How Not to Die of Botulism (2013)

Post by gus_massa » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 10:44 PM UTC

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #18

mjb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a critical difference between home fermenting and home canning. In home fermenting, you have living lactic acid bacteria of various kinds, and they out-compete the bad bacteria. You may help them along with some salt and acid. In home canning, you kill most of the living bacteria in the sample and seal it. If you get the acidity wrong, clostridium and other spores then come to life and poison your food produc…

So if I test the compound (sauerkraut) with PH test strips, and find it acidic then I'll be safe?

Most of the food is acid anyway, so it's not enough to get and acid mixture, it has to be acid enough to kill the spores. And the acidity varies with time, so I'm not sure how much acidity the initial mixture must have, IAMAFSE.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_botulinum

> [...] type-B strains were isolated from slightly acidic soils (average pH 6.25).

> C. botulinum is a lipase-positive microorganism that grows between pH of 4.8 and 7.0 [...]

Re: How Not to Die of Botulism (2013)

Re: How Not to Die of Botulism (2013)