Thursday, August 18, 2022

If You're Not Measuring Things, It's Not Science

I installed a yardstick among my tobacco plants yesterday so I can track their growth. If I haven't updated you on the project, the plants were put in the well-prepared ground last week.

Science!

If I recall correctly, my previous crop got to about 3' tall. Taller, maybe? In any case, I thrust a stiff rod into the soil and zip-tied the yardstick to that, making sure the bottom of the yardstick was just barely touching the ground. From the photo above, my tobacco plants are about 12" tall now.

These are Virginians, of which I have a dozen. Off-camera are nine Tennesseans.

It Looks Like It Was All Lies

... which is just what I expected

Several days into my cayenne fermentation experiment, the peppers in the brine solution are fermenting so fast that the container is overflowing and the bubbles are bubbling. The salted mash is just sitting there like the degenerate loser that it is.

On the left, proper fermentation is happening. So much winning!

On the right, there is naught but sloth and degradation. Sad!

5 comments:

tim eisele said...

So, is the difference between the two jars mainly that on the left, you made a brine solution with the correct amount of salt, while on the right you just added salt and (according to the lies) it was supposed to pull out enough juice to get to the correct salt concentration?

It looks like the one on the right is more of a salt-preservation chamber than a fermentation chamber. Salted peppers, instead of fermented peppers. I bet if you added enough water to bring the salt concentration down to a level that the microbes could survive, and inoculated it with a bit of the mash from the left jar, it would take off.

Chuck Pergiel said...

Picture captions are great.

K T Cat said...

Tim, the one on the right has peppers put through a blender and then salt mixed into the mash. On the left, it's a 1 tsp to 1 cup of water brine solution and the peppers are just chopped.

You make a good point that I ought to be able to add a cup and a third to the mash jar and that will get things going. I'm going to give the mash another day or two before I throw in the towel.

What's interesting is that the mash recipe is specifically for cayenne and Louisiana hot sauce.

K T Cat said...

Thanks, Chuck!

Mostly Nothing said...

I'm going to believe that you found the recipe for the mash, and had to cut it down for the amount of peppers you had. But the recipe was for a much larger amount?
I'm thinking that the ratio for salt to the mash is not linear. So pretty much agreeing with Tim.