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Cooking with lasers

M

mischief

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Hi everyone, long time reader first time poster.

I read a thread on this site about carving images into toast using a laser, which was interesting but it made me think are there lasers that are strong enough to cook a whole piece of bread into toast? It seems to me the right kind of laser could cook a whole piece of toast faster and more evenly than an existing toaster.

Thoughts?
 





lasersbee

lasersbee

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It would have been nice if you had introduced
yourself to the Community in the Welcome section
of the Forum.

That being said... Use a toaster or propane torch.
A laser will not get you an evenly toasted slice of
bread by hand.
You would need a CNC mounted laser to even get
close.

Jerry
 
paul1598419

paul1598419

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Yes, it seems that the wow factor of lasers has people trying to use them for purposes they just never were intended to be used for. This is a perfect example of this. Use a toaster. They work fine and a laser will only burn your bread in long lines.
 
E

Encap

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​
Lasers do work well for Signature Omlettes with persons name or whatever else anyone might like inscribed on the outside of the omlette, if that is of any help --works well on burritos , pancakes, and French toast also :crackup:

"Laser Cooking is a novel cooking technology that uses a laser cutter as a dry-heating device. In general, dry-heat cooking heats the whole surface of an ingredient, while a laser cutter heats a small spot of the surface in a very short time. Our approach employs a computer-controlled laser cutter and a video image-processing technique to cook ingredients according to their shape and composition, allowing for new tastes, textures, decorations, and engraving unique identifiers to the ingredients."
From: https://fukuchilab.org/projects/laser-cooking

mg21628965.200-1_300.jpg


Food Hacking: Laser Bacon




:can:
 
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BowtieGuy

BowtieGuy

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There's always the old standby, "can I pop popcorn with a laser", there were many videos of these attempts a few years back. :D

 
paul1598419

paul1598419

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That's just silly. Thanks for sharing it here, Jeff. He stated that the corn needed to be heated to "300 degrees F, or 100 degrees C" which is not the conversion from F to C. 100 degrees C is the temperature water boils at. This is 212 degrees F for those who didn't know that already.
 
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lasersbee

lasersbee

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I saw that MythBusters corn popping with
a Laser episode..
BTW Paul... the guy in the above video has
lousy pronounciation... I heard him say 300 F
is 150 C. ( Actually its 148.9 C ) which makes
more sense...:beer:

Jerry
 
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paul1598419

paul1598419

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You may be right, Jerry. I listened again very closely and it is hard to tell what he said. There is nothing spectacular about popping pop corn with a laser. If you understand that pop corn is a specific variety of corn and to get it to pop takes adjusting the internal water content to a specific percentage which IIRC is around 18%. But, I'm not sure about that. All one needs to do is to heat the corn kernel to a high enough temperature to cause the moisture to turn into steam and the kernel pops turning it inside out. It was done with oil for years and then air and on to microwave pop corn. So, I don't get especially excited when someone heats a kernel up with a couple of lasers as it spins to make it pop.
 
Benm

Benm

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Well, there is a thing to popcorn: to get the actual popcorn result you need to heat the corn kernel from all sides evenly. If you just blast a laser at a corn kernel onto a spot, you'll probably burn a hole on that spot long before the thing would have otherwise 'popped'.

As for the toast: Toasting entire slices of bread probably is not going to be practical using lasers. It may be possible, but would just take very long to do.

This doesn't mean there is no application though: You could toast bread to a nice light brown using a regular toaster, and then use a laser to imprint something like a logo or personal name on the surface.

If you do the QR code like pictured above the bread would not be really toasted. Pre-toasting it to an acceptable light brown helps a great deal because the darker color of the bread at that point makes it absorb light energy better so you can do it a lot quicker for a given amount of laser power.

The more powerful 405 and 445 nm diodes would be ideal for doing this.
 
Radim

Radim

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CurtisOliver said:
Not cooking but preparing.
Click to expand...

Why the hell they did not try to bake it with laser? Maybe they lack the correct optics for the cutting laser, but as you can see the video I posted above, there is beam shaped into circle, so with this they could try to bake the pizza like they made the tea. :D
 
CurtisOliver

CurtisOliver

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The more pressing question. Why didn't they align it better. They had the opportunity to have perfectly cut slices of pizza. But they missed the mark. :p
 
Radim

Radim

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True. Still seeing burned edges and frozen pizza it does not look very tasty. I'm a "pizza nazi", so... :D :crackup:
 
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