RE: [CH] Food Safety Question
Dan Turkette (dan@tekinteractive.com)
Fri, 1 Oct 2004 16:38:50 -0500
Considering how many people put their mouths over rubbers each year, I'd say
your safe ;-)
Regards,
Dan
www.americanspice.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom D Compton [mailto:tdc@juno.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 4:02 PM
> To: chile-heads@globalgarden.com
> Subject: [CH] Food Safety Question
>
> 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