Boing Boing » not food

Durian McFlurry at McDonald's Singapore

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:19:55 +0000

McDonald's Singapore is selling a "Durian Crunch McFlurry" that combines soft-serve ice-cream with everyone's favorite stinkily delicious T-Rex-testicle-looking fruit. It sells for S$2.80 or about USD2.23. Singapore sports many spectacular shave-ice dessert places that combine durian with things like kidney beans, sweet corn and candied fruit (serving durian cold suppresses some of the eye-watering perfume), and I'd have one of those over anything McHorrible's produces any day.

Our newest McFlurry from McDonald's (via Super Punch)

Synthesizer cake

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:38:47 +0000

Here's a spectacular Monotribe synthesizer cake, apparently last year's birthday cake for Moonbuz.

Happy Birthday with Monotribe Cake (via Crazy Abalone)

Quebec's new pizza-and-spaghetti-flavored slushy drink is "love in a cup," apparently

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 03:15:21 +0000

Quebecois convenience store chain Couche-Tard has rolled out a new drink: the Pizzaghetti Sloche, a shave-ice drink that comes in both pizza and spaghetti flavors, which can be combined to customer specifications to make Pizzaghetti flavor. Couche-Tard's slogan for the drink is "love in a cup." Redditor plagues138 posted a photo of the actual Pizzaghetti Sloche machine in situ.

Sloche - Pizzaghetti (via Neatorama)

Ross Sisters sing Solid Potato Salad

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:00:31 +0000

Here again is a clip of the amazing Ross Sisters performing a wonderful song about potato salad while performing the most amazing contortions and acrobatics -- like Cirque du Soliel crossed with Hee-Haw performed by the Andrews Sisters. It's from 1944's Broadway Rhythm. Xeni did this one back in 2010, but it warrants a re-watch.

The Ross Sisters - Solid Potato Salad (DVD Quality) Full Video

Han Solo in Carbonite Pop-Tarts

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:14:21 +0000

Last October, IGN's Brian Altano announced a bold design fiction: an imaginary line of "Han Solo in Carbonite" Pop-Tarts. Several months have gone by and this is still not a thing. The world is broken.

Would You Eat These Star Wars Pop-Tarts? (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

HOWTO make edible Aliens eggs and chestbursters

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 01:03:02 +0000

Here's a sweet little cookery show that will tell you how to make a facsimile egg from Aliens and a chestburster cake. The former is something you could actually serve at a dinner party (it sounds delicious!), but the cake requires a volunteer willing to lie on her/his back.

Edible Alien Eggs | BITE CLUB - Alien (1979) (Thanks, Jay!)

Drone-delivered pizza

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:00:36 +0000

Here's a video showing off a publicity stunt in which Domino's delivers one of its "pizzas" using a drone (and, it appears, two or three cameradrones to document the event). The "pizza" is packed in an electrified, heated bag to keep it warm during the high altitude flight. Their publicity material promises a Domino's flight academy to train their deliverator corps to safely navigate the fast-food-filled skies and prevent midair collisions with flying Chinese takeouts, kebabs, curries, and package liquor delivery.

Introducing the Domino's DomiCopter! (via Digg Videos)

Depressed Cake Shop: a pop-up shop selling grey cakes to raise money for mental health charities

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:00:27 +0000

Miss Cakehead writes, "The Depressed Cake Shop will be like nothing ever seen before as it will sell ONLY grey coloured cakes. Raising money for mental health charities, it will also provide a platform for discussion of the illness. The pop up is based in the UK but with other events starting to be planned around the globe."

The Depressed Cake Shop

Ronald McJoker

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 03:22:37 +0000

This terrifying Ronald McDonald/Joker mashup cosplayer was snapped at San Jose's FanimeCon 2013 by David Ngo.

Ronald McDonald (via Neatorama)

Mouldering city built of bread is a metaphor for Earth without humans

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 01:15:52 +0000

Swedish artist Johanna Mårtensson created this installation depicting a cityscape made of bread in 2009, and photographed it as it decayed, creating a series of pictures representing the destiny of all human folly come the day that we make ourselves extinct and vanish from the face of the Earth:

I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. After hand buildings as well as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms. An ufo that came here in a couple of of hundred thousand years would not see many signs of that a gang of primates ones thought that they where the lords of the planet.

Decor Photoinstallation by Johanna Mårtensson (via Crazy Abalone)

Life in a chocolate factory versus life in a startup

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 31 May 2013 13:49:19 +0000

Elaine Wherry took a break from working in San Francisco high-tech startups to work at Dandelion Chocolate, the chocolate maker/cafe that her husband co-founded. She calls her tenure at the chocolate factory her life as "an oompa loompa," and in a fascinating post, she writes about the differences and similarities between working in data-driven startups and in physical, retail-based hard-goods business. It's a wonderful study in contrasts.

For loops are a veritable miracle — At the chocolate factory, something breaks every single flippin’ day. Each morning I gave my evil eye to the roasters, melangers, temperers, wrapping machine, dishwasher, or anything with a screw, fuse, gear, glue, belt, or oil level and asked, “Okay, which one of you little buggers is going today?”
In comparison, code brings tears to my eyes. If that for loop worked yesterday, then barring catastrophic hardware failures or someone checking in code they shouldn’t, it’ll likely work today. That type of, “if you don’t touch it, it’ll keep working” certainty seems divine. I’ve always loved the Web but I have renewed appreciation for redundancy, unit testing, and monitoring now.

what i learned as an oompa loompa (via O'Reilly Radar)

Small batch artisanal high-fructose corn syrup

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 30 May 2013 23:19:36 +0000

Matt sez, "Maya Weinstein is an artist who just finished her MFA at Parsons, with the awesomest thesis ever: a DIY kit for making your own High-Fructose Corn Syrup, the industrial sweetener that is, well, let's say problematic these days.

"Amazingly, HFCS is not available for consumers to buy, and as Weinstein discovered, making it yourself requires some pretty unusual (and expensive) components, like Glucose Isomerase. But it's a totally fascinating process, and only the first in what Weinstein hopes will be a series of 'citizen food science' kits."

DIY High-Fructose Corn Syrup by Artist Maya Weinstein

Hemispherical Earth cake with crust, mantle and core

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 May 2013 18:27:03 +0000

This brilliant hemispherical cake depicting the Earth's surface and approximating its core was baked by Rhiannon of Baking Adventures in Melbourne, Australia. She baked a cake inside a cake, formed a crust of chocolate buttercream, and then applied the seas, continents and islands with marshmallow fondant.

When I started this cake I was determined for pin-point accuracy. I was going to make every country and every island so damn accurate a pilot could use it as their navigation system. But by the time I got to Europe, it was more like, "Yeah, that's the general shape." By the time I got to the Americas I was wondering if that continent was even necessary. I missed a whole heap of islands above Australia and settled instead for the main ones. Cutting out the countries wasn't that cake walk I'd imagined it to be.
I finally got to a finished look for the cake and let my sister take it off my hands. She brought me back a slice so I could share a picture of the inside with you all. The red layer is orange Madeira sponge, the yellow is lemon Madeira sponge and the white cake was a vanilla buttercake.

Commission: Earth Structural Layer Cake (via Geekologie)

How a Mexican drug-lord dines out

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:04:40 +0000

When Joaquín Guzmán Loera, leader of Mexico's notorious Sinaloa Cartel, wants to dine out, he engages some rather extreme security measures:

In 2005 on a Saturday evening, Guzmán reportedly strolled into a restaurant in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, with several of his bodyguards. After he took his seat, his henchmen locked the doors of the restaurant, collected the cell phones of approximately 30 diners and instructed them to not be alarmed.[26] The gangsters then ate their meal and left – paying for everyone else in the restaurant.[27]
Culiacán appearance
Later that year, Guzmán was reportedly seen in Culiacán, Sinaloa, repeating the same exploit at a restaurant.[28] According to a witness, in November 2005 Guzmán entered the restaurant in Culiacán with 15 of his bodyguards, all of them carrying AK-47s.[29] The restaurant was known as "Las Palmas", a lime-green eatery with an ersatz tile roof on a busy street.[30] A man in the restaurant told those present the following:
"Gentlemen, please. Give me a moment of your time. A man is going to come in, the boss. We will ask you to remain in your seats; the doors will be closed and nobody is allowed to leave. You will also not be allowed to use your cellulars. Do not worry; if you do everything that is asked of you, nothing will happen. Continue eating and don't ask for your check. The boss will pay. Thank you."[29]

Joaquín Guzmán Loera (via Reddit)

Sugar skull and bones

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 14:40:06 +0000

From November 2011, a set of photos documenting the creation of a sugar skull-and-bones set that can be served with macabre beverages, designed by Snow Violent and made by DR.HC.

Skull Sugar — from sketch to prototype. Part 1 (via Crazy Abalone)

Immigration woes for Amy's Bakery co-owner

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:16:30 +0000

More on Amy's Bakery, the restauranteurs who staged a world-beating social-media meltdown: Sami "Mr Amy" Bouzaglo faces deportation -- tl;dr: he's an Israeli citizen who's been banned from Germany and France for drug offenses and faces an immigration hearing in the USA. (Thanks, Matthew!)

Extreme Bloody Mary, Wisconsin style

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:56:50 +0000

Take a look at this impressive, heavily loaded Bloody Mary, served at O'Davey's Irish Pub & Restaurant in Fond du Lac. (Also known as Davey's.)
This ultimate hangover cure is topped with an extensive beer chaser consisting of pop corn, bacon, peanuts, beans, sausage, pretzel, sliders, a pickle and (this is Wisconsin after all) a cracker and cheese curd. Plus a Brewers flag.

Wildest Bloody Mary you've ever seen creating buzz for Wisconsin [Gitte Laasby/Journal Sentinel]

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Promotional DVDs smell like pizza when played

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:08:13 +0000

A Brazilian ad agency has built a campaign for Domino's "Pizza" that uses a heat-sensitive coating on rented DVDs; when the disc is played, the heat from the player heats up the coating and causes it to emit a pizza-like odor; the coating also changes appearance and becomes a picture of a pizza with an ad for Domino's.

In partnership with 10 video rental stores in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the brand used rented DVDs as media. About 10 discs each of 10 different new release titles such as Argo, 007, Dread And Dark Knight were stamped with thermal ink and flavored varnish, both sensitive to the heat.
While people were watching the movie, the heat of the DVD player affected the disc. When the movie ended and they ejected the disc, they smelled pizza. They also saw pizza: the discs were printed to look like mini pies, and carried the message: "Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino's Pizza."

A DVD That Smells Like Domino's Pizza

Ice cream ad: "if you want nutrition, eat a carrot"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:58:43 +0000

Wisconsin's Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream has some refreshingly honest ad-copy on the side of its vans. The photo was snapped by a Consumerist reader named David, and shows a van whose advert disclaims any nutritional merit, proudly proclaiming "gobs of rich Wisconsin cream" as well as lots of "real ingredients" (whatever those are). My own experience has been that eating food high in grass-fed animal fat is good for me, so that sounds about right to me -- though carrots are good, too!

Ice Cream Company Knows What You’re Here For: You Want Nutrition? Eat Carrots

3D latte foam art

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:43:52 +0000

Brian Ashcraft updates us on the astounding foam-art of Osaka barista Kazuki Yamamoto. Yamamoto has now mastered 3D foam, and is blowing my mind. Ashcraft has a series of posts documenting the journey of Yamamoto to undisputed novelty foam king of the Pacific Rim.

3D Coffee Art Reaches New, Dizzying Heights [Brian Ashcraft/Kotaku] (via Geekologie)

Open source hardware 3D printer for pizza-on-demand

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:00:56 +0000

A mechanical engineer (awesomely) named Anjan Contractor has won a NASA grant to prototype a 3D printer for food -- specifically pizza. It will lay down layers of food and flavor powder and melt them together; the powders are room-temperature stable for long periods and can be made from relatively abundant, sustainable foodstocks like insects and soylent green. He prototyped the concept with the 3D chocolate printer in the video above, and he holds out hope that food-printing could solve world hunger by allowing billions to feast on low-wastage, low-energy-input, low-carbon-footprint foods that are printed to order.

Contractor's printer is RepRap based, and is open source hardware; he promises to keep the plans open and free.

I suspect that there's a lot of nutritional subtleties lost when you turn food into processed elements that are recombined (in the same way that beta-carotene in carrots is reliably shown to have health benefits, while beta-carotene supplements are far more questionable). But as a form of food processing, it certainly is exciting!

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.
Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food (Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

Nutella's lawyers shut down World Nutella Day: STOP LIKING US SO MUCH!

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 03:00:56 +0000

Lawyers for Ferrero, SpA (makers of the Nutella spread) have sent a legal threat to Sara Rosso, who founded and maintains the World Nutella Day site, where they promote Nutella through recipes, tweets, stories, and (obviously) an annual day devoted to the sugary gloop. Rosso has capitulated and will no longer promote their products for them.

Seven years after the first World Nutella Day in 2007, I never thought the idea of dedicating a day to come together for the love of a certain hazelnut spread would be embraced by so many people! I’ve seen the event grow from a few hundred food bloggers posting recipes to thousands of people Tweeting about it, pinning recipes on Pinterest, and posting their own contributions on Facebook! There have been songs sung about it, short films created for it, poems written for it, recipes tested for it, and photos taken for it.
The cease-and-desist letter was a bit of a surprise and a disappointment, as over the years I’ve had contact and positive experiences with several employees of Ferrero, SpA., and with their public relations and brand strategy consultants, and I’ve always tried to collaborate and work together in the spirit and goodwill of a fan-run celebration of a spread I (to this day) still eat.

A Goodbye to World Nutella Day? (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Pancake arthopods

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:58:39 +0000

Pancakeist Nathan Shields polled his pals for their favorite athropods and then recreated them in pancake form. Crunchy!

Favorite Arthropods 1 (via Neatorama)

Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:20:58 +0000

http://vimeo.com/64607150

Here's a clip from an upcoming documentary by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating.

Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school, he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the City's school food service program.

Yuck: A 4th Grader's Short Documentary About School Lunch (via Reddit)

Abusive restaurateurs stage spectacular social media meltdown

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:14:45 +0000

Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro is Scottsdale, AZ gained some small notoriety when it became the first restaurant that Gordon Ramsey gave up on in his show Kitchen Nightmares, in which the restaurateur helps failing businesses reform their ways. The Ramsey segments show the owners of the restaurant, Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, screaming obscenities at customers, taking servers' tips, and generally behaving very badly.

But that was just for warmup. After the episodes aired and showed up on YouTube, the Bouzaglos took to Facebook to condemn their critics on Reddit and Yelp with a mix of profanity, Bible-thumping, spurious legal threats, and, finally, a claim that it wasn't them at all, all the crazypants stuff had been the work of hackers who took over their Facebook account.

In a world with innumerable social media hissyfits and bun-fights, the Bouzaglos' meltdown stands out as a world-beater. Truly, this is an exceptional episode of bad behavior.

This is the Facebook page for Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.

First vatburger is ready to eat

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:00:25 +0000

After spending $250,000 worth of anonymously donated money, Mark Post from Maastricht University is ready to go public with his first vat-grown hamburger, which will be cooked and eaten at an event in London this week. Though they claim that it's healthier than regular meat, one question not answered in the article is the Omega 3/6 balance -- crappy, corn-fed, factory-farmed meet is full of Omega 6s and avoided by many eaters; the grass-fed, free-range stuff is higher in Omega 3s.

Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper.
But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”
There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak.

Engineering the $325,000 Burger [Henry Fountain/New York Times]

(via /.)

Cake-topped parfait

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:23:46 +0000

A chain of Osaka cafes sells a crazy parfait, topped with a ginormous piece of cake:

On a recent day out in Osaka, our reporter stopped by a café and ordered a truly hard-core parfait. It wasn’t that the parfait was so big, and no, it didn’t contain any shocking ingredients. What blew our minds about this parfait was its topping.
It was a slice of cake, and it was so big it wasn’t even trying to fit into the glass. Our reporter had this sweet-tasting tag-team at the Semba branch of Osaka-based café MIOR.

Who Needs a Cherry on Top? Osaka Café Crowns its Parfaits with Cake [Casey Baseel/RocketNews24]

(via Super Punch)

What happens when you forget pizzas in the oven for weeks

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 May 2013 21:44:42 +0000

A friend of redditor BigBoppinBill forgot some pizzas in the oven for "a few weeks." The result? A kind of glorious fungal jellyfish.

This calls to mind the timeless wisdom of the Jazz Butcher's classic, loony, over-the-top song, Caroline Wheeler's Birthday Present: "Do you know what happens when you leave a fish in an elevator?/You don't?/Well, here's a clue/Fish is biodegradable/THAT MEANS IT ROTS."

A friend of mine left two pizzas in his oven for a few weeks... (i.imgur.com) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Make bread by mixing ice cream with flour and baking

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 May 2013 17:49:30 +0000

It appears that you can make delicious (and fantastically high-carb) bread by mixing melted ice-cream with self-rising flour and baking it. I'm willing to believe that this is totally yummy but I'm not going to try it:

1 Preheat oven to 350 F
2 Let ice cream soften at room temperature for 10-15 minutes.
< 3 In the bowl of your mixer combine ice cream with flour until the flour is incorporated.
4 Evenly distribute sprinkles in the bottom of a greased Bundt pan and scoop batter evenly on top.
5 Bake for 35 minutes until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
6 Invert and allow to cool completely.

Cake Batter Ice Cream Bread (via Neatorama)

How Tabasco Sauce is made

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 May 2013 02:47:12 +0000

I am a committed Tabasco Sauce fiend. It is neither too hot, nor too mild, nor too vinegary -- I put it on pretty much everything. I'd use it for contact lens solution if I could. My life was radically transformed by my discovery of tiny, individual Tabasco sachets that aviation security X-rays don't identify as liquids, which means I can carry Tabasco with me at all times without worrying about getting stopped at airports for not having a stupid baggie with my liquids in it.

I found this video describing the production of Tabasco absolutely riveting. The fermentation process, the salted barrels, and let us not forget le petit baton rouge.

How Its Made - Hot Sauce (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)