how do you make your foam? can you link me to the kit and chemicals?
It depends on the dish in question, but for this dessert I'll be simmering milk, cream, gelatine and vanilla until the flavour is infused, then stirring in softened gelatine until dissolved. I then use a handheld blender to whip the warm liquid into a foam, much like a cappuccino froth - although probably more like a microfoam for a flat white, etc.
As long as you don't boil milk it's very easy to make a frothy foam, but as I want a thicker foam for this dessert the mixture needs 'extra' stabilising to enable it to 'take' more air - and that's where the gelatine comes in.
But going back to basics with foams, which is somewhat of an oxymoron, I'm of the opinion there are two main types; a foam/froth and an espuma/air - with two very different ways of making them.
The first type is a light, airy, frothy foam, very similar to the aforementioned foamed milk, typically made with a handheld immersion blender and spooned over a dish. It probably won't be able to take much weight, if any at all, and would generally be one of the last things on the plate.
The second is a much denser, richer, stiffer mousse type of a foam, and generally this is made using a cream whipper and nitrous oxide cartridges and discharged from said whipper before adding to a dish. As it is thicker and denser it can take much more weight, so it can be used as as base ingredient when plating up, should that be required.
However, both types need some form of stabiliser* to enable them to 'take' and 'hold' the air within the foam, and these can range from almost any fatty dairy produce (milk, cream, butter, etc) to egg whites, gelatine, agar agar, soya lecithin and various other starches, proteins, etc.
My advise to you would be to experiment with using dairy and a handheld immersion blender to make your foams, then branch out into the more 'complicated' stabilisers and start to look at both hot and cold foams, then perhaps look at the expensive kit for making airs, if that's what you want to do.
And for your purposes, I'd keep it simple and experiment with a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio of milk to 'base' liquid (which must be relatively thick/dense) and then frothing that up. Obviously some base liquids will work better with milk than others, and some might even already contain dairy, but they key is to make sure you don't boil the milk before frothing.
*technically a surfactant, but I prefer to use the other word.
Also got some friends bringing round pork belly and buns 
Now how do you make your foam? can you link me to the kit and chemicals? thanks. 
