Liquid intelligence the art and science of the perfect cocktail

large volume of liquid to your solid. The pores never constitute a large percentage of the whole. Because the volume of liquid you inject is small, the flavor must be powerful to make an impact on the flavor of the solid.

The less porous your ingredient is, the more powerfully flavored your liquid needs to be. Using underflavored liquids is a big rookie mistake.

Candidates for vacuum infusion should not be too fragile. Fruits like strawberries have lots of pores and infuse well, and look awesome at first.

After about 5 minutes they start to turn slimy and gross, because their structure can’t handle the forces of vacuum infusion. Ripe pears, too, are heavily damaged by vacuum infusion.

Vac Infusion versus Pickling and Influence on Shelf Life: Rapid infusion is not like traditional pickling, in which an acidic, salty, or sugary brine changes an ingredient’s composition slowly through osmosis and often effectively preserves the product. Because vacuum infusion doesn’t radically alter the composition of your solid ingredient, it can’t preserve it the way a traditional pickling process would. Remember that.

On the flip side, if you vacuum-infuse something and then let it sit around for a long time in the fridge—overnight, for a couple days, whatever —then the composition of the flesh of your solids will change, just as in traditional pickling, because of osmotic effects and diffusion. Sometimes that is okay. Apples do not lose their texture when stored for a long time after infusion. Sometimes, however, texture is damaged. In the Cucumber Martini recipe, I tell you to eat the cucumber slices within 2 hours. Beyond that time osmosis will cause the water in the cucumber’s cells to leach out and dilute the gin. The consequence will be a loss of turgor. In other words, the cucumber will get sad and floppy.

GETTING READY: THE TEMPERATURE Anything you plan to vacuum-infuse must be cold. Cold. Not lukewarm, not tepid, not cool, but cold—fridge-cold at least (34°–40°F, 1°–4.4°C). That includes the solid you are infusing and the liquid you are infusing with. Trying to infuse too warm is the most common vacuum-infusion mistake I see, and I see it a lot. The result is messy boilovers and poor infusions. Read on for the full explanation, or take my word for it and skip to the next section.

Here’s a property of vacuums that you need to understand: applying a vacuum reduces the boiling temperature of liquids. Boiling isn’t just about temperature, it is about a combination of temperature and pressure. As you know from reading the instructions for a boxed cake (yes, you have), when you cook in the mountains you