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It is not quite the stuff of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the fare coming out of Homaru Cantu's kitchen is just as bizarre. In Roald Dahl's famous children's book, chewing gum is made to taste like a three-course meal. Cantu, a cordon-bleu chef, has modified an ink-jet printer to create dishes made of edible paper that can taste like anything from birthday cake to sushi.
"You can make an ink-jet printer do just about anything," says Cantu, who is head chef at the Moto restaurant in Chicago, US, and a keen advocate of the high-tech kitchen. The printer's cartridges are loaded with fruit and vegetable concoctions instead of ink, and the paper tray contains edible sheets of soybean and potato starch. Cantu then prints out tasty versions of images he has downloaded from the web.
When the artwork rolls out, he dips it in a powder made of soy sauce, sugar, vegetables or dehydrated sour cream, and then fries, freezes or bakes the sheets. The chef has also taken to printing his menus this way: diners can spice up their soup by ripping up the menu and tossing in the pieces.
Laser beam baking
Until he has filed some patents, Cantu is not saying how he modified the print heads to write in vegetable juice, nor is he divulging the recipes for his colourful inks. All he will reveal is that carrots, tomatoes and purple potatoes are involved in his concoctions.
And Cantu's ideas go much further. He plans to cook steak by using a hand-held laser to sear the centre until it is well done while leaving the outside medium rare, or raw. He even envisages using the laser to bake bread - with a crust inside the loaf.
Cantu hopes one day to take his ideas out of the restaurant business and into the media. "Just imagine going through a magazine and looking at an ad for pizza. You wonder what it tastes like, so you rip a page out and eat it," he says.
"He challenges every preconceived idea we have about food," says David Mazovick of the design consultancy Deep Labs in Chicago, which is helping the chef commercialise his ideas.
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2005-02-13, 10:42 AM
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