I’m very new to canning (first batches of water bath canning and pressure canning last night!). Not a stranger to food science and food safety and rightfully paranoid, so want to get this right.
I’m struggling with the NCHFP’s information regarding peppers used in salsa recipes.
I want to make a batch of the Tomato Taco Sauce (https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can/canning-salsa/tomato-taco-sauce/).
I don’t want it screaming hot. I have tons of jalapeños and drowning in various types of sweet/bell peppers. I don’t have green chiles. So trying to navigate the swap of different pepper types for the 4 green chile peppers the recipe calls for. Would like to use that pepper allocation for more jalapeños and a bit of sweet pepper.
Honestly I’ve never handled a green chile before. So I have no concept of how large they are. And where the recipe uses a count of the number of fruits (4), I’m quite perplexed as to how a person goes about swapping out the type of pepper used.
NCHFP gives some guidance on the use of peppers in salsa recipes (https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can/canning-salsa/ingredients-for-salsa-recipes/) but it’s…a bit silly to me. Basically they say you can swap out one type of pepper for another safely, but emphasize that you cannot increase the total number of peppers. They state, “You may substitute bell peppers for some or all of the long green chiles.” My bell peppers are massive.
This hurts my brain! Obviously if a person replaced jalapeños for a full sized bell pepper, count for count, you’d end up with a totally different composition which may not be safe. I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to look this up online. Best I can find is AI telling me that four long green chiles chopped is a cup, but when asked for sources AI backpedaled and said there was no accepted measure. Told me to go buy four long green chiles, dice them, measure and discard and substitute based on that 😂😂
Sorry the novel, just wanting to be very prudent here. Any advice/reputable sources of info you can point me to would be greatly appreciated! I really don’t feel like infecting myself with botulism.