by
Paul Marks
YOUR toast pops up with a strange pattern burned into
it. Pointing your phone's camera at the pattern pulls up a website
showing the day's traffic news for your commute. Later, as you're
wondering how to make a spring roll, you notice the instructions are
etched into the rice paper itself.
These are just a couple of the
applications of "laser cookery" envisaged by Kentaro Fukuchi and
colleagues at Meiji University in Japan. They reckon laser cutters have
done their time in industry and, like 3D printers before them, it's now
time for them to come into our homes - as a new breed of laser-enabled
kitchen appliances.
At a cookery technology workshop
in Nara, Japan, in November, the researchers showed how a benchtop
industrial laser cutter - normally used to cut or engrave patterns in
plastic, wood and metal - could generate a variety of fascinating
foodstuffs when hooked up to a computer running graphics software and a
webcam.
One delicacy they have developed is
the charmingly named "melt-fat raw bacon", an allegedly tasty sliver of
uncooked bacon on which the fat is cooked by the laser, using a webcam
trained on the bacon to guide the beam. "The well-cooked fat and the
fresh taste of the meat can then be experienced at the same time," says
Fukuchi. Don't all rush at once.
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