VACUUM EVERYTHING.

This is heavy. 45kg of heaviness, actually. It took about an hour to move from the front porch to the back room and unbox (moving it wasn’t too much of a problem. Lifting it out of the box, on the other hand, was a bit more involved). This is a chamber vacuum sealer - imagine a FoodSaver but so much more powerful, able to pickle things in thirty seconds flat.

(cucumbers pickled in a vinegar brine for thirty seconds)

However, if you’ve seen Heston Blumenthal work with chocolate for any length of time, you’ll know he’s fond of making Aero chocolate. Back long ago during In Search of Perfection, he used a household hoover and a space-saving bag. These days, at The Fat Duck, he uses…a chamber vacuum sealer. The process is fairly simple: you melt (and optionally temper) chocolate, add a small amount of oil, and then you add bubbles, normally by pouring the chocolate into a whipper and charging it with several canisters of nitrous oxide. You then expel the chocolate into a container or molds…and then place it in the vacuum sealer. A vacuum is pulled and the chocolate is left to set.

My sealer has a limit on how long it can pull a vacuum - ninety seconds maximum. Once the air rushes back in, it’ll cause the still-liquid chocolate to explode everywhere. But, if you turn the sealer off mid-cycle, it’ll retain the vacuum. So Aero can still happen! Unfortunately, whilst I got the chocolate to initially rise about three times in volume, I didn’t leave enough time for it to set properly, so after thirty minutes, I released the vacuum and got this:

Which looks like what happens anybody tries to make a soufflé on MasterChef. Sadness. Still, next time, I’ll leave it in there for an hour or so, and hopefully then the chocolate will have enough structure to hold steady as the air rushes back into the chamber. In the meantime, next week there will be pickling and alcohol fruits aplenty!