Y’know, Domino’s Pizza is getting a lot of mileage out of the news that they redesigned their pizzas because so many people said they suck (even though this Salon article this morning says that the new sauce is “sweet as candy”). But maybe they didn’t go far enough. A guy named Matt Brown, who has been devising all sorts of ideas as part of a project he calls “Food And The Future Of It”, came up with a method of assembling a pizza crust that he calls “self-slicing pizza”
Instead of a crust made out of a single sheet of dough, his crust is made out of a series of overlapping “shingles” that can be torn off into whatever size serving the eater prefers. It’s a brilliant idea and I think it would be a smart way for pizza places to market large pies for groups.
The Economist’s offshoot magazine “Intelligent Life” features this online article wherein the writer and some friends attempted to choose the “Best Cheese In The World”. Hopeless task, to be sure, but in the undertaking they came to the conclusion that the U.K. is in the midst of a “Golden Age” of cheese, with dozens of excellent hand-crafted cheeses now being made in Britain. The article is full of recommendations, only one or two of which are non-British. If, like me, you enjoy having a cheese sampling evening once in a while, it’s probably worth seeing if you can hunt down any of the recommendations from your local cheesemonger.
Buncha geeks at MIT have put together this device that uses the concept behind 3D printing to make “printable food”. It’s sort of a prototypical version of the “food replicators” from Star Trek, which could seemingly create anything out of nothing just by the issuing of a command (“Tea, Earl Grey, hot!”). This Salon article from a couple of weeks ago is a little breathless about the idea of food printers replacing traditional food preparation, but it’s likely that it probably will find its way into the kitchens of “molecular gastronomy” maestros in one form or another. They already use food-grade printers to produce edible paper items at places like Alinea, so this would be the net logical step. Just don’t expect to be ordering your hot Earl Grey tea any time soon.
