Vacuum – Melon compression
by jean-francois on Jul.20, 2009, under Equipments & Accessories, Recipes
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.
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July 29th, 2009 on 9:41 AM
Bonjour Jean-François!
Here is the easy way to infuse cucumber with white Martini using a home vacuum machine (MagicVac):
http://www.peter-gruber.gmxhome.de/SV/Infusing_Cucumber_1.jpg
http://www.peter-gruber.gmxhome.de/SV/Infusing_Cucumber_2.jpg
It worked equally well with Galia melon in tawny Portwine.
My MagicVac does only 0.28 bar (i.e. it brings water of 68°C to boil).