Bye Bye Iron Chef, Hello Paper Chef

Imagine the possibilities: Hit "print" and you've got sushi! Soon we'll be ordering lunch online... and printing out a five course meal right at our desks. If you don't love it I'll eat my menu... hey this tastes great. Edible Christmas wrap for the kids.

Papercraft food printed with edible inks at Chicago's Moto restaurant

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 11, 2006 7:58 AM | permalink

Homaro Cantu, the chef at Chicago's Moto restaurant, makes dishes by printing flavored inks onto edible sheets of "paper" and combining this papercraft food with elements cooked from the inside out with lasers. He also plans to levitate meals "using superconductors and handheld ion particle guns."

Perhaps Cantu's greatest innovation at Moto is a modified Canon i560 inkjet printer (which he calls the "food replicator" in homage to Star Trek) that prints flavoured images onto edible paper. The print cartridges are filled with food-based "inks", including juiced carrots, tomatoes and purple potatoes, and the paper tray contains sheets of soybean and potato starch. The printouts are flavoured by dipping them in a powder of dehydrated soy sauce, squash, sugar, vegetables or sour cream, and then they are frozen, baked or fried.

The most common printed dish at Moto is the menu. It can literally whet your appetite by providing a taste test of what's on the menu: tear off and eat a picture of a cow and it will taste like filet mignon. Once you are done with your sampling, the menu can be torn up and thrown into a bowl of soup - but only once you've ordered your two-dimensional sushi which consists of photos of maki rolls sprinkled on the back with soy and seaweed flavouring.

Link (via Oh Gizmo) (Image thumbnail taken from a larger picture on FirstScience, credited to Stephen Orlick and Homaro Cantu)

See also: When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet (NYT)

Update: Joel sez, "Here is a photo-essay of a 17-course menu at Moto, from LTHForum, The Chicago Culinary Chat site."