Sure, it's 100% vinegar brine so you can reduce the sugar as much as you want. Of course, at some point you're just going to end up with pickled peppers, so if you don't want sweet at all, why don't you just start with a pickled pepper recipe? You can even do just *some* sugar and end up with sort of a bread and butter pickled pepper. Here's just one - NCHFP has many vegetable pickle recipes, you can always sub hot peppers for sweet (in same amount/weight, obviously not count) if a bell pepper recipe looks interesting. The Joy of Pickling has a lot of pepper recipes too. Here is a link that might be useful: Pickled peppers

There are thousands of recipes out there that "say" they are safe for canning but they aren't safe. They have just been made up by someone with no food science background or formal training in food safety. And they don't come from reliable sources that vet their recipes or that follow the established safe tested home canning guidelines. They are canned at your own risk. The first clue is the canning "instructions" provided with this one - a sort of do-your-own-thing-whatever approach to processing. ;) Safe, approved recipes provide detailed instructions and specific processing times. Sure you can pressure can it but you'd still have no assurance of a safe food pH. And you'd have no way of knowing how long it would remain safe on the shelf. With no added acid the pH would not remain in a safe pH range. Chutneys require some form added acid to be safely canned. The link I provided above outlines the safety guidelines for canning chutneys and also provides safe, tested, and approved recipes. Compare this one if you wish to the many approved chutney recipes and you'll see the differences. I agree that it sounds like a tasty recipe but per the established guidelines it can't be safely canned. But it is your choice since we each have to decide how much risk we can tolerate. Dave

Absolutely. I put up lots of various jams without commercial pectin every year, maybe 50 pints, and always reduce the sugar by about half from Ball. The jam is not runny. (We have grape vines and I have started using some grape juice for sugars and natural pectin.) Actually, I don't cut the sugar in half as much as throw in enough to sweeten slightly and then add more until it turns glossy and sets in the freezer on a plate. Choose only very ripe fruit, with taste. This is really the key. Commercial non-pectin preserves load up on sugar to disguise the fact that they don't select fruit carefully. If you have a liquid at some point, reduce it separately so the whole batch does not have a boiled taste. For instance, I'm making Concord grape jam right now. I save the juice that leaches out of the insides separately, cold, and simmer only the pulp, then strain this. Then briefly steam and coarse chop (and repick!) the skins and combine them with the cold juice. Then I simmer down the left over juice extracted from the skins with the pulp juice extracted from the insides (about 1/4 of the total, much less with other fruit) Sometimes I use the sugar with the cooking juices at this point and make a kind of syrup, but I want the skins to soak in the sugar, so not with Concord jam. You can prepare a lot of pulp at once, but for the last step, when the sugars are becoming glossy, work in smaller batches. That's what they say, actually I am too lazy and big batches work fine if you stir them!

There are baker's formulas that come into play, although not all recipes follow them and not everyone creating a recipe are aware of them. And as we all know, there are exceptions to every cooking/baking rule. When you start to alter the ratio of ingredients you often need to add something or adjust something. Pound cake really isn't supposed to be overly-sweet, but Americans seem to add too much sugar to nearly everything. The formula for pound cake: the weight of the sugar should be equal to the weight of the flour. This keeps the balance between the structure breaker and the structure maker. Pound cakes generally contain equal amounts of fat and sugar in addition to flour, large amounts of eggs, and flavoring. It gets the name from the original recipe, which called for 1-pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs. Helpful hint: Grind the sugar with a food processor will make the pound cake lighter and smoother. Helpful hint: When you reduce the sugar you may find the panned pound cake will collapse. Baking it in a Bundt pan may "fix" the problem because it won't matter when you turn it out of the pan. Helpful hint: Substitute an egg yolk and potato starch for 10% of the flour for a moister, more tender cake. Helpful hint: Rose Levy Beranbaum adds a little milk and leavening. Since pound cake is leavened only by air and steam - generally - this is one of those exceptions to the rule. Helpful hint: Add 1 t. baking powder and beat the yolks and whites separately. -Grainlady