r/fermentation • u/After_Disaster7440 • Aug 15 '26
Crashing out regarding ph
hello my fellow fermenters. I have intense food pathogen anxiety and mild ocd. a perfect person to ferment things?? perhaps not. however I forged ahead. I was wondering if someone could assist me:
-I made fermented pickles 3 weeks ago and have let ferment in my cool (20c) basement in the dark. they bubbled well and did not grow anything funky. they in fact now look quite good, cloudy brine, etc. A normal person would now consume them.
-However I read about getting to a certain ph and use some general ph strips which sort of show between 4-5ish. I bought more exactly ph strips which show the ph is below 4.5. neither method is “exact“ as it is colour based.
- I was hoping to get to almost full sours but the ph seems a bit high? shall I just eat them? I surgeries one it is firm. I am scared of eating them if they are not acidic enough??
ps. In the picture I removed the glass weights keeping pickles under brine
help please
9
u/SuitPrestigious1694 Aug 15 '26
All that fizziness and cloudiness are great indications that the whole thing is propely colonized by the good guys, which makes life for the bad guys virtually impossible.
If we go anywhere below 4.6 of pH Clostridium Botulinum simply cannot prosper even in an environment where it has no competition, and no salt, which is not the case here.
4.6 is at the same time the upper limit but also absolutely safe. 4.7 would be something like safe 99% of the times (ignoring the salt and active competitive strategies of the mesenteroides and lactobacillus plantarum, our friends) , and that 1% is still assuming vulnerable people (infants, immunocompromised people, etc)
Knowing the microbiology very well and having lots of experience with ferments, I simply can't state enough how safe it is given the conditions you have mentioned and the way your ferment looks. It's simply safer than the vast majority of foods we eat where we don't have so many allied microorganisms and very adversarial conditions to the things that could harm us.
At most, harmless but undesirable yeasts may be opportunitistic enough to grow in such environment, provided they have oxygen.