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I have made a tartare sauce from:

  • mayonnaise
  • shallot
  • capers
  • fresh ginger
  • lime juice
  • chilli sauce
  • red wine vinegar
  • salt and pepper

All of these ingredients (except the shallot) are either stable and safe in the cupboard, or well in date in the fridge.

If I decant this to a sterile closed container, how long can I keep it refrigerated safely?

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  • And before anyone says anything about it, I didn't have cornichons. Commented Apr 5 at 15:05

1 Answer 1

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Three to four days in the refrigerator.

I will be closing this in a moment as a duplicate, because we do have a generic Q/A about the topic (we do tend to get variations of this question quite regularly). But as you expound on your method and reasoning, it think this warrants an answer to clear up two misconceptions with regards to food safety:

  1. Unless you are operating in a sterile environment with sterile tools and all the precautions of a laboratory, there is a high probability that the food you just prepared was exposed to bacteria and fungi. That���s not a problem per se, it’s the reason why just putting something in a clean jar without a processing step afterwards is not going to affect the shelf life (although it’s obviously a good idea to work with clean containers and close them). The same rules as for all other prepped foods apply. -> see canonical Q/A.
  2. Shelf life of food items depends on many different mechanisms to keep unwanted bacterial or fungal growth in check. And they can chancel each other out - dry flour and UHT milk are both shelf stable for quite a while, but once you mix them, they will spoil quickly. That’s why it doesn’t matter that all your ingredients were quite within the safe range, once you mix, the clock starts ticking. (And yes, of course you can mix flour and sugar and baking powder for homemade baking mixes, but that’s the exception, not the general rule.) Same applies to your ginger and shallots. They are well protected while unpeeled and whole, once you chop them up, you are damaging the cells and drastically increasing their surface area - thus cutting their shelf life drastically short.

If you are serving your sauce only for yourself (no vulnerable groups, because they are one of the reasons for a rather conservative approach to food safety) it’s of course up to you to ignore the official guidelines. But that’s certainly no encouragement, use common sense and decide for yourself. When in doubt, throw it out.

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