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."

Comments

Re:Sushi Fishy.

[ari_j]

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.

Moto's is always doing this crap.

[kahei]

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.

Re:Moto's is always doing this crap.

[kahei]

Well, actually, I was picturing a printer that lays down a layer of sushi rice in a given pattern, lays toppings on that, and thus 'prints' out plates of sushi to order. So you could dial up '20 maguro in a ring, then 10 amaebi and 10 engawa within that, and NO UNI' and it would lay down nigiri accordingly and output just such a pattern of sushi, with NO UNI.

Ever since I saw a stereolith machine the other day, I have been in awe of the wondrous power of printers.

cake icing

[Foobar of Borg]

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 ;-) !