning where you kill off all the good bacteria and leave the botulism spores], low salinity [more canning], anaerobic environment[technically this can happen in a ferment since the outgas from the bacteria is co2], and finally non-acidic environment[the lacto bacillus makes it an acidic environment pretty quickly])

there's also two schools of thought to letting it be or pushing down. some people push the ferment down under the brine every day until it gets established and some people let it go until they taste it however long it that takes. the first camp think that by doing that you push any potential contaminants down under the brine where it can't reproduce that well so there is never any big problem. the second camp just take the chance that they were clean enough to not introduce any molds (but there are molds in the air)

the other thing you can do to help is to make your own co2 blanket by mixing baking soda and vinegar and then pouring the co2 over the open jars. Be careful not to splash any of that liquid into your brine though! (similar to how you blow out a candle in science class). I've tried it and it seems to help but i'm not 100% convinced it is required.

Mold spores are in the air, on the food you're fermenting, everywhere. They can get in while you're filling the container. Operating hygienically and producing an environment where they won't thrive (keeping the solids submerged) is good prevention.

You could try something simple like kefir, we did it for our dog mostly. It is very simple. You just strain the yoghurt when it's at your desired thickness, then put fresh milk and the strained grains back in the jar. Over time you'll get too many grains, so you can be the annoying person giving them away and converting people or just feed them to the dog like we did. Optionally, you can do a second ferment in the fridge to let it mature, with optional flavourings. We quickly had too much to use but it works as a substitute for buttermilk and yoghurt in recipes.

I got the original grains from Facebook marketplace or something, we met in a carpark and she sold me a jar for $10 and the whole thing felt a bit like a drug deal. Just like transplanting a plant, you might have middling results until the organisms get used to your way of doing things (your water and room temperature, how long you wait, milk ratio, etc).

Then I forgot about it for a while and it all died but it was very obvious when it "turned", and took a lot longer than expected.

I did kombucha in a 5 gallon bucket with a spigot, and by the time my spouse got tired of the smell in the laundry room / pantry, the scoby was 4" thick. My chickens loved it when i tossed it to them.

I also managed to give some scoby away, to a couple friends and the person who invented the nicotine patch - so that part is also apparently common!

For lacto fermentation: Use a scale to accurately measure ingredients. Use tested recipes. Maintain correct temperature. Learn the signs of a bad ferment (sights and smells). Test the ph of the brine.

Agreed! I picked up brewing kombucha over lockdown and its been a fun vehicle for trying out flavors you won't see in stores. I've made watermelon mint, lychee, mango carolina reaper (it took 2 attempts to get the heat right), and even attempted a bloody mary that went horribly wrong.

mango carolina reaper

You are God to me now...

OK, not seriously, but that does sound amazing. I love mango and I love hot peppers, including Carolina Reaper, so that sounds like something I should try.

When I make it I use 1 carton of Goya Mango Nectar and TWO reapers. Let that simmer in a pot for 20-30 minutes. Let the mixer come to room temp and mix with your kombucha brew before moving to second fermentation. It'll give a noticeable burn, but the mango counters it nicely. Don't be tough with the peppers, those TWO go a long way. My first attempt I did six because I had no gauge and it felt like I was drinking sandpaper.

When reapers are out of season, you can substitute with 6 habaneros. Same level of heat (maybe a bit less), but slightly different flavors since reapers and habaneros' fruity flavors are different.

Have you had this?

https://queenmajestyhotsauce.com/products/queen-majesty-scot...

Seriously my favorite hot sauce of all time. It would be easy to let the scotch bonnet overwhelm things, but it's such a nice balance, it's only considered a "medium" heat overall.

I haven't had that particular sauce but I use a lot of Scotch Bonnet pepper sauce in general. It's nowhere near as hot as something like Trinidad Scorpion, Naga Jolokia, or Carolina Reaper, but has a really nice flavor. I almost always use a mix of Scotch Bonnet and one of the hotter peppers to achieve the desired balance of "nice flavor" and "extreme heat".

Agree, it is fun :-) Kefir is even easier than yogurt once you get the grains.

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