the 2 recipes are almost identical. 2 qts chopped peeled cored tomatoes 1 1/2 cups chopped seeded hot red peppers 1 qt vinegar divided is the same as 8 cups (64 ounces) canned, diced tomatoes, undrained 1½ cups seeded, chopped Serrano peppers 4 cups distilled white vinegar (5 percent) the rest is minor. But I like the recipe or both recipes. but I still have a question for Zakker. How do you grind up the peppers. blender or food processor or something else. *****using 1:2 vinegar. That a lot vinegar purchase!! I take it you mean 1 part mash to 2 parts vinegar. I suspect this is a common ratio that commercial people use. I suspect some of the cayenne people use more vinegar to dilute the salt. but lousiana hot sauce is cayenne mash with vinegar and it is kind of salty. Might be able to figure the dilution from the final salt and a good guess on the starting salt. Of course all mfg will rave about their process of making hot sauce. Tabasco sure does. But it seems to me that if you add 2 units of vinegar to the 1 unit of mash then why bother fermenting. You have so much vinegar that you may as well just use the pure vinegar method. Just putting the question to you to see what you might say. I really wonder if you can taste a difference. I would say that any fermentation taste is gone from tabasco. It tastes like flavored vinegar to me. And aging the tabasco sure is a waste of time and energy. I can not imagine that doing it with say a couple of weeks aging would be just as good as the 3 years of aging they claim. and the oak barrel might be ok for wine but I doubt it does anything for hot sauce. and what do you think of lamalu's 2 quick easy recipes. no fermentation. nice tomato taste. John do you know if you can ferment the tomato juice. Can we mix tomato juice and hot peppers and ferment them. The problem I see is that the tomato juice is already pretty low acid so it might not ferment properly. by the way pretty cool that you could purchase 100 pounds of hot peppers. I assume at a good price. Bye the way I have never been a cayenne fan. To me they always seemed hot without much flavor. just blind heat. well at 50,000 SHU they are hot and I dont find much flavor. For example I like habanero at say 350,000 SHU with good flavor. for some reason they do not have that same heat that cayenne has. However, It is interesting they have a new hybrid cayenne type with low heat. that has possibilities because the cayenne has nice high yield. so in a small garden maybe I can get more pepper for my hot sauce. then heat it up with other stuff. but zakker you seem to talk about the flavor of cayenne. so i find that interesting. what do you think of other pepper flavors. or maybe you like to get the flavor from the food and add the heat using cayenne. Bye the way ship 100 bottles to me pronto.

I prescrub the seeds in a sieve and add alot of water to the sieved gel juice. About half the time it takes 3 days at room temperature but sometimes up to 5. It is a lot less messy, time consuming and disgusting to do a little cleaning on the font end. No nasty sludge/floating mold to deal with. I use 16 oz deli containers with lids, but ziplock bags work just fine in an emergency. I've left seed in for a week many times with no sprouting, the ones that did sprout were sprouted on day 4. Sometimes seeds sprout inside the fruit, generally in store bought fruit possibly from long term storage, so I wouldn't rush to take half fermented seeds out just because you are afraid of sprouting, its going to happen, rarely, or not.

I was wondering what everyone uses in their home orchard for Fungicide and Insecticide. There have been some changes in some of the offerings so I was just curious what everyone uses. This year I choose to use Bonide Fruit Tree Spray and it has been effective so far. The problem is they have reduced the number of sprays per year to 2 for apples. I have mostly disease resistant varieties (Liberty, Enterprise, etc). But I do have Honeycrisp trees so I probably need to spray for potential fungus problems. I did have a bad Coddling Moth problem and that is what started my spray program. So…what do you use in your home orchard and is it available to the public?

lukki irish said :"Do you stalk my answers " No, of course not. Not yours nor anyone else's. What often motivates me to comment is when people cite information without apparently recognizing they may be using an unauthoritative source. Cites to sites that have economic ulterior motives to try to convince people to buy their products are unreliable. Supplements are mostly unregulated by the FDA so that claims are very often outlandish and unsupported in the normal way medicines are tested and proven. Bona fide, mainstream physicians don't sell or endorse supplements. Biomedical experts don't sell or endorse supplements. I have a friend who's a surgeon. In the middle years of his career, he became disillusioned about what he was doing and surgical medicine in general. He closed his practice and with hopeful enthusiasm joined a group of physicians advocating "alternative" and "natural" approaches to medicine. He lasted there 18 months before leaving to join a surgical group practice. His simple comment to me was "everything these people were doing was bogus". Later edit for clarity: Apparently lukkiirish deleted her comment that I quoted here, I added attribution so my comment wouldn't be orphaned and make no sense.