When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet:
HOMARO CANTU’S maki look a lot like the sushi rolls served at other upscale restaurants: pristine, coin-size disks stuffed with lumps of fresh crab and rice and wrapped in shiny nori. They also taste like sushi, deliciously fishy and seaweedy.
But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings…
… Mr. Cantu is experimenting with liquid nitrogen, helium and superconductors to make foods levitate. And while many chefs speak of buying new ovens or refrigerators, he wants to invest in a three-dimensional printer to make physical prototypes of his inventions, which he now painstakingly builds by hand. The 3-D printer could function as a cooking device, creating silicone molds for pill-sized dishes flavored, say, like watermelon, bacon and eggs or even beef Bourguignon, he said, and he could also make edible molds out of cornstarch…
Edible molds, yumm.
A glass of fine, dry, 1999 Tang would be the perfect accompaniment, followed by a palate-cleansing dish of freeze-dried Astronaut ice cream
[Link thanks to Chiasm]
May 12, 2005 at 5:47 pm
“Mr. Cantu is experimenting with liquid nitrogen, helium and superconductors to make foods levitate.”
Now there’s something you don’t read every day. What a total wackjob. I may just have to link to this.