Many people worry when fermenting and pickling foods at home, regarding spoilage of food – what if, they wonder, the food spoils, and I don’t notice, and I eat something harmful?
One of the reasons that fermenting has survived as a preservation method for thousands of years, is that it is pretty easy to tell when something is good, and when it is not.
Trust your senses:
If it LOOKS strange – odd color, moldy, or otherwise disgusting. It should look like FOOD.
If it SMELLS strange – odd smell, or bad smell is a tip-off that something is not right. It should smell like FOOD.
If it FEELS unusual – squishy, slimy, or way too soft. Some foods do get softer over time even when still healthy, but mushy is not good. It should FEEL like the food that it is supposed to be.
If it TASTES bad, or if the taste makes you queasy – generally one of the other senses will tip you off, but if you put something in your mouth that isn’t right, just spit out out and rinse your mouth with water. Honestly, people pretty much never get to that point unless they just aren’t paying attention to their other senses – because bad food always has some other tip-off that it isn’t right! It should TASTE like food.
In the majority of food poisoning cases, there was something not right about the food, which the consumer ignored while eating it. The flavor was off, or the color was not right, or something which caused them to think something was wrong, but which they ignored.
Trust your senses. You’ll notice a common theme there – Food looks, smells, tastes, and feels like FOOD. If it doesn’t, then don’t eat it!
With fermented foods, it is usually pretty easy to tell when it is not good. Most spoilage happens at one of two times:
- During the initial ferment. Something is wrong right from the start. This means that it goes bad usually before you’ve even had a chance to sample it. The kind of spoilage that happens here is very visible – typically involving mold, a layer of nasty stuff on top of the ferment, or other very visual indicators that something hasn’t worked correctly. Often it is due to contaminated food, hot temperatures, insufficient salt or brine coverage, or something else simple, so it is not only easy to detect, it is easy to correct.
- During storage – usually after prolonged storage. In this instance, you made so much that you aren’t using it regularly. It has been shoved to the back of the fridge, probably in a half-filled container, or it has been left on a shelf in the basement or root cellar and not looked at or used in a few months. Usually, it just got stored a little too long, or at too high temperatures, or in a container with too much airspace for too long a time period. Spoilage of this kind is also generally easy to detect – and will more often involve slimy, mushy, bad smelling gook, and may arrive one day in your kitchen, in the hands of a child, who is asking, “Mom? Is this supposed to look like this?”. This type of spoilage is also easy to avoid, and one of the easiest ways to correct it is by making small batches of things you don’t use frequently, so they get used in a timely manner. Proper storage – little airspace in the jar, cool temperatures, and checking them once a month – also helps to eliminate spoilage during storage.
With fermented foods, there is pretty much never an instance of spoilage serious enough to actually make you sick that is not detectible by more than one means. So if your nose doesn’t work as well as your neighbor’s, do not fear. Your eyes and hands will tip you off instead.
This applies to traditional salt and acid fermentations, and to milk or fruit based fermentations. We do not recommend fermenting vegetables without salt.
Trust your senses! Pickle with confidence.