Homaro Cantu has been called many things over the years: “techno-chef”, “mad scientist”, “a modern-day Willy Wonka” - to name just a few. But now he can add another epithet to his resume: Champion.

Last night in the culinary equivalent of the gridiron known as the “Kitchen Stadium”, Cantu narrowly edged out famed Japanese Iron Chef Masuharu Morimoto to capture a 52- 51 point victory on the Iron Chef America. (If you’ve never seen the Iron Chef before, it’s a “cooking battle” show in which two chefs - an incumbent Iron Chef and a Challenger - must each cook a meal in less than an hour including in each course a specific ingredient.)

To secure a win against veteran Iron Chef Morimoto, Cantu and his team (including sous chef Ben Roche) pulled out the big guns: liquid nitrogen, an ink jet printer, and of course, a class IV laser. After filling several balloons with beet juice (the “ingredient of the day” for the competition) he rolled them in a bath of liquid nitrogen to create beautiful frozen orbs. Next he fired up the laser to a scorching 2800 degrees to caramelize some cellulose-based packing peanuts (yes, the kind that are used in shipping boxes). And while Iron Chef Morimoto delicately sliced beets to make sushi rolls, Cantu simply printed out pictures of maki onto edible paper using an HP printer and soy-based ink.

Cantu, owner of the Chicago-based Moto restaurant, has been hailed as an innovator in the emerging field of “molecular gastronomy“. I’ve been salivating over his work from afar for the last few years, but in October I had the chance to catch up with him at PopTech!. The following is an edited excerpt from our chat (the full version will be featured in the Big Idea Interview on the next episode of FringeHog).

MB: Tell me how Moto is different than other restaurants.

HC: Moto is the tool by which my design company, Cantu Designs, test markets all of its ideas and innovations. Cantu Designs is an idea factory revolving around what I call food delivery systems or consumable products. These can be the inventions that deliver the food to you or the actual food product itself.

MB: Give me a couple of examples…

HC: For instance, if you’re not able to digest a steak we can print one up for you that will dissolve on your tongue. MB: How do you ?print up a steak’?HC: Well, it’s patent pending… but in short, you press a button [on a desktop printer] and out comes your edible substrate [aka, edible paper] and you can eat it. We can alter the texture, the flavor, we can print text on it to communicate with you. We’re also working on a 3D food printer with the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC)…We’re dissecting, for example, the ingredients in an apple -pectin, water, chlorophyll, sugars, acids, etc. and after we dissect those, we place them into say, ink-jet cartridges, and we can reformulate it with a 3-dimensional printer. [The result is] a direct replication of the original product that looks and tastes just like it, but has an indefinite shelf life.

MB: Reformulating apples aside, what are some other applications of this technology?

HC: I think this could be used for famine relief. We want to take it a step further so we print up edible substrates that can be shipped over to developing nations and can be sort of patch for something that is far too costly for us to deal with right now. People need food to exist. If we don’t eat food, we die. If we have nations that have this crisis of starvation - of energy - we’re never going to evolve as a human society. This is the first step toward answering it from a technological point of view.

MB: In 25 years, what do you think the future of food will look like?

HC: I think we’re going see a lot of things grown in a lab. I use the word “lab” but I call it a food replication factory. We’re tired of watching cows get slaughtered… so we’re growing to grow meat in a Petri dish. When beef is grown in a Petri dish we can alter the caloric value, the good cholesterol that you ingest and maybe make super foods. So we become more healthy, physically which then directly affects our mental health, which directly affects us as a society.

If you missed last night’s competition, you can catch the recap of the sushi smackdown when the show re-airs on the Food Network at the following times.

January 25, 2007 9:00 PM ET/PT
January 26, 2007 12:00 AM ET/PT
January 27, 2007 7:00 PM ET/PT
January 27, 2007 11:00 PM ET/PT
January 28, 2007 2:00 AM ET/PT