Sous Vide Cooking

Everybody is mentioning Thomas Keller watermelon compression technique. I didn’t have any watermelon in my fridge but I had a great melon waiting for being eaten. My vacuum machine is definitely not as powerful as a pro machine. Therefore my issue was to determine if my Lava 100 (max. vacuum is 0.8 bar) would make enough compression to change the texture of the melon.
I had some difficulties to vacuum the melon as juice was coming out of the pouch. I made several tries and finally decided to freeze (not completely) my melon before vacuuming it. This way no melon juice got into my vacuum appliance.
I let the vacuumed melon 24 hours in the fridge.

I can’t say this try was a success. The flavour is similar to the one that was not vacuumed. The compression worked quite well and the melon was definitely more compact. The texture in mouth was interesting. I can imagine that with more vacuum the texture would have been more interesting.
Next time I’ll try with a watermelon!

Jean-François.