[CH] Food Safety Question
Tom D Compton (tdc@juno.com)
Fri, 1 Oct 2004 17:01:37 -0400
Here is a question for all the experts out there. I usually just lurk
and learn, but this time I need some real help. Every fall I harvest all
my hot peppers and smoke them for a few hours with hickory or mesquite
chips. I finish the drying overnight in a food dehydrator and then grind
the peppers along with garlic powder, cumin, and salt into a wonderful
smoky chile powder.
I screw a canning jar onto my blender blade assembly and grind the
peppers right in the container. As the volume decreases, I keep adding
dried peppers till all is ground and the jar is full. This year, almost
at the end, when I unscrewed the blade to add a few more peppers, I found
about a one inch chunk of the (rubber?) gasket missing. It must have
been hooked under the blade and is presumably ground up in the pepper
mixture. I now have nearly a pint of chile powder contaminated with
whatever the gasket is made of. This represents this year's entire
harvest, and I hate to throw it out. I'm sure the small piece of rubber
will not noticeably affect the flavor, but I'm concerned about the
safety. Is that gasket going to be toxic, or is it inert?
I will greatly appreciate your reply.
Tom