Kitchen machining

[fivemack]

I've made (by accident, I was making yokki and it was supposed to be caramel; I will have to put a dental warning on the shortcakes) a quantity of particularly obdurate toffee. You have to cut it like glass, scratching the surface with a bread-knife and then inserting a sharp knife vertically to cleave it along the scratch; it's prone to shattering.

It strikes me as an interestingly edible industrial material, ideally suited to be cut into strange shapes, artfully assembled and enthusiastically eaten. How would you go about machining toffee? Hot wire or waterjet, I'd have thought - I can't imagine a saw or a drill that would work nicely with swarf as gungy as toffee. You planarise the top with a flat teflon-coated surface and a weight while the toffee is still liquid.

I notice that someone appears to have managed to patent the mortice-and-tenon joint when made in gingerbread.

Comments

[aldabra]

3-D printer, obv 8-) http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/10/diy-3d-printer-utilizes-hot-air-sugar-to-craft-random-objects/

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Um, dovetail, not m-and-t. Presumably to indicate that the US patent office are idiots (since this has been done by confectioners for decades, and probably centuries).

Hot wire cutting should work for toffee, but might be detrimental to the flavour of the finished product; you might also find that you tended to get sagging near the cut edges, making precise control of the shape difficult. Water-jet cutting should be possible (although you have to avoid letting any water remain near the toffee, which is hygroscopic[1]); there are some amazingly cool machines for conc-acid-spray cutting of metal parts (to avoid machining damage and accidentally induced stresses) that would probably be suitable for the job. Using water, not acid, obviously, although the fun to be had from spraying toffee with conc acid is not to be dismissed out of hand :)

As a more serious alternative, re-melting the stuff and casting it would be by far the easiest option. Since you can make kitchen moulds in arbitrary shapes fairly easily, this would also be rather cheaper than the more exciting alternatives.

[1] and indeed deliquescent, if you let it get enough of the stuff :)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Laser cut?

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

If your laser is reasonably high-power, yes; I suspect that unless your cut is effectively instantaneous, you'll get problems with burning and sagging along the cut as you would with hot-wire cuts.