"Hey John, so I'm loving the new laser cutter, but I was wondering if we could order some peripherals" "Yeah sure Billy, what do you need?" "A crumb tray"
Exactly what I just commented. Max out the speed and power, make multiple passes. You could even raise the bed between passes (until things get too close together).
Check the results if you take an actual slice of bread lay it flat and hit it with the laser in a Criss-Cross Matrix as fast as you can on both sides and see what the results are without cutting through of course
To understand more about this, you should look up the Maillard reaction, which is the process by which carbohydrates become "toasted". It only happens when the food is held within a relatively narrow band of temperature around 350 F. The temperature required to ignite or vaporize bread is much higher, and applied much faster by a laser.
You have reminded me of an ancient post I once read where a mad scientist made a pressure vessel to cook a full potato to golden brown.. ah, "maillard pipe potatoes" if you wanna search for it. Anyway, turns out that also tastes acrid in large amounts.
@@paradiselost9946A reliable weird way to cook potatoes I've found is to steam them for mashing. The longer you cook potatoes, the sweeter and creamier they get, but when boiling this causes them to disintigrate in the water. With steaming you just collect the drippings coming off them anyway and can slowly cook them for as long as you like before mashing, at which point you also have rich potato water to reincorporate or use as a thickening agent.
@@paradiselost9946Yeah that works too. In the case where you use the water for something else though steaming lets you add more cream relative to the water content if that's your kind of thing.
@@paradiselost9946Applicable to crispy potatoes, if you par-boil in water with a little vinegar it helps keep the pectin from denaturing because of the lower pH, so when you crisp up your fries after they retain a chewy center. This is (one step at least) of what McDonald's does to their fries.
Hi, as someone who uses a CO2 laser to make money, I have a few suggestions: 1. Use a much longer focal length lens, this is probably a standard 2in but they make 4in focal length lenses 2. Use higher power and faster speeds 3. Use multiple passes, moving the bread closer each time. This is called "Z step per pass" in Lightburn 4. Upgrade your air assist with a real compressor like a 6gal pancake compressor, and upgrade the exhaust 5. Don't use the honeycomb bed, use blades instead and definitely don't put paper towels under the bread, just clean the blades
What an odd way to say you do it professionally a 4inch focal length is still only good for ~15mm of cut and will definitely crash once you've stepped up the z a few times, the best thing is to cut it with a knife and use an etching programme on the slice
You didn't achieve toast. You achieved burnt bread, which isn't the same thing as Toast. Toasting occurs as a Maillard reaction around 300 to 500 degrees. Burning occurs at much higher temperatures or cooking the bread at longer times.
I'd imagine the moisture content really reduces the cutting power, the energy being used to evaporate the water. Btw. Overly burned toast can be carcinogenic!
If you had more power with a faster feed rate maybe. Were you looking for a reason to increase your laser’s output power by an order of magnitude? Perfect justification!
I've had an opportunity to try stuff like this, I found with burnable materials like wood, bread and cookies, that the smoke in a deep cut channel is your biggest obstacle as it obscures the laser. The material cuts fine and you can even turn down the power to less than charcoal, but you have to let the smoke clear so multiple passes is your best bet to getting your full depth. Lasers work pretty well with food. You should try bacon next time.
You might re-visit this one and have the laser pass over the cut faster and moving down on each subsequent pass, so the focal point moves down as well, basically 'digging' down into the bread progressively without heating it up for long periods of time.
There are cheaper ways to pyrolize bread though. And those cheaper ways do the whole bread. And it does taste like soot because the laser burned the bread surface along with all the oxygen it had. You were eating charcoal essentially.
Alternative Idea: use a slice of bread, lay it flat and toast it with the laser. This will probably work best with a very out of focus laser to heat a large area without burning it directly.
Yeah it's not toasting the bread, it's burning the 1 mm of bread adjacent to the laser but the rest of the bread is untouched. To properly toast the bread as it cuts, the laser would need to somehow be able to simultaneously cut the bread without burning it (who wants burnt toast) AND also radiate enough heat into the quarter inch or so of bread adjacent to the cut to actually toast it as it goes, a seemingly impossible ask.
You should have tried simply toasting it with a laser, like engraving a slice. That way you could adjust how much the surface is getting charred. If the bread comes out edible than theoretically you could cut it with a laser and make it toasted at the same time.
I knew this would happen. I haven't even watched the video and I know. William Osman did some funny food experiments with his laser cutter, and every single thing he cut came out inedible. Turns out, when it gets hotter than cooking temperatures, things break down into really terrible tasting compounds.
As someone who built an 80W laser and cut a grilled cheese sandwich in half with it, I know exactly what that tasted like. It wasn't even that charred and it tasted like cancer and death had a baby in the toaster. Never again.
William Osman actually did this back in the day as well, there's a few older videos kicking around his channel featuring his attempt at laser cut toast and a few different attempts at lasering meat, including laser etching grill lines into a steak
You really should think about chemical processes before eating that. I am not an expert, but as I understand it, you basically just ate some various carbon allotropes like coal, graphene and carbon black, some low grade unfiltered biofuels like ethanol and methanol, plus whatever comes out when you turn those things into a plasma and coat a porous substrate of carb chains with it. And some other stuff. Oh, and I guess there's some bread there too. I have no experience with laser cutters, but just as a guess you might cut deeper with less burning (and ionizing) of the surrounding material if you did many passes at higher speed. Either way, that was entertaining to watch. Thanks for sharing!
It's not going to be much different to burnt toast from any other heating method. Most of those things you mentioned are in the smoke from a candle flame and people light those for fun all the time.
Eat candles much? Anyway, I do think you're underestimating the speed and amount of energy being pumped in here. That is a much hotter point than a candle flame or the air in your toaster, which means it's going to create much more of those products than normal, and likely some things that it wouldn't normally produce at all. It's not just normal burning temperature, it's literally vaporizing at the cutting point. The light show from the resultant plasma trapped inside the bread's pores sure was cool looking though. Won't see that in your toaster.
Yes, it is, thank you for engaging, @@scaredyfish 🙂 Yes, I believe there is a difference. To me, the entirety of the bread needs to have been "sufficiently" warmed during toasting and maybe, be "sufficiently" warm while eating, to be toast. The "sufficiently" would be the personal variables, perhaps it could be or has been standardised. If insufficiently warmed while toasting, it's toasted bread. If not sufficiently warm while eating, it's cold toast or cold toasted bread. Maybe there could be toasted warm bread, toasted hot bread, toasted cold bread. There's already lightly toasted, medium toasted etc. A bit like steak. How much the inside is cooked is as important as the outside. But then, bad analogy, it's still steak even before cooking I believe. Oh English, you're just an inadequate language in modern usage, or maybe it's just common parlance which is insufficient. It's probably defined in some sciency thing somewhere, written in English. 😕
Since you're burning off the bread in between the slices, it's gonna be pretty unavoidable that all the bread smoke heavily purfumes and sticks to the pores of the slice next to it. It also looks like not much heat is being imparted to the bread, so the edges may be toast, but the center is still bread-like. Which also makes the best way to deal with burnt toast, scraping off the burnt part, less likely to work.
Maybe you could try something less substantial, like that candy-floss-like substance the USA calls Wonder Bread? 🙂 I have heard some USA white bread can't be toasted, as it just shrivels up like styrofoam under heat.
my favourite thing about really smart people is that they spend so much time at the extremes of knowledge space, they don't often have time to inhabit the middle parts where the normal people live. (see also: Nilered and his utter lack of cooking skills)
Back when I got my first laser cutter (a 5.5w diode laser) I thought it'd be cute to engrave little hearts into my girlfriend's wasa bread for her birthday. The taste was utterly horrendous. Not only did the engraved part taste like cancer, but the taste somehow infiltrated the whole slice. I can only imagine the horrors you unleashed by cutting a whole slice.
Wouldn't it be better to move the laser faster and many times back and forth and change focal length during the cuts, if that's possible with the cutter?
My gut feeling is that many fast passes would help keep the high temps extremely localised, and might just make it more edible. toast is a pretty good insulator though, especially carburised!
It sort of works. Colin Furze did it ages ago with a microwave transformer and a saw blade. The outside of the bread is burned and the inside doesnt get hot enough
*@AlphaPhoenix2* 2:10 Why not cut over multiple passes? (like 4-10 passes?) In that way you can always cut with nearly optimal laser focus? And i asume it would let you cut at lower power, or faster speed, so it is less charcoal & more toasted instead?
internally bread is kind of like a light stop, with a complex fractal geometry which breaks up light of course, you can say the same about almost anything white
The reason why toasting aka the "Maillard reaction" is delicious is because it cuts molecules into shorter, easily digestible thus "sweeter" forms, but when it goes too far you shorten them straight into pure carbon :P
"It looks like toast!" Remind me to decline your breakfast invitation.
Lol, "toast-shaped organic material"
More like charcoal...
@@Pyroteknikidit has become inorganic
I have to second that. you can keep your “homemade” brunch
I lost it at "it SOUNDS like toast!".
Looks like the worst possible kind of toast - somehow both burnt and floppy
This comment killed me
Maybe hell is being forced to eat burnt sloppy toast every day.
Yeah it looks like the loaf that comes out of one of those cheap at-home "bread makers" and they make THE WORST BREAD, it's almost as dense as wood.
"Hey John, so I'm loving the new laser cutter, but I was wondering if we could order some peripherals"
"Yeah sure Billy, what do you need?"
"A crumb tray"
Butter extruder.
Bet you have half the neighbourhood thinking they're having strokes.
I can smell this video.
“Smells like burnt bread” thanks I was wondering what it smelled like
Without on-site confirmation, I would never believe that this piece of burnt bread would smell like burnt bread 😂
Yeah, that bread soaked up all of that smoke, and returned it as "flavor".
Faster speed and multiple pass might be the ticket.
Jup, multiple passes is what I want to see!
So, as if using a bread knife?
Lame! 😉
Yes! Multiple faster passes seems like the next step.
Exactly what I just commented. Max out the speed and power, make multiple passes. You could even raise the bed between passes (until things get too close together).
I don’t know if is possible but with a dynamic focus would be the best
I can't believe you looked at that bread surface and chose to continue the process of putting it in your mouth
A scientist
For science 🧪
didn't he also preface the entire thing by saying this is 2 year old flour?
Check the results if you take an actual slice of bread lay it flat and hit it with the laser in a Criss-Cross Matrix as fast as you can on both sides and see what the results are without cutting through of course
Croutons, I expect.
That ain't toast, that's pretty much coal.
Certainly charcoal.
Low density charcoal foam.
*charcoal
This is one of the famous dishes from The book: "Burnt Carbon"!
To understand more about this, you should look up the Maillard reaction, which is the process by which carbohydrates become "toasted". It only happens when the food is held within a relatively narrow band of temperature around 350 F. The temperature required to ignite or vaporize bread is much higher, and applied much faster by a laser.
You have reminded me of an ancient post I once read where a mad scientist made a pressure vessel to cook a full potato to golden brown.. ah, "maillard pipe potatoes" if you wanna search for it. Anyway, turns out that also tastes acrid in large amounts.
Nice explanation. Thanks!
@@paradiselost9946A reliable weird way to cook potatoes I've found is to steam them for mashing. The longer you cook potatoes, the sweeter and creamier they get, but when boiling this causes them to disintigrate in the water. With steaming you just collect the drippings coming off them anyway and can slowly cook them for as long as you like before mashing, at which point you also have rich potato water to reincorporate or use as a thickening agent.
@@paradiselost9946Yeah that works too. In the case where you use the water for something else though steaming lets you add more cream relative to the water content if that's your kind of thing.
@@paradiselost9946Applicable to crispy potatoes, if you par-boil in water with a little vinegar it helps keep the pectin from denaturing because of the lower pH, so when you crisp up your fries after they retain a chewy center. This is (one step at least) of what McDonald's does to their fries.
Hi, as someone who uses a CO2 laser to make money, I have a few suggestions:
1. Use a much longer focal length lens, this is probably a standard 2in but they make 4in focal length lenses
2. Use higher power and faster speeds
3. Use multiple passes, moving the bread closer each time. This is called "Z step per pass" in Lightburn
4. Upgrade your air assist with a real compressor like a 6gal pancake compressor, and upgrade the exhaust
5. Don't use the honeycomb bed, use blades instead and definitely don't put paper towels under the bread, just clean the blades
are you admitting to counterfeit
Do you use the laser to cut banknotes or coins? 😂
@@windy8544bank heisting maybe
What an odd way to say you do it professionally
a 4inch focal length is still only good for ~15mm of cut and will definitely crash once you've stepped up the z a few times, the best thing is to cut it with a knife and use an etching programme on the slice
I'm so glad there is an army of UA-camrs who do daft things with expensive equipment, so I don't have to. 10/10
This comment is so accurate
Yes
"It's like eating soot.......
I guess it *is* eating soot."
You didn't achieve toast. You achieved burnt bread, which isn't the same thing as Toast. Toasting occurs as a Maillard reaction around 300 to 500 degrees. Burning occurs at much higher temperatures or cooking the bread at longer times.
パン焦げ焦げになっちゃった！
Let’s just enjoy this hilarious use of a laser cutter.
ur no fun!
@@howdy_fellers No, my name is "Fun at Parties", not "No Fun". No Fun is my brother.
I'd imagine the moisture content really reduces the cutting power, the energy being used to evaporate the water.
Btw. Overly burned toast can be carcinogenic!
If you had more power with a faster feed rate maybe. Were you looking for a reason to increase your laser’s output power by an order of magnitude? Perfect justification!
I've had an opportunity to try stuff like this, I found with burnable materials like wood, bread and cookies, that the smoke in a deep cut channel is your biggest obstacle as it obscures the laser. The material cuts fine and you can even turn down the power to less than charcoal, but you have to let the smoke clear so multiple passes is your best bet to getting your full depth.
Lasers work pretty well with food. You should try bacon next time.
It's not the science we need, it's the science we want!
Perhaps "the results we deserve."
And of course: new business model for Send-cut-send.
send-toast-send - it's my idea, you can't have it
How dare you say something this funny.
You might re-visit this one and have the laser pass over the cut faster and moving down on each subsequent pass, so the focal point moves down as well, basically 'digging' down into the bread progressively without heating it up for long periods of time.
*_Flashbacks to one of the first William Osman video that I watched_*
Hopefully AlphaPhoenix's house doesn't burn down now.
Hey, that fire wasn't laser related. 😊
“Hello owner of expensive and niche (I’m assuming) laser cutting equipment, I would like to lease time one your machine”
“Why?”
“… science?”
There are cheaper ways to pyrolize bread though. And those cheaper ways do the whole bread. And it does taste like soot because the laser burned the bread surface along with all the oxygen it had. You were eating charcoal essentially.
If you open a can with a laser, does it also heat the soup to a palatable degree?
Mmm, charred to perfection.
Even better, combines burnt toast and fresh bread, with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits!
This video plus the comments left me with literal tears of mirth. Bravo!
Alternative Idea: use a slice of bread, lay it flat and toast it with the laser. This will probably work best with a very out of focus laser to heat a large area without burning it directly.
Yeah it's not toasting the bread, it's burning the 1 mm of bread adjacent to the laser but the rest of the bread is untouched. To properly toast the bread as it cuts, the laser would need to somehow be able to simultaneously cut the bread without burning it (who wants burnt toast) AND also radiate enough heat into the quarter inch or so of bread adjacent to the cut to actually toast it as it goes, a seemingly impossible ask.
Finally getting to the real impactful questions facing humanity.
Maybe you can try cutting croutons out of a slice of bread. For very fancy laser salads.
You should have tried simply toasting it with a laser, like engraving a slice. That way you could adjust how much the surface is getting charred. If the bread comes out edible than theoretically you could cut it with a laser and make it toasted at the same time.
As a German, I always find it amusing what "objects" Americans would call "bread".
I knew this would happen. I haven't even watched the video and I know. William Osman did some funny food experiments with his laser cutter, and every single thing he cut came out inedible. Turns out, when it gets hotter than cooking temperatures, things break down into really terrible tasting compounds.
But can you perfectly toast a marshmallow with your laser?
No Jacob, and you know why 😂
Just engrave the surface on low power.... and have it rotate. But yeah, that be messy if you miss caculated.
Project failed successfully.
best british toast i've ever seen.
As someone who built an 80W laser and cut a grilled cheese sandwich in half with it, I know exactly what that tasted like. It wasn't even that charred and it tasted like cancer and death had a baby in the toaster. Never again.
Heywood Banks is probably just like... yeah, toast?... With this one.
YEAH TOAST!!
William Osmund did this before the house burnt down
Now I want to know if you can use a laser cutter to perfectly toast a pre-cut slice of bread...
Most mad scientists are actually mad engineers.
Next addition to this series. If you laser cut steak, does it grill?
William Osman actually did this back in the day as well, there's a few older videos kicking around his channel featuring his attempt at laser cut toast and a few different attempts at lasering meat, including laser etching grill lines into a steak
It looks like an extravagant way of setting your kitchen on fire.
William Osman had the same idea 7 years ago 😅
this type of content was lacking from the internet since william osman's house burnt down
at no point in this video is the bread toast. burnt, charred bread is not toast.
ok but it's funny though
I like how the beam, even when so much out of focus, it still burns.
The 3-4mm diameter spot of paper towel getting vaporized was kinda scary - only appreciated it after editing the footage back
That's the kind of good science I paid my internet provider to be able to watch
It's funny how You can turn a question I didn't know needed asking into one, that I have to know the answer to.
One man’s toast is another man’s burned, inedible bread. A tale as old as time…
What I've learned: bread will be a good shield against laser-wielding Skynet robots.
Bread armor 👍
A high tech way to consume carcinogens.
Now we know the next great engineering challenge for humanity, create a laser that can reliably toastcut bread.
The absolutely vital question I did not know I needed answered.
We should be going in the opposite direction: we need laser-proof bread.
That's a piece of toast.
Tell me you've never eaten burnt toast before without telling me you've never eaten burnt toast before.
Next: make the perfect slice of toast using a laser and pre-sliced bread.
Dense, burnt, and floppy...
congrats, you demonstrated the solar beef conundrum on a piece of toast!
Makes me think of the bread-toasting knife that Trillian uses in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005).
"Smells like burnt toast." Yeah, you burt the toast.
"It smells like burnt bread, OMG!" "It looks like toast!" - What exactly did you expect??
You really should think about chemical processes before eating that. I am not an expert, but as I understand it, you basically just ate some various carbon allotropes like coal, graphene and carbon black, some low grade unfiltered biofuels like ethanol and methanol, plus whatever comes out when you turn those things into a plasma and coat a porous substrate of carb chains with it. And some other stuff. Oh, and I guess there's some bread there too.
I have no experience with laser cutters, but just as a guess you might cut deeper with less burning (and ionizing) of the surrounding material if you did many passes at higher speed.
Either way, that was entertaining to watch. Thanks for sharing!
It's not going to be much different to burnt toast from any other heating method.
Most of those things you mentioned are in the smoke from a candle flame and people light those for fun all the time.
Eat candles much? Anyway, I do think you're underestimating the speed and amount of energy being pumped in here. That is a much hotter point than a candle flame or the air in your toaster, which means it's going to create much more of those products than normal, and likely some things that it wouldn't normally produce at all. It's not just normal burning temperature, it's literally vaporizing at the cutting point. The light show from the resultant plasma trapped inside the bread's pores sure was cool looking though. Won't see that in your toaster.
@@user-hf3ym7lh4d people breathe candle smoke.
As I said all those things you listed exist in candle smoke.
"And other important scientific questions"
And here I am cutting my bread with a knife like a sucker.
In the future when we will have spaceships firing lasers at one another they will be covered in bread for protection.
Probs for actaully letting nothing go to waste and actually sucking on a lump of coal, you are brave than i likely will ever be.
Smells like burnt toast. Tastes like burnt toast. Looks like burnt toast. I think it might just be burnt toast.
Quack!
I don't. I think it's burnt bread.
A philosophical question: can bread become burnt without first becoming toast?@@ChrispyNut
Yes, it is, thank you for engaging, @@scaredyfish 🙂
Yes, I believe there is a difference.
To me, the entirety of the bread needs to have been "sufficiently" warmed during toasting and maybe, be "sufficiently" warm while eating, to be toast.
The "sufficiently" would be the personal variables, perhaps it could be or has been standardised.
If insufficiently warmed while toasting, it's toasted bread.
If not sufficiently warm while eating, it's cold toast or cold toasted bread.
Maybe there could be toasted warm bread, toasted hot bread, toasted cold bread. There's already lightly toasted, medium toasted etc.
A bit like steak. How much the inside is cooked is as important as the outside. But then, bad analogy, it's still steak even before cooking I believe.
Oh English, you're just an inadequate language in modern usage, or maybe it's just common parlance which is insufficient. It's probably defined in some sciency thing somewhere, written in English. 😕
Interesting how it “toasts” as opposed to complete ablation of bread.
"There's no way he's gonna eat that" I reassured myself 💀
You need a longer focal length lens which will actually create a larger convergence diameter but also a much longer "neck" of good focus.
Since you're burning off the bread in between the slices, it's gonna be pretty unavoidable that all the bread smoke heavily purfumes and sticks to the pores of the slice next to it. It also looks like not much heat is being imparted to the bread, so the edges may be toast, but the center is still bread-like. Which also makes the best way to deal with burnt toast, scraping off the burnt part, less likely to work.
Might want to wash that "toast" down with some nice IPA. Wait, not that kind of IPA!
I too wear safety glasses when eating toast. Good job.
Well, I'd say that was predictable, because ofc a laser doesn't cut. It burns.
Never before has a thumbnail demanded the instant click of my finger lol
Maybe you could try something less substantial, like that candy-floss-like substance the USA calls Wonder Bread? 🙂 I have heard some USA white bread can't be toasted, as it just shrivels up like styrofoam under heat.
Damn he really took a huge bite out of it too lmao
I'm surprised you didn't cut the butter with the laser. 😮
Okay. So, first. Think thats Margarine. Not a big difference. Okay so cutting Margarine with a laser would set a fire. For sure.
my favourite thing about really smart people is that they spend so much time at the extremes of knowledge space, they don't often have time to inhabit the middle parts where the normal people live. (see also: Nilered and his utter lack of cooking skills)
The laser would have to char the bread in order to penetrate it
Back when I got my first laser cutter (a 5.5w diode laser) I thought it'd be cute to engrave little hearts into my girlfriend's wasa bread for her birthday. The taste was utterly horrendous. Not only did the engraved part taste like cancer, but the taste somehow infiltrated the whole slice. I can only imagine the horrors you unleashed by cutting a whole slice.
Your science is ground breaking! We salute you
Well that was no surprise, when the toast comes out of our toaster looking like that we tend to chuck without using our taste buds to prove it's crap.
Wouldn't it be better to move the laser faster and many times back and forth and change focal length during the cuts, if that's possible with the cutter?
I imagine a faster cut with more passes could potentially achieve more toasting and less burn...
My gut feeling is that many fast passes would help keep the high temps extremely localised, and might just make it more edible. toast is a pretty good insulator though, especially carburised!
Most Important Science.
Now i need to get my 75 watt YAG running...
considering pumpernickel literally means "Devil's Fart", that description matches the fiery/smokey gas coming out of your bread.
Toaster makers hate this one weird trick
It sort of works. Colin Furze did it ages ago with a microwave transformer and a saw blade. The outside of the bread is burned and the inside doesnt get hot enough
*@AlphaPhoenix2*
2:10 Why not cut over multiple passes? (like 4-10 passes?)
In that way you can always cut with nearly optimal laser focus?
And i asume it would let you cut at lower power, or faster speed, so it is less charcoal & more toasted instead?
If the robot uprising comes I know how to protect myself.
"What am I doing with my morning?" Content!
a friend used a circuit board marking laser to raster an image in toast onto a slice of bread. ie hit it perpendicular to the cut surface.
it's not waiting 5 minutes for bread to be sliced if it's being toasted simultaneously!
You need to increase speed, or lower power to prevent it from completely burning it, then increase number of passes to make your cut deeper.
internally bread is kind of like a light stop, with a complex fractal geometry which breaks up light
of course, you can say the same about almost anything white
The reason why toasting aka the "Maillard reaction" is delicious is because it cuts molecules into shorter, easily digestible thus "sweeter" forms, but when it goes too far you shorten them straight into pure carbon :P