Awesome Food

Rice is one of those ubiquitous things that we just take for granted. But in this video from professional forager Samual Thayer’s Well Fed Wild, we get a look at the traditional process of harvesting and preparing wild rice for consumption. The whole rice-dancing part is what really surprised us.

(Flashing lights) This fascinating short film from Joel Penner and Anna Sigrithur uses time-lapse footage to reveal how tiny organisms spoil food, others that make it tastier through fermentation, and yet more that compost and break down dead things to fertilize the Earth for new life.

The inaugural Laguiole AOP Festival in France included a competition to see just how stretchy dairies can make their cheese. In this video from Jeune Montagne, they show off their cheesemaking skills with a gooey Aligot de l’Aubrac that reaches a truly impressive height with the help of a scissor lift.

Purveyor of weird, wild, and wonderful objects Archie McPhee expands its already bizarre collection of candy canes with three new flavors. First up is sweet, creamy butter, followed by smokey beef brisket, and a savory caesar salad, complete with a hint of anchovies. We don’t mean to yuck anyone’s yum, but we’ll pass.

Korean restaurant chain UFO Burger makes sandwiches that come sealed inside of a UFO-shaped bun. The design keeps its contents from spilling out and just plain looks cool. In addition to cheeseburgers, they make bulgogi and spicy chicken sammies. We’re hoping that they expand outside of Korea so we can eat some.

Sugar Lab’s mad scientists went batty for Halloween, using 3D printers to make edible sweets in seasonal shapes like Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Apple Covered Caramels turn the classic inside out with a caramel and apple butter filling, while Day of the Dead Glitter Skulls dissolve into edible glitter when plopped into cocktails.

What is my purpose? You flip the cheese. The JNJ RF6 robot has one job to do. It rolls down the aisle of a cheese cave, grabs wheels of cheese, brushes off their outsides, flips them over, and puts them back on their shelves. It performs this task 96 times per hour, maintaining up to 5000 wheels of cheddar per week.

When you don’t want to deal with ordering pizza delivery, cooking a frozen pizza at home is the next best option. Weird History Food explores the origins of the cheese, tomato, and flatbread combination, and the technology that made it possible to transport and store frozen pies.

After the Hydraulic Press Channel tried to turn small rocks into bigger rocks, they got the idea to try the same technique with something more edible. Under the immense pressure of their machinery, they turned large portions of breakfast cereal into dense pucks which could theoretically be used for survival.

The Everything Bagel from Everything Everywhere All at Once packs way more than just poppy seeds, garlic, and onion flakes. While Binging with Babish wasn’t able to fit all of his hopes and dreams into his oversize bagel, he did manage to combine every seasoning he could find at the grocery store.

Ninja’s countertop appliance makes ice cream, sorbets, milkshakes, and other frozen treats with the push of a button. Fill the container with yummy ingredients, freeze for 24 hours, then let the CREAMi’s paddle work its magic to create creamy desserts. Includes three pint containers and lids for making multiple flavors.

Fresh off of the toolgifs subreddit comes a video of a machine that cranks out those delicious Chinese steamed buns. Fillings for the doughy delights snake through a tube into a dollop of pastry, and then an iris mechanism twists their tops to seal them and give them their distinctive look. Just steam and eat!

We have a hard enough time making omelets that don’t break apart on us when folding them over, but this Korean chef makes it look easy to create one with a swirled design that looks like a tornado. The best part – it gets stacked atop a dome of fried rice and surrounded with a moat of tomato sauce. Get in our bellies!

WhistlePig Whiskey teamed up with Runamok Maple to create this delicious maple syrup aged in whiskey barrels. It’s got a great depth of flavor and edible sparkles to add magic to your cocktails. Mix it with PiggyBack rye and bitters for a lightly sweet Maple Old Fashioned. Sold as a gift set from the WhistlePig shop.

We’re fascinated by the variety of machines you find in factories. This particular device is fairly simple – a couple of rollers and a spinning blade. But it’s the stroboscopic optical illusion that occurs when it spins up to speed that makes it so satisfying to watch. Somebody needs to turn this into an endless loop.

Please enjoy this hilariously weird little stop-motion short of a tiny pig devouring a sandwich, accompanied by the most infectiously irritating music since Nyan Cat. Apparently, this little piggy has quite the appetite.

Taking a page out of Back to the Future II, Hawaii’s Holomua Kitchen makes and sells skinny slices of freeze-dried pepperoni pizza, packed in an airtight bag. We haven’t tasted this crispy, crunchy snack food yet, but the 5-star reviews on Etsy sound quite promising.

Macro photography usually remains at a constant distance from the object being photographed. But Macrofying pulled off this slick shot which starts out wide on a hot pan filled with popcorn and oil, then zooms in on a single kernel to see it pop in ultra slow-motion.

Adam from North of the Border turns his attention from making creepy-looking cartoon characters to making creepy-looking food. Inspired by JackJack’s killer cheeseburger sculpt, Adam’s bowl is filled with toothy fruit that looks like it was harvested from the Upside Down.

This video from National Geographic dates back to 2012, but we figured Funyuns are timeless so what the heck. The clip takes us inside one of Frito-Lay’s factories, where the crunchy fake onion rings are cranked out by the millions every day. In case you were wondering, they’re made from puffed cornmeal, much like Corn Pops.

This wonderfully satisfying machine sprays out an even layer of batter onto a spinning platter, cranking out perfectly round crepes in seconds. When each one is done, a mechanism ejects the delicious disc onto the assembly line. Here’s another similar machine working its magic.

Chocolate has been one of the world’s favorite confections for thousands of years. But it hasn’t always been the sweet treat we know and love today. Mental Floss host Justin Dodd takes us through the earliest known uses of cacao beans, and explains the process that turns it into chocolate.

No, that’s not a typo. Pastry artist Amaury Guichon created these realistic-looking headphones using a beet sponge cake layered with fresh raspberry mousse, a raspberry and yuzu compote, a red sable, and a raspberry cremeux. They don’t sound as good as Beats headphones, but these taste much better.