Play with your food: Rework your toast

Or maybe not. Whatever history will say about it, we have seen a lot of rapid toaster evolution lately. Concept cars have been around since the beginning, but it's perhaps only in the last year that concept toasters have been getting some attention. (Here are three interesting ones.)

A popular shtick for toaster design has been to have the toaster impress some image or message upon the toast. An example, and one of the interesting early toasters of the modern toast renaissance, is a weather toaster (circa 2001) that indicates the day's weather forecast with a sun or cloud symbol on the toast. Just in case you don't want to provide your toaster with an internet connection, there are other types like those made by Pop Art Toasters with manually interchangeable image plates. Pop Art also produces this brilliant toaster set that includes food coloring pens (!) so that you can color in the drawings on your toast. (You could save the pens to customize your hearts as well.)

At the low end of the spectrum of toast-imaging display technology are such gems as the Sanyo Hello Kitty Toaster or the (remarkably similar) Skull and crossbones model. If those aren't scary enough, you might look at this one, too.

To really be interesting as a display technology, a toaster should be able to produce an infinite variety of graphics, ideally with high resolution. The Zuse is a high-end 12 x 12 dot matrix toast printer which looks wonderfully precise, but is not programmable. One can achieve truly impressive resolution with a laser engraver, but the problem is that it does not so much toast as simply disintegrate the parts where the laser hits, leaving it ambiguous as to whether selective toasting has really occurred. (And before anyone asks, yes, using Sharpies is just plain cheating.)

The most impressive toast art that we have seen is indeed still fully analog, and it may be some time before digital toast imaging technology truly fulfills its promise. On the bright side, it's quite straightforward to do your own analog toasting, either with cookie cutters and masks (like the previous examples), with an electric hot air gun as we use, or even a fine-point butane or propane torch-- if you promise not to burn down the house.

This machine is also complete overkill, with regulated and adjustable temperature and adjustable airflow-- we really got it for a different purpose. A much more economical choice for toasting might be an embossing heat gun, typically $15-20.

Technorati tags: electronics, soldering, rework, toast, cooking, english muffins, play with your food, art, howto, diy, analog