Blended red jalapenos and a bit of garlic, weighed the mash and added 3 percent salt by weight, airlock lid, ambient 20C. It bubbled hard on days two and three and by day four it has gone completely still. pH strip reads somewhere around 4. Do I keep waiting, feed it something, or is a stalled mash a sign I should start over?
Not stalled, finished the noisy part. The visible bubbling is mostly the early heterofermentative stage burning through easy sugars, and jalapenos do not have many. Once the pH drops under about 4.2 the population shifts and gas production falls off a cliff while acidification continues quietly. Leave it two more weeks and taste it, it will get rounder and less raw. Adding sugar to restart bubbling gives you a fizzy sauce, not a better one.
Usually to somewhere around 3.4 to 3.6 over a few weeks. Strips are only worth about half a pH unit of accuracy though, so if you plan to bottle for shelf stability rather than fridge storage, a cheap meter is the one piece of kit worth owning.
So a still jar at pH 4 is normal rather than dead. Does it keep dropping?
Check the airlock is actually sealing before you diagnose anything else. Half my "stalled" ferments have been gas escaping past a lid gasket. Give the jar a gentle press and see if the airlock moves.
Give it a stir once a week with a clean spoon so the top of the mash does not dry out and crust. Mine takes six weeks for the flavour to stop tasting like blended raw pepper.
@iris_tanaka · 3mo ago · 2 replies
Three percent is also a firmer brake than the 2 to 2.5 most mash recipes use, which shortens the loud phase. Nothing wrong with it, the sauce keeps better, it just ferments slower and more quietly.
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@gongfu_greta · 3mo ago
Agreed. I go 3.5 percent for anything I will keep on the shelf for a year and accept that it looks boring for the first week.
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