Slashdot Mirror
Sushi Prepared on a Printer
Ant writes " The New York Times talks about Homaro Cantu's maki, it looks 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. Then, Homaro flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings."
How can the guy call it sushi when it has no sushi-rice?
It's made from soybeans.
It's like saying a tofu steak is a prime cut of filet mignon because you colored it and added some flavoring.
Contrast with Surstromming, which is fish allowed to ferment in the can to preserve itself. Thank you, Sweden, for one-upping Norway. Lutefisk wasn't disgusting enough.
But is it a naked printer?
Look, it's not sushi, if you RTFA you'll see it's a novelty item printed with sushi designs on the outside -- it's not supposed to even look like sushi.
That apart, the point about Moto's is that it doesn't serve actual food, it serves insanely tiny and bizarre objets d'art in Kubrik-esque surroundings. You don't go there to eat, you go there to witness the most ridiculous restaurant ever, and boy do they deliver! Single strand of spaghetti? You can get that. Silver teaspoon containing tiny dab of meat-flavored ice cream? You can get that (but can't keep the teaspoon). Giant pile of pretention, drenched with arrogance, topped with a fundamental inability to understand cookery and garnished with a four-digit bill? They have that, too -- actually, it's compulsory.
It's still part of what makes Chicago great, though.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
>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.
Is he trying to create the mythic Replicator from Star Trek?
-johnmeier
Don't forget hakarl, shark meat that's been buried in the sand for six months...
Because the fish are caught in the spring.
The origins of this stuff is the Northern baltic coastal regions. Not exactly an area where a lot grows, or grows well. There were people in northern Sweden literally starving to death as late as 1919. So you can hardly blame them for eating whatever they could. (Bread made out of tree-bark was common too. It fills you up, but has no nutritional value, since humans can't digest it.)
So you can't blame the people for eating disgusting stuff. But why you would continue to do so out of tradition, in a modern, industrialized, first-world country is still beyond me.
On Tuesday night, a dozen friends and I spent 7 1/2 hours in Moto's function room enjoying 22 courses, including one involving a meat that one of our group brought to Cantu and asked if there were any preparations he'd enjoy making. What's important here is that, while the gimmicks are flashy (and he admits up front that it's an evening of flashy gimmicks), the food itself is of a level competitive with most in Chicago.
A variety of reviews, including pictures, have been posted on the foodie site we hang out on, which, to avoid the Slashdot effect, I leave as an exercise for you readers.
That review does not sum it up. The reviewer obviously didn't like it and based on his comments, I would not consider him to be a reliable resource in the world of high-end dining. High-end dining is not about portions, its about flavors and experiences. I've been to MOTO and it was incredible. My wife and I had the ten-course meal with the wine progression. It was perfect. The wine selection complimented the courses exquisitely. The presentation was flawless. The service was impeccable. It was one of the greatest and most unique experiences of our lives.
I highly recommend that people try MOTO with one piece of advice: Leave your expectations at the door.
http://www.motorestaurant.com/
Actually, the technology has existed for a few years now to do this with icing on cakes. I was able to put the stanza of a poem on my groom's cake by giving them a pdf file of the poem stanza text and a graphic. They then printed the icing out onto the cake. It was quite neat and did a very good job, though naturally you still neat artistic skill for any of the frilly edges and 3D creations. ;-) !
And, before anyone asks, the poem had nothing to do with Nantucket
Similar to the upcoming US election results
for astronaut food. I am not saying taking a printer into space with flavor ink cartridges, mind you, but that the printed papers be shipped with them...
Though I suppose they could try both, but if the printer malfunctions, they'd starve if they relied on this exclusively.
But this allows for more efficient storage. With a bit more tweaking with the proper research, with proper packaging which can also reduce the amount of exposed surface, this could be a really great way to provide nutrients for space travel, etc.