I have been working on my asian cooking lately and met a few elderly people who have some older style recipes on common dishes they use in their restaurants / street side food carts. Their method is to cook large batches of their sauce before hand. They then add the completed sauce when cooking a dish.

I am noticing this is a much better method and gives a more consistent dish. I made a large batch of two sauces today and although time consuming, the results were terrific.

I would like to preserve these sauces but I would like to make sure I don’t make myself sick. Most use palm sugar, soy sauces, garlic, fish sauce / salt and like. I’m assuming they will be okay for a while in the fridge. One has evaporated milk and curry powder and I am not sure how long that would last.

Two questions:

1. Could I bottle the sauces in a hot water bath much like someone may bottle home made jams?
2. Is there generally a simple test I could use to see if the sauces are still okay to consume other than sight and smell?

I’m open to any suggestions.

Freeze them?

• Freeze them?

✓

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.

> 2. Is there generally a simple test I could use to see if the sauces are still okay to consume other than sight and smell?

Agar plate is the only one that comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_plate

Several methods are available to plate out cells. One technique is known as “streaking”. In this technique, a drop of the culture on the end of a thin, sterile loop of wire, sometimes known as an inoculator, is streaked across the surface of the agar leaving organisms behind, a higher number at the beginning of the streak and a lower number at the end. At some point during a successful “streak”, the number of organisms deposited will be such that distinct individual colonies will grow.

Place each Petri dish inside a zip lock bag to prevent drying out and to control odors. Turn the plates upside down and put them in a warm place. For many microorganisms, the ideal temperature for incubation is 32°C or 90°F. Bacterial growth should start to become visible in 2-3 days.

Thank you Moll. I will see if I can get hold of an agar plate locally. It would be interesting to see the result.