Thin sliced meats are yummy. Many gourmety type establishments slice fancy meats like prosciutto and carpaccio very very thin - for one those meats are spendy, and for two the sometimes strong flavors are balanced by the very small quantities. Every grocery deli has a meat slicer and they can cut your salami thin if you like - maybe down to 0.5 mm.

The microtome is a tool used to produce histologic slides and can cut a specimen down to a cell thickness sheet. I propose that microtome technology be used to prepare molecularly gastronomized cuisine - superthin sheets of sausage, sushi or other meats. Rather than slicing coins or lozenges off the long end, the sausage or meat, snap frozen, would be turned on its side and shaved into a continuous sheet like a log being turned into plywood. Various fanciful presentations could be make out of these long thin sheets - vanishingly thin but still yummy.
-- bungston, Aug 17 2009

Microtome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtome
I see here that the microtome can slice bone, teeth or plan matter. That probably makes them less chewy. Imagine a garnish of very thin sliced walnut. The wood, that is. [bungston, Aug 17 2009]

Mister Creosote http://en.wikipedia...iki/Mister_Creosote
Just because it's wafer thin doesn't mean it's safe .... [8th of 7, Aug 17 2009]

Microtome Beef Microtome_20Beef
somewhat tardily I see this concept had a precedent on the HB [bungston, Mar 29 2013]

if it fell off your plate, would you be able to find it?
-- po, Aug 17 2009


You might need canine assistance.
-- bungston, Aug 17 2009


Will there be a corresponding range of "Wafer thin mints" ?
-- 8th of 7, Aug 17 2009


I like the principle of this... De Selby would have approved.
-- xenzag, Aug 19 2009


//Imagine a garnish of very thin sliced walnut//
"garnish" sp. "veneer"
-- coprocephalous, Aug 19 2009


Heh.
-- blissmiss, Aug 19 2009


Food fit for emperors.
-- shudderprose, Aug 19 2009


excellent - the sort of thing Heston Blumenthal would do
-- hippo, Aug 19 2009


We suspect this idea has already been piloted by McBurgers for the bacon they put in some of their "sandwiches" ....
-- 8th of 7, Aug 19 2009


Thinking about it (though not very hard), you might want to keep the rats' brains well away from the walnuts.
-- coprocephalous, Aug 19 2009


Well, if you were going to do it properly you'd have two Microtomes, one for preparation of your biology samples and the other for your deli counter or kitchen.
-- hippo, Aug 19 2009


A microtome will go down to a few microns, so let's assume your shavings are 10µm thick. A 10cm x 10cm x 10µm shaving is going to have a volume of 100 cubic millimetres, or equivalent to a cube about 4.5mm on a side. Hmmm - might just work.

Tricky to handle, though. Microtomes cutting thin sections normally float them off into a trough of water, from whence they can be encouraged onto the surface of a microscope slide.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 29 2013


trough of water?

surely a carefully paired wine would be appropriate?
-- bs0u0155, Mar 29 2013


if Dr Lecter had one of these, fewer victims before the FBI caught up with him.
-- not_morrison_rm, Mar 30 2013



random, halfbakery