MAKING A WATERMELON RIND GARNISH: 1, 2, and 3) When you cut up your watermelon, leave the rind in rings. 4) Peel the deep green outer rind off the rings. 5) Place your peeler on the ring and start peeling in circles. 6) Keep going—you want a long, continuous, unbroken strip. 7) To get at the strip without cutting you will need to disassemble your peeler. 8) Finally, vacuum infuse with All-Purpose Sweet-and-Sour. (See recipe, here.)
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR VACUUM INFUSION CHOOSING THE INGREDIENTS Porosity: Just as with nitrous infusion, any candidate for vacuum infusion must be porous—it must have air holes in it. During the vacuum infusion process you will fill those pores with liquid. The larger and more numerous the pores in your solid, the more liquid you can inject into it and the more flavor your solid will acquire. Watermelon, which has boatloads of air space in it, soaks up liquids like a sponge. Apples have plenty of air holes in their flesh, but those holes are smaller and more difficult to penetrate, so they are more difficult to infuse with flavor. Not only must your ingredient have pores, but those pores must also be available to the infusing liquid, which means it’s difficult to infuse through skins, which are typically less porous than fruit flesh. Unpeeled cherry tomatoes pick up no flavor from vacuum infusion; peel them and they are infusion champions. Additionally, cutting your ingredients thinner makes it easier to infuse them, because it makes more pores available to the liquid. Since vacuum infusion simply fills up existing pores, it never adds a
