Finally got a PH meter.

[Holly2015]

Please delete

 

[pc farmer]

Sweet. That's pretty cheap too. Let us know how it works

 

[chilerelleno]

That's a decent one for the price.
Should work fine once calibrated.

I have to dig mine, already put it away after emptying the pool for the winter.

 

[Sowsage]

How does it work with solids? Iv always wanted to know exactly where my sausage reads as far as ph goes. I know it really should be shelf stable after the fermentation but i never store anywhere other than fridge or freezer because i dont actually know the real ph.

 

[Sowsage]

Mix the solids with buffered water then blend into a slurry. Then you can test the slurry.

Mix 25% into 75% water

That seems easy enough. Price for a gadget like that seems really reasonable too!

 

[SmokinAl]

The one I have has a meat probe on it so you can stick it right in the sausage. When I stuff the sausage I leave a bit in the stuffer & put it in saran wrap & use that for testing the PH. That way you are not piercing the casings.
Al

 

[SmokinAl]

This method may not work on finished dried meat like hard salumi/pepperoni or cheeses to see how they finished out. They still may need to be prepared into a slurry for good contact with the pH probe/bulb.

My ph meter has a meat probe very similar to the temp probe on a remote therm. Quite easy to poke into hard dry cured sausage. It is actually made for meat & cheese.

Al

 

[tx smoker]

I have a device that looks almost identical to yours Lance but it's for testing the TDS (total dissolved solids) in the pool. To check pH and other aspects of the water chemistry I have a digital laser test kit but I don't think mine would work for food. I may very well have to look into getting one of these.

Lance pretty well covered how the pH scale works but I'll take a second and expand. pH stands for Potens Hydrogen, which is Latin and translates into "the power of hydrogen". It is a logarithmic scale to determine the alkaline (high pH) or acidic (low pH) level of whatever compound you are checking. To put things into perspective a bit, sulfuric acid (battery acid) has a pH level of approximately 2.0. I found out last week that a lemon has pretty much the same pH level. That was enlightening!! Another way to look at "the power of hydrogen", which is the primary component in water, I believe that one of the bombs dropped in Japan at the end of WW II was a hydrogen bomb. It can be some pretty devastating stuff!! I've had a bit of an advanced education in water chemistry for a long time but never knew how pH would apply to food until I started digging deep into stuff here as I was researching cured and dry aged meats and sausage. It's absolutely fascinating to me to take something from one aspect of my life and apply it to my food hobby.

This has been fun!!
Robert