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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

laser

Early Research Shows Promise for Cooking with Lasers

Ever since I first saw secretly evil superhero Homelander cut through anything and everyone with laser beam eyes, I’ve thought it’d sure be handy to have a pair of laser peepers to clean up weeds around the house or cook a quick meal.

While I (unfortunately ) won’t be able to shoot lasers from my eyes anytime soon, things are looking up in the laser cooking department thanks to a recent research project by a group of students a Columbia University. In a recent article for npj Science of Food program for Nature, the group describes the project in which they print and cook raw 3D printed chicken using lasers.

The group started by pureeing a chicken breast and then extruded the chicken paste into squares using a 3D printer. From there, they used different lasers to conduct various trials that varied parameters with three different lasers: A 5–10 W blue diode laser (445 nm) as primary heating source, and comparative tests done with an Near Infrared (NIR) laser (980 nm), NIR laser (10.6 μm).

From the explainer video:

“By tuning parameters such as circle diameter, circle density, path length, randomness, and laser speed, you can optimize the distribution of energy that hits the surface of the food, but at higher resolution than conventional heating methods.”

The group also experimented cooking in highly-precise cooking patterns (including a checkerboard pattern) to see how it compared with traditional cooking. The takeaway? Laser cooking might make better food than traditional cooking methods like broiling.

“Compared to oven broiling, we found that laser cooked foods are more moist and shrink less after heating,” concluded the group.

Interestingly, the group also found that lasers can cook food wrapped in plastic. The idea of being to cook through packaging opens up potential new avenues for offering consumers no-contact food in foodservice scenarios, something that’s no doubt of interest in these pandemic-stricken times.

While some like SavorEat are building print-and-cook systems, this is the first time I’ve seen a cooking system which uses lasers. The high-fidelity control of laser cooking is reminiscent of the solid-state cooking systems slowly making their way to market, only instead of using radio waves they shoot highly directed beams of light.

You can read the full research paper here and watch the explainer video below:

Robots that Cook: precision cooking with multiwavelength lasers

What’s Up Post-Doc? Researchers Use Carrots to Create a Fricken Laser

Carrots are no longer just the scourge of toddlers and fuel for Bugs Bunny. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IIT-M) have used the vegetable to create a laser. That’s right, pew! pew!, a laser.

This gets a little (read: a lot) above my pay grade, but the New Indian Express reports that the IIT-M researchers have used carrots cooked in alcohol as an eco-friendly lasing material. The discovery came about when Professor C Vijayan, Assistant Professor Sivarama Krishnan, and PhD researcher Venkata Siva Gummaluri were having after-work hours fun “pumping light” through a variety of organic materials.

What made carrots work well was the carotenoids, which are an optically active bio-pigment found in the vegetable. The cellulose fibers in carrots were also beneficial for optical amplification and photo scattering and other stuff that I, a non-physicist, do not fully understand, but that’s less important because it’s carrots creating lasers.

Before you think this is just a goofy discovery, the New Indian Express explains why this orange-hued breakthrough could be important:

The laser generated through this technique, has immense potential in the field of bio-imaging. Currently, the most common lasing materials, such as Indium-Gallium-Arsenic and Gallium-Nitrates, are manufactured using toxic chemical processes which are harmful to the environment.

In other words, as the researchers point out, this green (err, orange) lasing material is safe to handle and can even be eaten after a day of experiments. What’s up doc, indeed.

Modernist Cuisine’s Nathan Myhrvold on Photography, Robotics, and Pizza

If there’s one man who you can trust to take some out-of-the-ordinary food photographs — ones that both celebrate the natural phenomena of food and dissect it— it’s Nathan Myrhvold.

For those out of the know, Myhrvold is a techy, inventive powerhouse: former CTO of Microsoft, founder of intellectual property company Intellectual Ventures, and driving force behind the gastronomic, boundary-pushing Modernist Cuisine.

Oh, and photographer. Myhrvold is the one behind all the photographs in the awarded (and exhaustive) Modernist Cuisine cookbooks, which draw you in with logic-defying high def shots of fresh produce and laser-cut interiors of bread at all stages of baking. Last year he began setting up galleries to display the photography prints, which currently have locations in Las Vegas, New Orleans, and now Seattle, home of Modernist Cuisine and Intellectual Ventures (plus plans to open one in La Jolla). Yesterday I stopped by the Seattle outpost to take a tour and chat with the man behind the camera.

Modernist Cuisine

Myhrvold being Myhrvold, (most) of the photos on display aren’t simply of the point-and-shoot variety. “Those are the exception, rather than the rule,” he joked. The others come to life thanks to a few things you don’t see in most photography studios: robots and lasers.

In the Modernist Cuisine workshop they cut things like metal mixing bowls, woks, and ceramic coffee cups in two so you can see what’s really going on when you whip egg whites or pour cream into your coffee. The robots are there to create easily predictable, easily repeatable actions so that the photographer can capture, say, the splash of a drink or explosion of a champagne bottle precisely on multiple takes.

One upcoming Myhrvold project which will surely feature robots, microscopic photography techniques, and lasers a-plenty is the Modernist Pizza Book. Like the 5-volume Modernist Bread book epic which came out in 2017, the forthcoming book will also be multi-volume and will tackle the history, science, and taste of pizza.

All types of pizza. Myhrvold told me they’d spent several weeks in South America awhile back, exploring regional pie types. The local specialty: rings of pineapple with a green olive in the center. “You’d say that’s not pizza, or that’s for me,” he said. “But they love it there.” The same love-it-or-hate-it mentality applies to an American classic: Hawaiian pizza. (Fun fact: Myhrvold told me it was actually invented in Toronto.)

Modernist Cuisine

This sort of polarization seems to go double for pizza, a food that’s arguably the world’s most popular single dish. Though it has universal appeal, pizza also mutates depending on local tastes — thus how we get things like pineapple-and-olive pies. To Myhrvold, this dichotomy is what makes pizza so interesting: it’s a food that’s simultaneously universal and exceedingly particular. And it’s also one that people really like to get up in arms about. I’ve almost destroyed friendships because I’m a strong believer that the New York slice is essentially cardboard covered in cheese (sorry).

One thing that really ruffles traditionalist feathers is the idea of automating pizza-making. “You’ve got Zume over on one end, that’s robotically created pizza,” said Myhrvold. “on the other end Naples insists you need to use wood as fuel.” The inconsistent heat of wood-burning ovens makes pizza cooking a lot trickier but, when done right, creates an excellent pie.

Zume may never be able to pizza that’s quite as good as a pizzaiolo with decades of experience (at least, not yet), but they can make pretty good pizza that’s fresher, hotter, and tastes better than the frozen stuff. Costco, which Myhrvold told me is the 13th largest pizza chain the U.S., is also leveraging automation. It has saucing and crust-pressing robots to help them churn out faster pies without the need for highly-trained cooks, which translates to a cheaper pizza.

For Myhrvold, there’s room in this world for all types of pizza. And I tend to agree: there will always be demand for artisanal pies made by a master pizzaiolo. But as Myhrvold pointed out, convenience is also closely tied to pizza consumption, at least in the U.S.: first came frozen pizza, then Domino’s came in with delivery (and later chatbots and drones).  And now there are pizza vending machines, pizza portals, and even countertop pizza ovens, all vying to provide you with a piping hot slice in the easiest, quickest way possible.

“Food spans the whole range from pure fuel to high art,” he said. “There’s nothing bad about using technology to improve that.” For now, though, Myhrvold is partial to a deep-dish slice from a Chicago style pizza joint in Seattle. Hold the pineapple.