I have a question about botulism when canning pickles. I realize that most canning recipes use 1:1 vinigar to water ratio for canning pickles. I accidently used 1:4 vinigar to water ratio for canning pickles. Now i am wondering if I will get botulism and if so can i re-use the jars or do i have to throw the jars out? if i can re use the jars then what is the best way to clean and steralize them?
123583
If a home canned jar has botulinum in it can the jar be cleaned and saved? If so what is the correct way to clean the jar?
22867
So, I foolishly ignored advice about wearing gloves while handling hot peppers. I thought since they were "just" anaheim peppers I'd be fine... I was wrong, and I repent.   Does anyone know of a way to stop the burning? I have washed my hands repeatedly with soap in hot water and tried OTC burn spray.  I'm really worried about getting it off b/c I have a little baby &amp; I don't want to get it on her, too. Can the oil transfer to someone else still?
12803
I made some habanero salsa last night for the first time (my god, was it delicious) and took care to clean everything that was used.  I figured I was good when I had no problems taking my contacts out afterwards.  So, fast forward to this morning.  The slap chop was still out to dry (stop having a boring pepper, stop having a boring life!) so I put it all away aand then found out the hard way when I went to put my contacts in that I did not in fact clean the tools well enough.  So, I've now got a slap chop, 2 knives and a cutting board which all need to be cleaned of the oils.  What's the best way to do this?  I can throw them all into the dishwasher at once if needed, none of the plastics should melt.
79307
I make a product I invented called Maybe It's Marinade. Cold pressed extra virgin olive olive, pressed garlic as the base in three varieties, AoliOliO, Dill and Cayenne Pepper, garlic powder, and titch of salt. I package it in a 250 ml mason jar. I also place the jar in a celephane bag as part of its packaging. Recently, a public inspector noticed the product and sunk his teeth into it concerning Botulism risks.   I've been making this for eighteen years. No one has ever gotten sick. I designed the product to be stored in the cupboard. Using cold pressed olive, extra virgin olive oil I have never found the product to become awful, discolored, smelly, and I set some aside in my house on several occassions for months and tested it on myself and found nothing wrong.   The product is not a method of storing garlic in the oil, with the other ingredients in the recipe, it becomes a bread dipping oil, cooking tool, pasta sauce accessory.  The use of the mason jar provides a secure lid but a very reusable easy to open situation. I do not fill the oil to the top, so that the product can be shaken. Its a very interactive product if that makes sense, in the way that it's spoon accessible.   Can you provide some sort of pro and con overview? I only see articles on storing garlic in oil, not as an ingredient in a recipe? If there's a chance i will make people sick afer eighteen years, I may have to stop making it.  Thanks a heap.
80065
During my last small batch brew, , I came home to find that the foam in the 1 gallon carboy had overflowed the three-piece air lock (which was a mess to clean out). I have read that if it looks like it may bubble over, one can use a hose to create an airlock using a bowl of water. However, it overflowed while I was away, and I did not see it coming. I changed out the airlock for another one that I had, and let it proceed.  1) Is there a way to avoid this? Was there possibly too much wort in the carboy?  2) What are the possible effects on fermentation process, if any?
115258
Digression from   What are the good rules of thumb for determining a. whether to use secondary fermentation at all and b. when to move from primary to secondary.  Preferably any rule of thumb should have both chemical and anecdotal rationale supporting it.
58127
I've been making garlic butter for years, storing it for months at a time. When I read that garlic-in-oil can grow dangerous amounts of botulinum toxins after similar lengths of time, I wondered how safe garlic butter is and why.   Evidently, the  specifically target storage in oil. I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation for butter not being mentioned with a preliminary search. The first Google result turns up a grossly unhelpful Yahoo! Answers page whose sources do not mention butter at all.  To the point: is garlic butter safer than garlic-in-oil, and why? Is butter not also an anaerobic environment, so that the same precautions should apply as with oil?
72381
This recipe for poppy seed rolls calls for 1 large yeast. How much yeast am I supposed to use? I usually see recipes measure it in teaspoons, but I can’t guess how much “large” is. I am also assuming this is active dry yeast, maybe it’s not and that’s the reason why the size is weird.
116300
Twice in the past week or so, I've wondered whether my cooking utensil was still clean enough to cook / serve with. Here were the situations:   Cooking ground sausage (no casing). While breaking the sausage up, raw sausage clearly got on the back of the spoon. Over the course of cooking the sausage and later adding veggies, all visible traces of the raw meat disappeared. I finished up cooking, used the spoon to stir in some penne, and then served.  Candying some bacon. Put some bacon in the oven with some brown sugar on it. Used a fork to flip the bacon half way through. Then used the same fork to take the cooked bacon out of the pan and on to a rack.    Is this safe? When do I need to worry about contamination on my cooking utensils? What is sufficient to make the utensil safe again?
102623
I was looking for a recipe for an Italian tomato sauce when I came across an old cookbook from an American Creole Chef I like, but I'm really confused about the terminology he uses for some of the ingredients and wondered if someone could clarify exactly what he's referring to.  In the recipe he asks for -   2 cans (6 ounces) of tomato paste 2 cans (10 3/4 ounces) of tomato sauce  2 cans (10 3/4 ounces) of tomato puree   I've always assumed that tomato paste and tomato puree were the same thing, but clearly not. Can anyone clarify the difference between these two?  Tomato sauce in the UK comes out of a ketchup bottle, is he referring to passata, sieved tomatoes? If not, what is he referring to?
21109
Wondering if I have to boil my homemade jars of salsa to seal them if they sealed on their own. (Yes I sterilized them before hand) The salsa went in hot and once the lid was on, about 5 minutes later there was the telltale pop!   IF this is safe, how long does something like homemade salsa and homemade sauces keep for in sealed jars?  Thanks! ~Andrea
25916
For an ecology project, my lab group added vinegar to 4 tanks containing equal volumes of pond water, 1 control with no elodea (an aquatic plant) and 3 treatments with the same amount of elodea in each. The purpose of adding the vinegar was to reduce the pH. The hypothesis was that the tanks with elodea would go back to their normal pH quicker. This was indeed the case. We measured the pH of each tank daily for about two weeks. All the tanks eventually returned to their natural pH, but the length of time that this took was much shorter for the tanks with elodea.  When we told our professor about our experimental design, he said that there exists no statistical test that can be performed on the data to compare the control to the treatment. That because there was no replicate for the control (we only used one control tank) we cannot calculate variance and so we can't compare the sample means of the control and the treatment. So my question is, is this true? I definitely understand what he means. For example, if you took the height of one man and one woman, you can't draw conclusions about their respective populations. But we did 3 treatments, and the variance was small. It seems reasonable to assume that the variance would be similar in the control?  Update:  Thank you for the excellent answer. We got more water and elodea from the wetland and decided we would run the experiment again with smaller tanks but this time with 5 controls and 5 treatments. We were going to combine this with our original data but the starting pH of the tanks was different enough that it doesn't seem valid to consider the new experiment to be sampled from the same population as the original experiment.  We considered adding different amounts of elodea and trying to correlate speed of pH remediation (measured as time elapsed until pH returned to its original value) with amount of elodea, but we decided that wasn't necessary. Our objective is only to show that the elodea makes a positive difference, not to construct some kind of predictive model for exactly how the pH responds to differing amounts of elodea. It would be interesting to determine the optimal amount of elodea, but that's probably just the maximum amount that can survive. Trying to fit a regression curve to the data wouldn't be especially illuminating because of the various complicated changes that occur to the community when adding a large amount. The elodea dies, decomposes, new organisms start to dominate, and so on.
55061
How long do you wait before taking corrective action if your fermentation doesn't start?  Are there any other good ways to tell if it's just taking a while to get going?
80317
I have ethanol , Reagent Grade 99.8% v/v  can i use this to make hand sanitizer ? is it safe for hand skin ?  I will be  &lt;&lt; have a look at that link.  I am planning to dilute the Ethanol with water to get a 65% concentration .  Can i proceed with making the sanitizer ?  Look at the Ethanol specs on the picture below
91790
I've been told that I should be rinsing Chinese tea with the boiled water before the first full infusion intended for drinking.  I make the occasional very-expensive tea from Taiwan and I feel it is a waste to throw away a first pot simply for "rinsing".  However, my mother-in-law insists it is correct to rinse the tea first :-)  Is this practice of rinsing always advisable, or are there specific cases or kinds of tea where rinsing is necessary? What are we trying to rinse away?  Is the practice only for Chinese tea, or for other kinds of tea as well?  Looking for some enlightenment from some tea experts.  Thank you!    Update:  Since I asked the question, my mother-in-law came across a newspaper article, in Chinese, describing pesticides found on some teas from China, and so it is advisable to rinse before consuming.  Here's a scan I made of the article:    Something in English...  Essentially, the article references a 2012 report by Greenpeace.  You can read a , and here's a link to the report itself: .  Press release summary:     A Greenpeace investigation has found pesticides banned for use on tea   in the products marketed by some of China's top tea companies. Some of   the firms, which include China Tea, Tenfu Tea and China Tea King,   export tea products to Japan, the US and Europe.   For that reason, I accepted the answer below which suggests rinsing for reduction of pesticides.  Of course, I don't think I'd want to drink a tea with 17 kinds of pesticides present, even if rinsed!  Caveat emptor ... I plan to ask more questions when I buy my tea.
102871
I just purchased my first kit and am about to brew it (tonight!).  The instructions provided indicate that after cooling the wort and tranfering it to the sanitized carboy I need to top it off with cold water.  It seems like this is just asking to introduce non-desirable organism to the beer. (or not quite yet, beer).  My questions:  1)  Should I boil the top-off water and cool it, before adding? 2)  If not, why?
90755
I've just finished my primary fermentation and have produced a cider that is coming in at 5.2%. I am about to bottle my cider and add some priming sugar to give it a bit of a fizz. I would like to try and flavor some of the ciders with a fruit coulis. am I correct in thinking that the natural sugar in the fruit should give the cider a natural fizz and I don't need to add any sugar? Also, I am a fan of a sweeter cider, I have been advise not to add more than a teaspoon of priming sugar, and to use a sugar substitute at the same stage if i wish to sweeten it. I have purchased Xylitol, I plan on trying a few combinations with the priming sugar/Xylitol &amp; no additive fruit coulis. Does this all sound like it makes sense or am I just going to ruin my cider.