Canned according to the official USDA guide. A mixture of boiled white vinegar and water dumped over garden fresh peppers than had been soaked whole in a vinegar bath and then dried. Jars sterilized in the oven, then water bath canned for a half hour.
by cptmoosehunt
7 Comments
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sterilizing jars in the oven has unstable heating and may cause micro cracks and eventual failure of the glass.
Would you have the link to the recipe?
I’m not sure what recipe you’re talking about but if all that was in the jar was white vinegar and peppers, I sure wouldn’t eat them with all that black stuff.
None of the ingredients should have black oil in them. Something is wrong here. Were jars clean? Were lids clean? Garlic and peppers were fresh? Vinegar and water didn’t have contamination?
The only thing I could begin to imagine is that you had some diseased seeds that went into your jar. Sometimes, especially with hot peppers that are not fully ripe, the seeds turn black and start molding a bit, and it is easy to miss if you are doing a quick slice or chop and not deseeding your peppers. If that was the case, there could be oily residue from the peppers (the capsaicin) and moldy growth from the diseased seeds. I would have to wonder, though, if that means there was mistake with your vinegar to water ratio, and something maybe went wrong with the water bathing or seals, that would allow floating bits of seed/oil to mold. That may or may not be what you have there in your pic, but it is the only thing I can think of.
Sorry you lost all that work and harvest. Best wishes for next time. 🙏🏻🦋
Putting jars in the oven is bad for the jars and an unsafe practice. Maybe something from your oven that you couldn’t see collected into the jars and then coalesced into the black stuff? If you process anything over 10 minutes your jars don’t need to be sterilized. It sounds like you didn’t really follow the recipe anyway.
If the primary preservative is vinegar, one potential cause could be because several brands have changed the acidity of their vinegar from 5% to 4% in the last few years, which is below the threshold considered safe for canning!
Source: https://extension.psu.edu/advice-about-vinegar